Top marks for the Lifeline Centre

The client survey results are now in for the new Lifeline Centre at Driffield. East Riding Council’s project manager awarded us the maximum 10 score for Product, Service, and Overall satisfaction. Well done to all the team!

 

 

Northern Dioceses

We've just received the framework documents for the Northern Dioceses framework. This will involve schools projects, and with a bit of luck we should see some of these coming through in the Autumn. The six Dioceses involved are Carlisle, Blackburn, Manchester, Chester, Liverpool and York. The intent will be for the School Governors under each Diocese to call upon the Main Contractors for individual projects to submit a best value proposition via a mini-competition with the successful appointment being on the basis of the criteria contained within the enquiry. The framework is worth arounf £40m in total

Woobius collaboration hub

Thanks to Martin at Fairsnape for letting us know about Woobius, the online collaboartion hub designed for architects and engineers that provides a simple way of file sharing. If anyone out there has looked at it or used it let us know

J Z Flowers update

Work is progressing well on the J Z Flowers site at North Cave . This picture of Dave and Pete on site was taken last week. You can see the site on your left as you approach the North Cave turn off heading west on the M62

Risk

I keep reading prequal after prequal that asks how we are going to manage or eliminate risk. As a long time gambler i've always seen risk as an opportunity, essentially a good thing. Someone please send me a prequal with this question: "how do you incentivise your staff to take risks or find ways of doing things better? Maybe we could adopt a "big stick" approach to innovation!

Wyke College site blog goes live

The Hobson & Porter site blog for the Wyke College redevelopment in Hull is now online. You can find it at http://hobsonandporter-wyke.blogspot.com and maybe you can even add yourself as a follower.

We’ll be posting up dates and information about the work and keeping you up to date with progress as the building progresses.

Hallgate Primary school

Just received photos of the new Hallgate Junior School in Cottingham. Another 10 out of 10 for Overall Satisfaction. Well done to all the team at H&P

Green Vision Leeds

Just back from a full day of presentations on sustainable construction at Green Vision in Leeds. Not many simple solutions or quick wins to report but came away with a number of useful information resources and websites to follow. Will try to attend "retrofit for the future" on Thursday

Low Carbon Innovation Bulletin

This is a weekly bulletin I signed up to a few months ago that does a good job of pulling together organisations and case studies relating to lowering carbon emissions

Collaborative Programming

It turns out that our site manager at Wyke College, Mark Kelsey, updates his programme every day with MS Project. All we need to do now is find an effective way of him sharing this information. Printing to PDF is a waste of time, a blog update would be better. I'll get a copy of Project and get his programme and test out the interchangeabilitywith GanttProject. I'm sure the project team, college, students and parents would like to have access to real time updates and programme.

Label cloud

I'm playing with a few ideas for label clouds in the betablog. Ignore anything that looks half baked.

Google Calender Sync

As demonstrated earlier. This will sync your Outlook calendar with your Google a/c Calendar.

You can set permissions for different people depending on whether you want them to see the actual entry or just a 'busy' marker for that slot.

The five minute website - an example of free tools

Here is an example of a website put together in under five minute using free tools. It isn't glamorous or sophisticated and there isn't a gram of Flash to be seen. In minutes a page can be posted for general consumption.

This raises an interesting and very understandable corporate concern - control.

There is a genuine concern that if tools are available to anyone who wants them then who is controlling what they are saying and doing? Who can stop somebody saying horrid things and posting embarrassing photographs from the Christmas party? The free five minute website give you the answer - nobody. By logical extension anyone can do anything and if they are motivated enough they will do it anyway in under five minutes.

We must to remind ourselves that we are using the web to make things better, not to stop people griping when we make things worse.

unsheffield

I'll probably be attending some of this event. I hear that the geek will inherit the earth.

Open source project management; a brief response (because I had switched off new post comments ;)

Andrew, you've raised some really important questions about what people actually get out of the tools that they are using and MS Project is a good case in point. Bloatware is a term that is used too often in my opinion because it of uses on the tools rather than the output. But it crystallises the issue nicely. I have no idea how H&P implement and use MS Project but it is a good case in point to discuss the topic of collaboration in general.

MSP is HUGE and EXPENSIVE to implement and train up for. I've used it on and off since the 90's and despite persevering I now find that I can't justify the energy that it absorbs. The future for now does seem to be applications that integrate simply into (browser) platforms like Internet Explorer, Chrome and to a lesser degree FireFox. MS and Google seem to have applications in their sights in the way that Apple App's have revolutionised handheld computing.

There is an important question to be asked with every so called solution; Why are we doing this?

So you need to ask why you are using MS Project, and I'd suggest that it being a de-facto standard isn't a good enough answer to prevent you looking at other solutions.If a single member of the project team doesn't use it as fully as everyone else then its strength fails at the weakest link.

A paper and pencil diary and task system might be the answer if a project/ construction/ design/ cost manager is the only person using it. If the MSP gannt charts never really leaves his desk for any constructive purpose then you are probably wasting time and money, making you less efficient than if you ditched it today. It might be more productive (and much cheaper) to buy a few dozen copies of Dave Allen's Getting Things Done.

That's not to say that you should throw the baby out with the bathwater but project information is no use if it isn't of some use to more than one person. Shared and open use of the tools encourages collaboration with the information. Collaboration encourages the best solutions. The best solutions encourage excellence and usually profit! We all like profit. :)

Open source project management tools the way forward?

We've just spent a load of cash retraining contracts managers on the use of MS Project. Every time we do a quality based tender submission we get asked to show how we develop and update programmes. But how many contractors actually update all their programmes on a regular basis? The problem with MS project seems to be that you need the software to open it, so how can it be used in a truly collaborative way. After all, collaborative programming and integrated teams are supposed to be the holy grail of continuous improvement (if they're not then tell me what is so I can put it in my next bid). Open source gizmos that interface with MS Project and other applications are being developed, and these must be the way forward. The main criticisms seem to be that they have less functions than MS Project, but my Toyota has lots of functions and i don't use any of them. Shouldn't the main point here be not how flashy your programme is (or could be), but who's actually using it as a useful project management tool. I'd be interested to hear about any contractors currently using open source tools, and on what size of projects.

Economic Impact Assessment Tool

I'm about to attempt an economic impact assessment for a school site we have just finished in Beverley. The idea is that we work out how money going into the project was spent and respent, so producing a multiplied economic benefit. I'm starting by finding out who we employed and where thay worke / live, including subcontractors, and also do some analysis of materials to find out where they were purchased, or even manufactured. This is my first attempt so will probably end in disaster. If i get any good stuff out of it it may be useful to Esteem to show the "Hullness" of its Building Schools for the Future bid

Browne Smith Baker's Carbon Challenge scheme

We've started talking to one of our customers, Pickering & Ferens Homes about developing a standard house type specification. I think this is a great opportunity for us to find out how much a zero carbon Code Level 6 home will cost. I went to a presentation  by local architects Browne smith Baker a few weeks ago and was surprised at how cost efficiently they delivered it - would be interesting to know if anyone has achieved similar results on smaller schemes

Google in construction

Just been talking to Martin at Fairsnape who told me about this story - it looks like they are putting all their drawings on Google docs and saving plenty

Subbies need to get green

A new survey revealed 95 per cent of large construction firms will give preference to subcontractors who can prove their green credentials.