Whose job is the best?

John Mead and Peter Smith knew each other as lads, became carpenters together, and took the same degree. After that, Mead became a consultant and Smith moved up the ranks on site and is now a project manager. (He was tempted by a job offer from the Housing Forum, part of Rethinking Construction, but preferred to stay on the front line.) They met recently to debate whether it is better to be a doer or a thinker.

Difficult decisions

Smith: What do you miss most about being at "the coal-face" of the construction process?

Mead: The people mainly, the social mix you get on a construction site. One minute you can be up to your neck in mud meeting Lord Rogers and the next minute a subcontractor can be screaming down the phone that he hasn't had his payment. I miss the diversity of a construction site. Also the satisfaction of driving by a building and thinking, I helped put that up.

Smith: Surely you get some of that social mix in a consultancy?

Mead: Not on an hour-by-hour basis and not quite as varied. There was more of it when I was involved in the M4I [Movement for Innovation] demonstration projects. That was fantastic, being out on site observing, capturing and measuring best practice techniques and working with some brilliant construction minds.

Smith: What don't you miss?

Mead: I don't miss the fire fighting. Flying by the seat of your pants all the time. It always seems that when you're coming up to PC, it's usually then that the shit starts to hit the fan. You get people who won't work with you, who always want more. That's the game they play. They want that little bit extra. You can play the game, but I don't believe it should be like that and so I don't miss that aspect.

Smith: That's one aspect I love most. It's challenging. Don't get me wrong, if you've got that 11 or 12 hours a day and in the evenings and weekends, that wears you down. Particularly around the time of PC. But the bonus is that you're alive and sparked every day.

Mead: I can see the excitement. There is the unknown, and you have to act on instinct. But because of what I've seen at M4I and worked to put into practice through Opps I know it doesn't have to be that way. It's wasteful. You can't plan out every eventuality but you can minimise waste and that's what I'm trying to do, working with supply chains to integrate the production process. The difficulty for you is the pressures of delivery don't give you a chance to step back and say, hold on, let's plan this better.

Driving seat

Smith: The pressure depends on how the contract has gone. There are some circumstances you can't plan for, or control, for example, if a contractor goes bust or another isn't performing.

Mead: But can you not work with your suppliers and bring them to the point where much of the unknown is managed out? You get situations where the subcontractor is saying, if you want this done by Friday it's going to cost you more. And you pay more even when you had originally agreed that it would be done by Friday, but they're saying the architect was late with the drawings and some other contractor is delaying their work, and this is what leads to the constant fire fighting.

Smith: You make it sound like I sit at a desk and develop the programme, get a contractor on board and the programme is given to him with no communication and he's told, right that's what you're going to achieve, now get on with it. We do the things you're talking about, though maybe not in such a regulated way.

Mead: Do you tender mostly or do you negotiate?

Smith: Mostly we tender.

i don’t miss the fire fighting

John Mead

Mead: Wouldn't it be better to have a pool of supply chain partners that you can count on and with whom you've worked before?

Smith: We're moving in that direction. We now have a database of approved contractors, where if a contractor lets any of the Berkeley Group companies down we have the option of striking them from the tender lists.

Mead: Do you measure and monitor their performance in any way?

Smith: Of course. If the project manager writes a letter of notification regarding health and safety to a contractor, that is included in the contractor's file, and if there are other letters about the contractor we know something is wrong. A lot of the ideals you're working towards we have installed, but not necessarily in the manner you would present it. If you were starting up a new company you could set up these systems at the beginning. But we're such a large entity we can't just introduce something and have it take effect tomorrow.

Missed opportunity

Mead: What about that job offer from the Housing Forum? Do you ever think you should have taken it?

Smith: I can't deny it. I was tempted. It was a difficult decision because it would have taken me in a different direction that maybe would have suited my temperament and degree. But it would have been short term. The Housing Forum was offering a year's secondment. It probably would have been beneficial because I would have seen various schemes and come back and said, hey guys, this is the way we should be doing it. I work for a close-knit company with like-minded people. We work together and good ideas get promoted and worked on. I felt I could make a difference to my company by staying on the job.

Mead: Maybe, but the industry, at the initiative level, needs more people like you who have practical experience. I sometimes find myself getting carried away with some new way of working, because one forgets how difficult it is to deliver the product. Contractors are business people who must make a profit. If you change overnight without the right information and planning it might fall down around your ears. It sounds as if Berkeley Homes is doing it in a sensible manner. But the Housing Forum would have benefited from your input and I think you might have benefited from the experience.

Comparing pressure

Smith: Are your deadlines as profound as mine? Our deadlines are literally whether the client occupies the property or not.

Mead: Our deadlines are cast in stone. They are often immovable, mainly because we have to deliver the business benefits in a set period to demonstrate our value. Yours are as well, but you can drift past. You are the client.

Smith: What happens if you drift past?

Mead: It costs us both financially and in terms of our reputation. Your reputation is built on bricks and mortar. Ours is on delivery of business benefits. Somebody can come along and see what you've done.

Smith: If we drift past we lose reputation and revenue.

Mead: We have to be able to say to a client, speak to Messrs ABC and Co to see how we helped their business.

the bonus is you’re alive and sparked

Peter Smith

Smith: Do you ever get surprised? Do you ever find that the avenue you've been going down has hit a dead end and you think, we've got to rethink this?

Mead: Yes, you could get half-way through developing a process and something could come along and completely change one element of that process and that has a knock-on effect. But it's not like a wall falling over. It's not a physical occurrence. The pressure for us is that people are wary of consultants. You pay a lot of money and you have to demonstrate that value has been gained. We have to develop things, whether it is a business process or a supply chain, that makes a tangible difference to a business. That's where my practical experience comes in.

Commitment crisis

Smith: I've known you for 20 years, and I know that the pressure you feel is largely self-imposed. I'm the same, and it's because we care. I've been interviewing to fill a post for three months now because I don't get the right feeling from people. To be successful and an asset in this industry you have to love it. I will work whatever hours necessary to get something right. If you get someone who works 8 to 5.30 to collect his money you're not going to get much support. There are too many people in the industry who just don't care.

Mead: Why do you think that is?

Smith: I think the industry is very easy at the moment. You could give up your day job, go to a labour agency and tomorrow be on £22 an hour as a site manager. And you're not expected to set the world alight, you're expected to do a day's work.

Mead: Do you think it comes down to the transient nature of the industry? When we used to work on site you would have employment for the duration of that contract and then the job would finish and so would your income until the next project comes along.

[This led to a discussion about how money is the basic motivator at a trades level, but not necessarily management level. Mead admitted he earned nearly £40,000 a year as a carpenter, but after he graduated he took a job at £15,000 a year. He wanted the challenge. Smith agreed.]

I'm fine, thanks

Mead: Would you like to try my job for a while?

Smith: If I could do it all over again I would still want to do what I'm doing.

Mead: What about taking a busman's holiday? What would you want to get out of it?

Smith: Not ideas. I wouldn't expect to walk away saying, John's given me this great idea. I would expect to go through the thought processes to arrive at those ideas. Would you like to do my job?

Mead: If I could work on a project in a way that I believe projects should be run I would be doing it now. But I don't want to do project management in its current form. The bartering and the bashing up of subbies, the fire fighting on a daily basis. The majority of the industry works this way. I would love to be a project manager - that's where my heart is, on site, but not in the way the industry traditionally works. I don't believe construction projects should be run in that way. It's not your fault, it's not the subbie's fault. It's the industry's fault for letting it happen and the client's fault for continuing to procure on price instead of value.

[This led to another discussion about to what extent you can plan uncertainty out of construction until Smith is asked point blank: Why don't you want to be a consultant?]