Opinion piece

First the good news: there were no fatalities during the construction of London 2012. Now the bad news, there were three deaths in London construction projects in the five weeks from March this year.  Is there a lesson to be learnt or have we forgotten it already?

After a long recession, UK construction is stirring and roaring ahead and the industry wants to make up for lost time. Do we have time to think things through? Maybe not. You must be joking - we are too busy. What’s worse, it seems that some companies that performed in an exemplary fashion during London 2012 perhaps only paid lip service and not a lot of learning was transferred internally. And I don’t mean just construction techniques, but the management of construction projects.

I worked with a tier-2 contractor during the London 2012 programme and they ran a well managed project with project managers that were enthusiastic and inspiring. This year, I worked with the same contractor on a different project and it was like stepping backwards 30 years: macho knee-jerk reactions, a lack of vision and no sense of collaboration with subcontractors. If not for the same logo on the helmets, I would have thought I was with a different company. Oh, there were plenty of reasons: “we’re too busy”; “it’s the subcontractor’s problem, not ours”; and “we’ll fine them if they screw up”.

We had a very successful construction programme with London 2012 and there is even a Learning Legacy website showcasing our achievements. (Disclosure: my NoWaste project is on that website)

So what happened? Where did all that learning end up?

We have an industry with world class architects, designers, consultants and project managers. But we still call some of the actual building activities the biblical trades. We have an industry that has a mandated training levy, yet the industry is constantly claiming a skills shortage.

Maybe it is something else we’ve not paid attention to. The industry training body seems to be fixated with technical training and appears to show little interest in innovative ways to engage the workforce. Training departments in companies offer programmes so dire that people were even finding ways to avoid the mandatory health and safety training. Maybe we are focussing on the wrong things?

I would argue that we need to focus on training and learning that is easy, simple and practical. 

Easy because it is harder to mess up. If we are training people to do something different, or do something differently, the last thing you want is for people to make mistakes and then become discouraged. An easy to learn process also makes the learning faster and thence offers, ideally, a quicker return on the training investment.

Simple because people will not bother if it is too complex - some of us may relish the challenge of rocket science-level of complexity, but few will have the inclination to tackle it. So the suggestion is to design something simpler so we can all do readily.

Practical because people are generally not willing to devote time on activities that are not beneficial or make no sense to us.

We need to work with the realities of the ever-evolving workplace and perhaps look beyond just the technical skills of the biblical trades instead to helping the teams to adapt to change. For example, the industry’s apparent fixation for ‘green’ skills may be less important than how to work in a ‘greener’ way. To me, it may be more effective to learn simple, easy and practical techniques to solve problems. Knowing how to cut down wastage and simplify processes generally results in ‘greener’ activities.

We need to encourage broader dissemination and adoption of the good practices from the London 2012 programme, and yes, the contents of the Learning Legacy website may need to change from the current marketing style towards more practical guidance. Now, you will say adopting good practices is  likely to cost more. Yes, initially, but in a project lifetime, the reduction of problems, mistakes, accidents and waste will balance the score.

Are we alone in facing the risk of squandering the learning legacy? In discussions with construction professionals in Russia working on the Sochi Athletes Village, I found that there is very high interest from Russian project managers in how the London 2012 project eliminated the “wastage of human potential” -  i.e. deaths on construction sites. (Ironic, isn’t it?)

The Russian contractors faced somewhat different problems to what we had in Stratford: a lower initial supervision level led to teams not having the right goals and a large amount of snagging and rework. The working conditions were sometimes less than optimal with incorrect tools and inadequate personal protection equipment. This resulted in the operatives unwilling to work extra hours to allow the schedule to catch up as well as teams getting in each other’s way.

The project managers there dealt with these through tighter management and greater supervision as well as having the plans and work list evaluated twice daily. The project thus moved from behind target in July 2013 to on-target by October 2013. There is now an interest in learning from the post-London 2012 transformation and how to encourage teams to solve problems quickly.

So what would their learning legacy be? Would they forget the good practices learnt? Or would they leverage the knowledge to upgrade their industry? I know what I would not like to see: working for clients that insist that we adopt practices from Sochi’s Learning Legacy.

Uly’s NoWaste® programme won the “Most Effective Training” award in September 2009 from the London 2012 management team.

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This article first appeared in Project magazine. APM members can read all feature articles from Project magazine over recent years by accessing the Project magazine archive.

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