There’s a great article in today’s Observer which really captures what it feels like to participate in the process of building:

Out of an urban backwater, the 2012 Olympic dream takes shape

The seduction of construction is a powerful thing. It is the way that the sheer fact of building, the churning of mud and materials into frames and buildings, and the choreography of workers and machines, convinces us that something is being dealt with or transformed. Before the purposefulness of building, doubts recede about the purpose of what is being built.

The last sentence does hint at one of the problems that construction projects often encounter: that people get so caught up by the mechanics of the building process that they forget why they are building.

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So yesterday one my PhD students passed his viva with flying colours. 

I’m not sure that the perfect thesis ever gets submitted, so he has some grammatical corrections and a few explanatory paragraphs to add here and there but – overall – it went as well as could ever be hoped for!  The examiners had no problem with logic of the study or the manner of its defence.

It feels great when you’ve steered their development to reach that point and it’s gone really well for them.

Now to the final submission, his graduation, and – of course – the publications…

I just have to make sure all my other PhD students have the same kind of outcome.  No pressure there, then.

I finalised these words today.  Quite pleased with them:

Researchers are attempting to determine if the patterns in these design manuals are true representations of stakeholders’ genuine aspirations or if they have been adopted by stakeholders as convenient pseudo-aspirations in the absence of means of expressing their collective cognition of value.  Such study is timely as the private sector is rapidly adopting similar design manuals that promote compliance with sustainable design paradigms, such as the principles of BREEAM and PassivHaus, without first confirming that these technologically-oriented pattern languages reflect stakeholders’ expectations and aspirations for more sustainable buildings and associated lifestyles.

I recently presented an interpretation of some recent NHSScotland capital project business cases to the 2010 HaCIRIC Conference.  The paper was produced by my Benefits Quantification project and went down really well with most of the delegates. 

Here’s the presentation:

HaCIRIC Conference Presentation
http://static.slidesharecdn.com/swf/ssplayer2.swf?doc=thomsonetal-101006131231-phpapp01&stripped_title=haciric-conference-presentation&userName=drderekthomson

And the paper’s abstract:

QUANTIFYING THE BENEFITS OF HEALTHCARE INFRASTRUCTURE INVESTMENT
D. Thomson , L. Pronk , C. Alalouch , A. Kaka     

ABSTRACT
UK government seeks the use of Benefits Realisation Management Processes (BRMPs) to direct capital investments that are technically complex and must satisfy a diverse range of stakeholder needs. Although BRMP frameworks are available, methods to inform them with reliable quantifications of stakeholders’ judgements of benefits realisation are currently absent. 

The articulation of benefits in current practice is reviewed to establish the context of benefits realisation. Benefit-related healthcare policy is reviewed by desktop survey of government publications and NHSScotland business cases. A conceptual framework for benefits quantification which characterises benefits realisation using stakeholders’ judgements and perceptions of benefit worth is contributed.

Translation of stakeholder judgements of benefit provision magnitude into indications of benefit worth by means of benefit functions is explored and related to BRMP operation. The use of utility functions to translate judgements of magnitude into representations of ‘worth’ is found to be an appropriate premise for benefit quantification.

KEYWORDS
Benefits; Investment; Judgement; Stakeholders; Utility.

Just accepted for Construction Management and Economics.  Sole-authored, too!

Abstract

Construction industry reliance on performance metrics fixed at the project outset is being superseded by increasing use of emergent client judgements to characterise success. Clients may still consider a project that fails to meet formalised time, cost and performance goals successful if it satisfies emergent requirements not understood during initial briefing. Construction practitioners do not routinely recognise that client awareness of requirements improves as projects progress. Internal conflict among the client stakeholders and their reflections on the emerging project solution help client stakeholders to better understand their needs. Dissatisfaction results when these emergent requirements are not acknowledged.

The need for practitioners to recognise and respond to these issues is explored by paradigmatic case study of an office relocation and refurbishment project. The role of the ‘Project Sponsor’ as a synthesiser of client requirements and reflections on the emerging solution was observed to be subverted by stakeholders in a client body who found their emergent requirements were not acknowledged by construction practitioners. By characterising the harmful effect of pluralistic client complexity and emergent requirements on perceptions of project success, the rationale for a revised project sponsor role to better address these influences on perceptions of project success is contributed.

It’s a good job my cognitive apparatus is situated deep within my foundations.

says the brutalist car park famous for its role in (the original) Get Carter movie as it tweets its own tortuous demise while it is slowly demolished bit by bit.  All to make way for…

…yet another Tescos.

 http://twitter.com/trinitycarpark

http://www.flickr.com/groups/gatesheadcarpark/

Clause 11.2(3) of the NEC3 Engineering and Construction Contract reads:

The completion date is the completion date unless later changed in accordance with this contract.

Or if typed correctly:

The Completion Date is the completion date unless later changed in accordance with this contract.

The capitals and italics mean something.  Wonderful.  Tonight’s debate: do I tell my students that this level of detail matters…?

Things still aren’t looking good out there…

The number of practices expecting workload to decrease rose again by 3% (28% predicting a decrease in July, compared to 25% in June). There continues to be little evidence of a recovery in employment prospects for salaried architects, with 16% of architects expecting a decrease in staff numbers; a one per cent rise on the 15% figure in May and June. 27% of respondents also stated that they were personally underemployed in July (25% in June, compared to 29% in May).

The survey also revealed that practices continued to be markedly less optimistic about forecasted workload predictions across every sector, encompassing public, commercial and private housing. 42% of practices expected a further decrease in future public sector workload; this is compared with just 38% in June and just 25% in May. The number of firms expecting commercial sector work to decrease remained constant at 19%, which was a 6% increase on May’s forecast of 13%. Last month, private housing was the only sector to fare better, however the number of firms expecting more work stayed constant at 26%, compared to 22% in May); the numbers expecting work to decrease also rose by 2% (14% in July, compared to 12% in June).

Source