RPS Design Consultancy Belfast
As with all my contemporaries I have moved to the Design Office. My attachment is with RPS Consultants in the Belfast office and I am working within the Maritime Infrastructure Department. This blog is a brief scene setter so that my follow on blogs make sense.
RPS
RPS Group was founded in 1972 as Rural Planning Services (RPS) and labels itself a multinational energy resources and environmental consultancy company. The company is headquartered in the UK. In the 90s RPS expanded into Europe, North America and Australia. The company now employs over 5000 people worldwide, has an annual turnover of approximately £500m and in 2015 made a pre-tax profit of £57m
As part of the company’s expansion RPS Group acquired Kirk, McClure & Morton – a small sized consultancy, based in Belfast. The office employs approximately 200 employees. There are six departments, typical of many civil engineering consultancies: Waste & Energy, Transportation, Water & Environmental, Planning, Structures and Maritime Infrastructure.
BAE Surface Ships
I am employed on the BAE Surface Ships Initial Enabling Infrastructure (IEI) project. The contract comprises the design and construction of works to facilitate the build of The Royal Navy’s new Type 26 Frigates in BAE Systems’ Glasgow Shipyards. BAE Glasgow contains two shipyards along the River Clyde. BAE uses a modular approach to build the warships at two River Clyde sites; Govan and Scotstoun. The ships will be constructed in modules within large fabrication sheds at Govan. These modules will be welded together on a slipway on one shipyard and transferred onto a barge for launching. After the vessel is launched, it will be taken down river to another shipyard Scotstoun for final fit out and trials.
BAE Systems Glasgow – Two sites on the River Clyde
Initial Impressions
With a “smaller” consultancy I believe I will be exposed to a wider variety of engineering design rather than being pigeon holed in a particular design discipline/project. The counter to this is there is no dedicated specialists (Geotechnics for example) and knowing the SME requires knowledge of which personality designed the last/similar project.
The BAE project has a great deal of engineering design; in essence heavy Civils refurbishment/modification of old dock quays. Unfortunately, there appears to be a fair bit of Geotechnics which is disappointing as I was naïvely hoping for 6 months of steel portal frames…
Finally (and most importantly) it is great to spend some relaxing time at home with the family as the photo shows.
Paddy and Caffreys
Holdfast Training Services Trial Blog 
Good to hear you’re back at home and able to spend some time with the family.
Sounds like an interesting project…?
Dolly
Thank you. All good Chez McClure.
The project works really well for, submission timelines work really well with my attachment.
All in all
Life is good – just need to smash a Thesis, final TMR and AER as well as all my CPR prep…
Mate great photo, I’m glad you are at home and your design office looks really good. Sadly it’s all structural here.
Kirk, McClure & Morton – a small sized consultancy, based in Belfast…any relation – it’s not what you know and all that.
I wouldn’t worry about the lack of specialists – I think my design office is quite large, especially the wider group – and it still feels like Ex Steel anytime something needs to be designed!
Enjoy the family and the weather whilst you can!
Nice short blog Rich
I’m also in a small consultancy with a lack of specialists but I think the way to get value out of this is to be involved in setting the scope of the investigations so you get the information you need to assist in your design rather than just a detailed but irrelevant report. As Engineers (yes a bit of poetic licence there) we can’t just trust specialists to “do their thing”.