Life long view

Martin Long is one of that rare breed who selected a career in building services early on in life – unlike the majority who seem to fall into the profession by happy accident.

“It started when I worked in a plumbing business over the summer holidays when I was young. I really wanted to be a plumber, I suppose!” But an enlightened careers teacher pointed Long towards a degree in environmental engineering. After graduating from Loughborough, he went to work for Arup as a mechanical engineer.

In his sixteen years with Arup, Long worked on projects as far afield as California and Istanbul. “Working in Turkey was a very interesting experience. I was responsible for procurement, and that’s when I got a taste for the project management side of the job.”

On his return to the UK, Long worked on Argent projects including Governor’s House and Brindley Place. Long explains: “We were working for Argent, on the client’s brief, and overseeing construction rather then being design engineers. That is where I started getting into the partnered approach, and seeing how clients work in a non-adversarial environment.” At around that time, Long also took an MSc in project management at Reading University.

Having got at taste for project management, Long was keen to put this into action and moved from the consultant side to developer Stanhope, where he has been for the past five and a half years.

“I’m responsible for an entire project, from the time Stanhope is appointed. We develop the project all the way through. It isn’t just the m&e area, it is a multi-disciplinary role,” says Long. However, because of his background, Long also has responsibility for strategic procurement of m&e systems.

“I am very much involved in choice of trade contractors, engineers, systems and suppliers across projects.” In this role, Long has been able to take a partnering approach to working with services suppliers.

He describes this philosophy very simply as “if people have worked with us successfully before, we try to work with them again!”. But there is more to it: “We meet every three months with the key consultants and trade contractors to discuss which suppliers are doing well, and which new products are on the market that we should be looking at, and generally picking up on people’s experiences.”

Long says though, that this way of working suits Stanhope and may not work for everyone. A particularly strong element is the use of standard solutions. “We don’t like bespoke. We like to take manufacturers’ standard solutions and work with them where possible.” He concedes that Stanhope is able to achieve this because it’s buildings are of a similar type - office space, based in London and the South East. However, innovation for its own sake is not desirable: “The architects come in for criticism for being too attached to bespoke solutions, but engineers can be just as bad. The word ‘innovation’ gets used as an excuse for doing new things for their own sake. If it’s not broken, don’t fix it is a good adage!”

Long is very much against reinventing the wheel. “A good engineer doesn’t necessarily come up with a new idea for every project and we sometimes think engineers do that because they feel they have to – but they don’t.”

Another increasingly important area for Long is sustainability. “This has come way up our agenda in the last year or so,” says Long. “All our schemes at the moment feature the possibility for using chp, ground source heat pumps, photovoltaics and so on. We are looking at this range of options a lot more.”

Long feels that legislation such as the European Directive on the Energy Performance of Buildings, as well as Mayor Livingstone’s London Plan will drive developers to take sustainability more seriously. “This is also driven by our clients corporate social responsibility agenda. But we are also taking a more holistic approach to understanding how buildings work, including energy consumption.”

This long term approach is harder to achieve, especially as information on whole life costing of equipment is currently thin on the ground. But Long takes the view that it is absolutely necessary to consider buildings in the long term.

“At Stanhope, I work on one project at a time. The philosophy is that the project is yours for life. If a problem comes up on that project, it’s yours and not assigned to someone else to deal with. It can be tough, but you don’t walk away from projects and it makes you aware of the responsibility.”