...but the accent must be on English

A senior project manager, who worked on a number of Athens Olympics projects, said: “Unless London pulls its proverbial finger out, there will be problems.”

Claude Lambie was seconded to JR Knowles to work on infrastructure projects in Athens for two years.

He said of his experience in Greece: “The greatest difficulty by far was not local and government bureaucracy, and eventually tracking down the delegated signatory – who was usually out for a long lunch – but language difficulties.”

He said that although the contractual language was English, “meetings broke up into polyglot splinter groups discussing the same problems at the same time but in Spanish, Austrian, German, Greek, French and English. Many meetings ended in disarray.”

He advised London to enforce English as the language spoken at all project meetings. “Hopefully the Queen’s English will be the accepted form of language for 2012 and I’ll certainly join up once again, although with a Scottish accent,” he said.

Glasgow-based Lambie added that the 2012 project seemed “very London-orientated”.

He said: “I would hope that Scottish firms are not excluded from the work.”

Lambie added that the situation in Athens led to “garbled minutes”, which in turn took too long to reach the correct the people and too long to be approved.

Minutes were sent “to central government departments for approval, then forwarded to the appropriate sub-committee of the IOC for final approval and only then could actions be commenced, by which time two further meetings had taken place”.

Lambie is now operations manager at Avid Construction Management in Scotland.

His comments follow those of experts quoted in the last issue of QS News. Bernard Ainsworth, director of Atkins, said: “It is important that there is one client.” Tim Urquart, head of project management for Bovis Lend Lease in New South Wales, said: “Decision-making should happen at the lowest possible level with delegated authority given to middle management.”