Brexit creates the perfect opportunity to rip up the procurement rule book and lock in sustainability targets, says Mathew Riley.
With less than a month to go until the UK exits the European Union (EU), many are still unsure how their businesses will be affected and what the impact on civil engineering will be. Nonetheless, Ramboll UK managing director Mathew Riley believes that Brexit creates an opportunity for improving procurement and a chance to increase focus on climate change at an early stage in projects.
Riley also wants the government’s infrastructure delivery taskforce, known as Project Speed, to prioritise improvements in procurement as one of its early outputs. He says that as an industry, construction must also consider how it got to this point and identify the barriers to change.
“I’ve got experience of both sides of the fence – I’ve sat in client organisations running procurement functions and I’m now on the consultancy side – and it is clear there is a need for change,” he says.
“The current approach to procurement has had its time and was relevant to getting control, demonstrate transparency, etcetera. It’s like many parts of our industry, it’s probably overly mature and needs to be effectively reinvented for want of a better description.
“The focus has become far too much around the process, not around the outcome, particularly in the public sector.”
What really frustrates me is we still have the same kind of conversations now that we were having 17 or 18 years ago
Riley has a background in property and is a chartered surveyor by training. He says his first relevant experience of the construction industry was through working on Heathrow Terminal 5 (T5) in the
early 2000s.
“What really frustrates me is we still have the same kind of conversations now that we were having 17 or 18 years ago. It is slightly more sophisticated, and maybe with updated language but the fundamentals are the same,” he says.
“If you look at the barriers or constraints, there’s the process itself where the process often gets put ahead of the outcome.
“But I think there are probably
three areas where as an industry we need to change.
“First there’s the classic behaviours piece, where there’s that fear of change. People do like a rulebook – engineers especially love to follow
a code of practice or standards. Trying to liberate people’s minds,
with a degree of ambiguity can be quite a challenge,” says Riley.
“People’s brains are quite animal and, if you’re an engineer, or if you’re a project manager, they are quite analytical, quite methodical in how they think. Therefore, to get them to use the right, more creative side of their brain can be quite hard.
“Then, I think there’s also the fear of failure. I think you see that acutely in the public sector, where I think the media scrutiny that they often get, not just on the big projects like Crossrail and High Speed 2, but even at the local authority level is intense. That can actually paralyse a lot of clients – they might want to do the right thing, and there are certainly some very bright people in those organisations who see the opportunity, but that fear of failure culture holds them back,” he adds.
“Finally, I also think the current leadership and management, in which I include myself, needs to recognise its accountability in helping facilitate that or make that change.
We’re not good enough at providing the evidence of what’s possible to clients and to organisations to then create that case for change
“We talk about it but actually, if you look at actions, the actions don’t match the words and, I’m quite self-critical of our industry – that we don’t in any way play our part.
Riley goes on to say: “That leads me on to another point – that we’re not good enough at providing the evidence of what’s possible to clients and to organisations to then create that case for change.
“So that’s, again, incumbent on us. We get lots of small examples where there is innovation in delivery or in construction, but actually, that’s not the big picture stuff – it is more incremental.”
Riley points to some of the initiatives used on T5, which he says were not repeatable on other projects but the elements that did not get shared and were lost.
Project focused
“That brings me to another constraint, which you can loosely define as business models. I’m being self critical of consultants or contractors here but we’re very project focused.
“If you think about how we win work, it’s quite a hamster wheel process like any business development but it is very project focused. I know we have frameworks, but again there are often then still quite a few tenders within it, so it’s still a very project focused mentality. I hate to use the dirty word of money, but its very profit driven, cash driven and very short term.
“Ultimately [the fact that] people are protecting commercial positions is a real barrier to change because we are operating off such thin margins. Link all those things together and behaviours, fear of failure, the fact that we’re a low margin industry – the evidence isn’t compelling enough and it’s very difficult to create that change.”
Nonetheless, Riley believes there is a lot more the industry can do. He sees Brexit and the need to tackle climate change as an opportunity, particularly if the civil engineering industry is to capitalise on prime minister Boris Johnson’s “build, build, build” mantra to drive post-Covid economic growth.
“Procurement needs to reinvent itself,” he says. “We have to recognise the need, to not only simplify the process but to focus more on the outputs and outcomes. But we also need to better assess the impact of innovation and learn how to value it.”
Riley believes that the industry can bake in the need to address climate change at the procurement stage and that the need to consider it will drive change in the procurement process.
“We need to force that change,” he says. He also adds that Brexit is an opportunty to, to some extent, rip up the EU procurement rule book which he describes as a constraint on innovation.
Riley is urging Project Speed to redefine what good procurement looks like. “Even in the short term, it’s an opportunity to say throw out that rule book and create something really simple and effective,” he says.
“This should be based on future needs, not based on the way we’ve always done things.
“This really should be on the priority list of short-term deliverables for Project Speed and would be a quick win for us as an industry to show what really can be done.”
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