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New Manual on Construction Health and Safety in Developing Countries launched at ECI Conference

The European Construction Institute launched a new manual on Construction Health and Safety in Developing Countries at its conference in Delft from 23rd to 24th March.
It was developed by ECI in conjunction with Loughborough University. It addresses issues of infrastructure, language, literacy, local practices and politics as well as Personal Protective Equipment, Security, weather extremes and workers’ families. It also contains data sheets on health and safety in eight developing countries including China, India, Iraq and Nigeria. These include indices of Hofstede’s cultural characteristics as well as literacy, language and economy. There are similar country data sheets on Belgium, France, UK and USA as examples of developed countries.

The manual has been developed to assist those responsible for the management of health and safety. To that end, a recommended management process has been drawn up together with some assessment tools to help with understanding the consequences on health and safety of carrying our projects in developing countries.

Further funding has recently been acquired to extend this work to include issues relating to migrant workers on projects within  Europe and elsewhere in the developed world.

For further information, including review copies, please contact the ECI office on tel: +44 (0)1509 223526 Email: eci@lboro.ac.uk

“Managing” governments and other stakeholders in a major international civil engineering project

Prof dr Michael Abbott of the UNESCO-IHE Institute for Water Education, will tell the European Construction Institute Conference of his experiences on the Øresund Fixed Link between Denmark and Sweden. The Conference takes place on 23-24 March, 2006, at Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands.

Prof Abbott says: “ Competence in this field is essential to competitivity. Anyone who ignores it is, as the Americans say, 'toast'.

One cannot 'manage' stakeholders. One can only facilitate a dialogue between them individually and with the owner and the contractor. This is not a management function, but a leadership one, and must be led by a person or persons at the top executive level. It cannot normally be carried out as a parallel function by a consultant. A major part of top executive time on the Denmark-Sweden connection was taken up with this function. This process starts when the project is first conceived and continues until some time after it is delivered. It necessitates excellent communication skills and technologies working synergically.

The Øresund Fixed Link sets the standards for future projects and provides a paradigm case in successful and therefore productive stakeholder participation. It introduced new standards in the communication of data, knowledge and understanding, each with wide varieties of semiotic constraints, devices and solutions. It emphasises the fundamental importance of transparency to provide the means to generate states of coherence and intelligibility on the part of all participants in the project.

It could not have been so much as legislated without extensive preliminary consultation with a great variety of stakeholders, each with its own lobbying powers. The legislation and thence the regulation of the project was developed through this process, empowering most of these stakeholders to intervene effectively if environmental and other such conditions were not being respected. It demanded extensive technological and sociotechnological innovations that had not been previously so much as investigated. All stakeholder participation proceeded in real time over internet through an information centre that processed data into easily assimilated forms for each class of user. All modelling and data collection content was continuously transmitted by radio to this centre, to be processed there. There was complete transparancy in all data and the means to interpret this data by its often very disparate users. As a result, the whole link was built and has since been successfully operated while satisfying all environmental conditions, it was built well within budget and it was delivered six months ahead of schedule. 

Stakeholders included the owner - where the very form of ownership was strongly conditioned by stakeholder participations - the Danish and Swedish parliaments and governments, their respective ministries (environment, fishing, transport, etc), the European Commission, the governments riperian to the Baltic and certain of their ministries, the general public represented so far as possible by their NGOs (Danish and Swedish mussel bed farmers, Danish and Swedish eel fisheries, herring fishery associations, the society for the protection of the eider duck, swan and seal protection interests and at least a dozen others.” 

The European Construction Institute (ECI) is Europe’s only transnational network of construction excellence. It brings together many of the most innovative clients, contractors, specialists and support organisations in Europe to develop and share knowledge aimed at improving the entire construction supply chain.

MD of ARAMCO OVERSEAS COMPANY (AOC) to speak about investment plans for the next five years at ECI Conference, 23 – 24 March in Delft

Aramco Overseas Company (AOC) manages operations in Europe, Australia, Africa, South America and the Far East for its parent company, Saudi Aramco, the national oil company of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Saudi Aramco is currently running several oil, gas and refinery expansion programmes, totaling $73.7 bn. The majority of their $46bn oil expansion projects are designed and executed by European and Asian engineering and construction companies. ECI member Shell is a partner in their $11bn Gas Initiative.

Abdalhafidh M. Nagshabandi, Managing Director of AOC, will speak at the ECI Conference in Delft, The Netherlands, on 23 – 24 March 2006.

In addition, Gareth Davies, MD of CEL International, will share secrets of success in the evolving Chinese market, Prof. dr Michael Abbott of UNESCO-IHE Institute for Water Education will speak about the empowerment of stakeholders on the Øresund Fixed Link and Joost P. van Iersel of the European Economic and Social Committee (EESC) will show how other industries in Europe have adapted to change. There will also be items on global safety, conflict resolution and global logistics as well as presentations on the future of the construction industry from Prof. Simon Austin of Loughborough University and Prof. Hennes de Ridder of Delft University of Technology.

CEL International will share forty years of construction expertise in China at the ECI Conference “Global Construction Ten Years On”

CEL International, the UK-based contractor which was formerly a division of the Courtaulds group, has been managing construction projects in China since the mid-60s. Its MD, Gareth Davies, will speak at the ECI Conference “Global Construction Ten Years On - Adapting to Change” on 23 and 24 March 2006, at Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands. He will be assisted in this by David Lyon of Intralink, a business and market services consultancy, specialising in China. They will consider the present and future drivers that are moving China on and the major players in the delivery of Chinese construction today. They will also share their views on tactics to enter the Chinese market, to overcome common hurdles and manage risk, before considering future developments in China over the coming ten years.

Asked what makes China different from other markets, Gareth Davies says

“Its scale and volume and the low cost of its labour. This means that techniques are based on the low cost of labour rather than economic efficiencies”

What lessons could he apply to other evolving markets?

“That you can’t impose your own methods. You need to work with their culture and gradually introduce change”

What advice would he give to a construction company entering China?

“Expect the unexpected and “unknown unknowns”. There is also a need to recognise that it is a complex, highly-regulated market and that it pays to invest in understanding the market by incorporating experts within your team”

"China is the most exciting place in world to be doing business at the moment” says Gareth. “The Chinese are thirsty for knowledge and ex-patriots are keen to support its development”

For further information about the ECI Conference, follow the link under Events and Masterclasses left.

Enhancing the value of construction projects by better management of people

A new handbook from the European Construction Institute (ECI) entitled “Managing People on Construction Projects”, was launched on 13 October at Alstec Ltd, Leicester, UK. The book is the result of a collaboration between researchers at Loughborough, Leicester and Glasgow Caledonian Universities and a group of ECI Members combining clients such as Astra Zeneca Engineering and major contractors such as Foster Wheeler Energy Ltd.. The project was financed as part of the government’s Respect for People initiative.

The launch presentations described the methodology of the research team who surveyed practitioners to discover the real state of working relationships both between management and staff, and project teams and suppliers. From the results, they were able to meet the objectives of the task force, namely to identify the nature, context and effectiveness of current levels of empowerment, to develop benchmarking methodology for teamwork and empowerment, to identify teamwork and empowerment concepts that are relevant to the construction sector and to develop a “tool box” of techniques for meeting specific project performance criteria. The handbook is the result of meeting these objectives, and as such is invaluable for all managers and team leaders of construction projects.

Identified within the handbook are three new Value Enhancing Practices to guide the busy project manager in Leading Projects, Achieving Project Team Performance and Effective Supply Chain Engagement. When these and other good practices identified in the handbook are applied, the value of construction projects will be enhanced.

The book is now available from the ECI office, Tel: +44 (0)1509 223526, Email: eci@lboro.ac.uk, price £60 (ECI Members £40).

ECI Whole Life Value Toolkit gains Innovation Award

The European Construction Institute’s (ECI) Whole Life Value Toolkit, as applied by Faithful and Gould to a Private Finance Initiative (PFI) Schools project, was awarded Highly Commended in the British Institute of Facilities Management’s Award for Innovation, presented at the Grosvenor House Hotel, London on 10 October 2005. Faithful and Gould have been leading the ECI Task Force on Whole Life Value in which the Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors (RICS), the Construction Industry Council and Constructing Excellence are also partners.

Following a rigourous three-stage selection, the final was a closely-fought contest between three nominations. It was eventually won by Glaxo Smith Kline, but the competition was so close that both runners-up were awarded Highly Commended.

Since the award, the Whole Life Value Toolkit has also been confirmed as finalist for two categories of the QS News Awards – Innovation and Strategic Investment Planning. The results will be announced on 2 December.

The Whole Life Value Toolkit provides an effective and relatively simple tool to measure and evaluate alternative whole life options using a “balanced scorecard” approach. It is suitable for all sectors of industry and commerce, such as the property, civil and building, oil, gas, energy, petrochemical and process sectors of industry. It helps to improve the effectiveness of investment decision-making as well as helping to reduce risk and uncertainty, and it builds on, rather than replaces, existing life-cycle costing processes and value management tools and techniques. It is currently being tested on public sector projects and is in development as a published web-enabled tool and handbook. Publication is planned for 2006. A version specifically for the petrochemical, process and pharmaceutical sectors is also being developed.

For further information, please contact: ECI tel: +44 (0)1509 223526, email: eci@lboro.ac.uk