Consultancy

I’m available for consultancy and open to suggestions.

I tend to look at issues surrounding the interaction of stakeholders with construction projects. In particular, I have been previously appointed to get the root of why perceptions of actual projects differ between those involved.

If you’re interested in what I can do for you, please contact me at drderekthomson@gmail.com. I, of course, come with the relevant insurances.

Below is a taste of some of my consultancy appointments in recent years:

An Examination of Perceptions of Project Success

On this project, I was subcontracted to the facilities management arm of a UK national contractor. One of their strategic clients, an executive agency of the National Health Service, required in independent evaluation of the success of a recent office conciliation and refurbishment project. I designed and implemented a dual investigation. One arm systematically worked through the email records and project documentation of the procuring client to determine key events and decisions and their knock-on consequences. The other undertook a series of semi-structured interviews with representative office users to determine their perceptions of how the project was implemented and of the quality of the resulting space. This was an exhaustive process through which considerable unexpected insights were revealed.

The work highlighted a divergence of opinions regarding project success and raised interesting ethical challenges in both the design of the consultancy intervention and the reporting of its findings. Some of the insights from this consultancy was presented academically. You can read about the paper here.

Facilitating Agenda-setting for Valuation of Intangibles

I was subcontracted by an independent consultant to assist in the design and facilitation of a series of workshops to gather and synthesis diverse opinions into a coherent view of what issues need to be considered when valuing the UK’s intangible assets: the natural environment, in this case. This was a challenging undertaking. The initial workshop had to host 45 delegates. Traditionally, this is too large for a productive workshop, so my role involved designing a day full of structured activities that could make this size of group productively work. The central challenge in this situation is to make sure that delegates learn something from participating rather than merely providing their thoughts to the workshop host. This can be difficult as the hosting client may not be particularly interested in benefiting delegates in this way, yet the social contract that it forms is critical for securing meaningful participation and sustained engagement. Subsequent workshops, although still quite big with around 20 delegates in each, followed more traditional approaches.

The workshops were a success in that they elicited the delegate insights and opinions that the client needed. Participation rates remained high through the series of workshops, showing that the delegates considered themselves to benefit from engaging in the process.

Value Management Workshop Facilitation for a ‘Free School’

I was again subcontractor to another independent consultant to facilitate two value management workshops for a recently-formed ‘Free School’ initiative. While the standard value management process and workshop structures provided the backbone to this work, at the time of undertaking it the ‘Free School’ policy had only recently been announced causing the stakeholders in this project to have fundamentally differing views on the role of such a school in its community and, thus, the functions its accommodating building would have to perform. This posed certain challenges in facilitating their synthesis of a common view of building intent; but they were not insurmountable. This work entailed a traditional pre-briefing VM1 workshop followed – some months later – by a VM2 workshop for concept design review.

A unique element of this work was my contribution of insight to the consultant’s model of whole life value (to contribute some of my academic work in this area), as the client’s brief also required the concept design to be evaluated in these terms in addition to the traditional functional review of value management.