A consultant’s perspective……
Six weeks into my design office placement with WSP, I think I have come to understand why consultants are consultants, contractors are contractors and architects are architects….! I was also surprised to discover how quickly I switched allegiances and adopted a consultant’s perspective….nothing to do with the central location, swish office, great coffee machine and invitation to the opening of the Shard of course!
I was asked to contribute to the monthly ‘Knowledge Sharing Forum’, and conscious that I was highly unlikely to have discovered anything structurally ground breaking worthy of dissemination to the WSP Structures department, I went for a comparison of a design office and the military! Interestingly, I found the design office to be more comparable in many respects than site (summarised in the meeting minutes below):
Major Rachel Beszant is on secondment from the Royal Engineers. From her first month in WSP she has drawn five key similarities, and two differences to the military:
The similarities are:
- There is a strong teamwork aspect to our business – though we are each capable as individuals we can only deliver the projects we do working in teams.
- Within each team there is a structured hierarchy. This is necessary to ensure accountability and allocation of responsibility
- Goalposts change throughout the lifetime of a project. Whilst in the Army this may be due to a change of political leadership in our business we are faced with clients and architects changing their minds and on-site discoveries.
- Communication is vital to the success of our projects. This is particularly well done through the structures portal.
- People are the centre of the organisation and success is reliant on the skills and expertise they have.
The main differences being:
- As a private company WSP has to maintain commercial competitiveness. Money does unfortunately drive many of the decisions we make, though this does also ensure we are efficient.
- There are no Sergeant-Majors enforcing discipline on the second floor!
I fear if my turn comes around again before July I may have to work on a groundbreaking discovery!
Aside from organisational and people observations, I can confirm that geotechnical parameters and water levels are indeed as vague as John warned us… and London is sat on a lot of water! The British Standard generation hate the EuroCodes….. and software packages are almost as reluctant to change as the BS era! Software modelling is the way forward as long as you understand the programme and know how to fix the errors, and hand calculations are key for checking, but any longer than 2 pages are reserved for graduates (or RE attachment officers!!)
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Rachel, I’m interested in your comment in regard to the heirarchy. GHD have a really flat organisation and everything below business group managers is a complete buggers muddle of just people with skills, no order (except for graduates who are very much at the bottom of the pile). From Business group managers up it is very structured but this only accounts for 10-15% of the staff. Can you give a bit more persepective on the structure and do you know if it’s the norm for UK organisations?
Otherwise I’d say your similarities and differences are a fair reflection. One aspect I might challenge is that having worked in the Infra world money does drive decisions in the military and influenced a fair amount of the work undertaken by the in-theatre Wks Gp, whilst not for commercially competitive reasons!
Roy,
I’m in with Rachel on this one. There’s a significant difference between commercial awareness and budget control. Nobody in theatre is concerned with profit returns and their effect on share price, and there’s more subtlety in that than you might realise.
Richard,
I realise the subtlety…the point I was raising was that of money drives design decision making in theatre and there is not a limitless pot. I saw and was involved in many discussions on reducing scopes and streamlining designs to get VFM, hence money driving many decisions we make. There is a misconception by some (generally outside the infra sphere) that there is this limitless war chest that can be dipped into but sadly it’s not the case.
Remember, the code you use doesn’t matter becasue the real world doesn’t follow rules. An engineer of your calibre will be able to explain how any aspect works according to first principles without recourse to a code but then show how the code is met if required…. Well it sounds good anyway! Your final note re calculations are just for checking is very aposite in illustrating that software can apply the rules all you need is a simple model with sensible approximations to check it. Good stuff! P.S. do you need a sergeant major on the second floor?