Holdfast Training Services Trial Blog

Everyday and with every new part of construction the same issues keep popping up, no power (or faulty generator), water logged floors or roofs, inadequate storage or working areas, unscheduled deliveries.  Occasionally a real problem rears its head but that is usually squirreled away to the designers before we have a chance to really look at it.  I’m getting to saturation point on what I feel I can gain from the site, it is becoming very frustrating, I have asked to spend some time at head office with the pre-construction team to see how the bid process can be got so wrong as it has been in Southampton.  

I do find myself wondering whether I’m completely missing the point, one of my early posts ‘A Building is a By-Product’ talked about the fixation of winning prizes like Considerate Constructors but what I wonder now is whether cashflow really is more important than product or profit even.  This project almost certainly won’t be profitable, it won’t be on time (massive LADs) and has been beset by design and management issues from the outset and yet nobody seems to be getting angry about it, especially the levels above contracts manager who you would expect to be getting nervous.  The only solution that I can guess at is that there is some clever back room processes that can get ‘Sad Ken’ across the line ahead of the field in the 1530 at Chepstow and turn a profit by some miracle.  People that are clever with contracts any views?

One thing that has kept me interested recently is being given pretty much the entire responsibility for bringing ALL the utilities onto site in the same week on the same road.  A planning condition is for a single road closure for service installation (in reality we pushed our luck with the transfer beam and got away with it) and so starting next week in a stretch of road about 80m long I will overseeing the circus that will see geothermal heating, gas, mains water, HV electricity, BT and the foul water system all connected in 5 days.  In sorting some of this stuff out I’ve had an interesting blast from the past, it started off a little like this:

PM ‘You need to either speak to Keith Olbury or Frank Dickinson at Lanes for Drains’

Rich’s internal monologue ‘No it can’t be even with that name’

Later on the phone man with distinctive squeaky Yorkshire accent ‘Hi is that Rich’

We talk business and then I say : ‘You’re not a former Royal Engineer are you?

‘Yeah I was’

‘A plant operator?’

‘Yeah, why?’

‘I thought it might be you’

‘Where do you know me from then?’

‘I was your Troop Commander in Tidworth’

‘Really?’  

I guess I made a real impression then.

Yes Frank Dickinson was a particularly poor LCpl in my Troop that I was now relying on for a service in the real world, both of us with ‘manager’ in our titles, oh dear.