Five years ago, project managers were regarded as pen-pushers – now they are seen as indispensable. So how much work is out there and who is winning the bulk of it?

“Project management is the world’s fastest growing profession,” declares the Association for Project Management on its website. In the building industry, at least, this is hard to deny. Whereas 20 years ago professional project managers were all but unheard of in construction and civil engineering, the association now claims 3000 members working in the sector, making up 20% of total membership, and another 35 registered firms.

Why is there such a call for project managers in construction? Tom Taylor is in a good position to know, as in 1985 he was one of the four who founded the industry’s first stand-alone project management consultancy, Buro Four, and is currently chairman of the association. “The building industry is more convoluted, more multi-headed and more anarchic than other industries.

There’s now so much choice in the methods of procurement in Britain. And there are so many stakeholders in building projects, and they want to engage with all the others. So you’re getting project management at the client end, at the design end, at the construction end and at the specialist subcontractor end.”

For Phil Wade, who heads Bovis Lend Lease’s 300-strong design and project management division, Lend Lease Projects, the firm’s involvement has “moved further up the food chain” from construction management. “We are a lot more focused on the front end of the process, in setting up the brief and appointing design consultants.” The division is helped in this process by combining the skills of urban and engineering design, land surveying, safety planning and specialist development management in retail, community development, healthcare and education.

Wade agrees project management has come far in the past five years. “It has come away from the paper-pushing image it used to have to providing solutions and innovations that add real value. Clients want to see something tangible as a result of project management. They want you to add something extra. Good project management is about good communications, good leadership and good skills in addressing problems, innovation and motivating others.”

Buro Four’s Taylor thinks the real issue is not project management but management, pure and simple. “Some people think there’s too much management. I ask them: ‘Would you like more management?’ And they answer: ‘No, better management’.”

Taylor also emphasises the role of the team: “You cannot rely on a specialist project manager.

A project is only as good as the team, so everyone has to do their bit in managing their part of it and its interface with all the other parts.” In other words, if your aim is to improve the end product, there’s no escaping project management, whether a specialist is appointed or you do it yourself.

Who are the project managers?

Out of the hundreds of project management firms now operating in the UK construction industry, those set up from the outset as pure project managers are very much the exception. As well as Buro Four, which set up shop in 1985, they include Hornagold & Hills, Hama and Malcolm Reading & Associates.

Instead, established consultancies and a few contractors have moved in to fill the vacuum opened up by the spiralling demand for project management services. These large quantity surveying practices now has a project management division. “Perhaps half of all those divisions are much more sophisticated than when they were first set up,” concedes Tom Taylor of Buro Four. “And there’s now far less transfer between QS and project management staff.”The other sector to pick up a big slice of the action is civil engineering, where project management meshes into major urban regeneration projects. American contracting giants such as Bechtel and Brown & Root led the way, and British consultancies such as Mott MacDonald, Arup and Scott Wilson Kirkpatrick are keen to follow.

Finally, contractors and construction managers are offering project management services, whether fee-based or part of an package deal. They include Amec, Balfour Beatty, Bovis Lend Lease and Mace.

Postscript

Looking ahead …

21 September Annual debate of the Association of Project Management on the theme: “This house believes a project is only as good as its PR.” Are the project managers’ holy trinity of time, cost and quality still the only relevant standards by which to judge success? See www.apm.org.uk

Broadcasting House