The customer is always right. Or are they?
A quick bit of background: The St George Hospital construction project is funded by Health Infrastructure (part of the Ministry of Health), the end users are from the Local Health District (New South Wales Health). Brookfield Multiplex are the principal contractor and the contract is with HI; there is no formal agreement between BMPX and the local health board. However, whilst HI allow the non-financial decisions to be made by the end users they are not formally a decision until HI have confirmed them. As the CI pointed out during his visit, this is very similar to the set up of DIO/MoD (read HI/MoH) and the Army/Navy/RAF (read end users).
The issue: In the first two months with BMPX I have spent an inordinate amount of time in user groups, workshops and completing reviews of marked-up documents. It seems like every time we have a review the number of comments and changes increase rather than decrease. Therefore, at what point do you stop asking the client what they want and simply tell them what they are getting?
Taking Security as an example; during the concept design phase the security drawings were signed off by the LHD management, the variation costs agreed with HI and the documents updated by the subcontractor. Subsequently there was a review of which doors needed to be automatic and which needed to be held open. Again, these were agreed with the LHD management, the variation agreed with HI, and the drawings updated by the subbie. At this point the drawings landed on my desk with the instruction of “can you set up a final review to close out the final comments on these”. Simple. The result of this “final review” was nearly 12 hours of user groups spread over 3 weeks and over 150 new comments, questions, alterations and good ideas from the nurses and doctors that will use the new hospital. All this has to go back to LHD management and the financiers at HI to review and accept/reject. Only then can the drawings be updated (again) and a “final, final” review be conducted – I may forget to invite anyone else to this and just issue the drawings.
Luckily for me, as I did such a good job with the security workshops I now get to do the Medical Service Panels and the Nurse Call as well. Over the next few weeks if you see the headline “Army Officer beats up nurses with rolled up design drawings” you will know why!
The solution: ?
Holdfast Training Services Trial Blog 
James,
At least they are taking stakeholder engagement seriously – better to make any changes now, whilst they are relatively cheap, than a much more costly variation down the line when discovered it shouldn’t be like that!
One of my design office attachment projects suffered from a severe lack of stakeholder engagement and it showed.
Good point. Although it doesn’t make the process any less painful.
During a meeting yesterday that was supposed to see if we could standardise a few of the MSPs the user group got distracted by the room layout sheets and started moving beds, chairs and monitors around. I thought the architect was going to cry!
It does require careful, if not slight authoritative coordination to ensure you don’t end up with a Ferrari when you only need a Skoda.
Fran makes a good point in the comment about a control of this process. Most of the projects I have been working on have fallen under a framework agreement with Melbourne Water. When we send them drawings to review they get passed around there various departments and come back covered in red pen. To date a lot of these changes have just been made, but as a result the project costs have begun to spiral (new drafting costs, additional review costs and the costs of the actual additional features). This has become an internal issue within the Joint Venture, as to how this has been allowed to happen and why variations have not been raised. My personal view this is an issue because the projects are managed (including the budgets) by JH but the designers working for KBR talk direct to the client and therefore changes are made without the full implications being assessed.
On the plus side though: nurses…
Tell them what they are getting or tell them what they need? If the architect had engaged with the end user at the concept stage, it is highly probable that what they are getting and what they need would be one and the same thing resulting in far fewer meetings and tears post drawing production. This is the process that Nick Francis followed when he was preparing the concept design for the Ebola hospitals in Sierra Leone. An issue you have to watch out for is technical generalists thinking that they know exactly what the specialists in a field of practice require. Nick had never designed a hospital before so he went and consulted the end users before getting his pencils out of their case.