Tag Archives: BIM

Time to apply some military and manufacturing know-how?

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Module Building in factory environment

The UK construction skills crisis continues to delay projects, drive up costs and reduce quality. As we have discussed several times on the SkillsPlanner blog, the government and industry have produced various reports and instituted various campaigns, but the skills gap challenge is deep-rooted.

With the Global Financial Crisis wreaking havoc in 2007-2009 and plunging national construction industries around the world into recession, the UK shed hundreds of thousands of workers, many of whom never returned to the industry. As the UK emerged, somewhat shakily, from recession, replacing these workers has not been helped by the industry’s poor reputation – itself a symptom of deep systemic problems (To change the image, first change construction), including a lack of diversity, an ageing workforce, and decades of under-investment in research and development so that construction is rock-bottom of the digitalisation league, notwithstanding the efforts to promote technologies such as BIM (Tackling skills gaps – can we learn from BIM?).

We have welcomed government plans to reform post-16 education (post) and we are looking closely at recently announced changes to the UK apprenticeship levy scheme (summarised by TES here; the CITB suggests the changes could cut apprenticeship funding by a third). But we still think construction needs to adopt a long-term view of its skills and employment needs, and to be thinking about digital skills and the fourth industrial revolution.

Military-style skills provision?

We are not alone in this view. Gary Sullivan, CEO of construction logistics and security business Wilson James has urged much the same kind of new thinking. In a hard-hitting open letter to the recently reshuffled skills minister Robert Halfon MP published in Construction Manager magazine, Sullivan writes:

Gary Sullivan“… we need more than builders. We need to manufacture off site, we need people with good hand-to-eye co-ordination, we need people who can use state-of-the-art tools who can produce quality at speed again and again. The precious few young people who want to join the industry are being given the wrong skills and it is taking too long to train them in the wrong skills.”

He continues:

“We need to train differently, get people in at ground level and get them working. We could look at how the military train young people. In less than 18 weeks they produce the highest skill levels with technical expertise and a great work ethic. We have to invest in off-site manufacturing and in parallel train the workforce to fit, erect and plug in the state-of-the-art products created in factories in our Northern Powerhouse. Our ambition should be more F1 than 1961.”

It is no surprise that Sullivan mentions the military. Before founding Wilson James 25 years ago, Sullivan spent seven years in the paratroopers, and then worked for the UN where he learned about logistics. Upon return to civilian life, he worked initially as a logistics and security manager for Bovis Lend Lease on projects in the City of London, noting how much construction could benefit from improved logistics. Today, Wilson James employs over 3000 people, has an annual turnover in excess of £100m, and has recruited extensively from armed forces leavers.

BuildForce square 720pxBuilding a strong transition pathway from the armed forces into construction is actively supported by SkillsPlanner project leaders at Ethos (many present at the Westminster launch of BuildForce at the Houses of Parliament on 29 June). As Sullivan suggests, military personnel can quickly gain technical skills and have a strong work ethic, while many in senior ranks have both professional and managerial skills and attitudes that equip them well for work not just in construction as we currently know it, but in what construction might become over the next decade or two.

Modern methods of construction

Such thinking is already being applied in other countries which face similar challenges to the UK. For example, according to a 2015 Ford Foundation report, more than 2.3 million advanced manufacturing jobs in the United States are unfilled and over the next decade an estimated 2.7 million baby boomers will retire from this sector. In California, Workshops for Warriors is training veterans in advanced manufacturing – “Today we train veterans to make products, but tomorrow we will train them to train robots to make products,” says founder Hernàn Luis y Prado. Workshops for Warriors is also partnering with online learning provider SolidProfessor to provide additional skills in engineering software use, including several Autodesk applications familiar in construction.

Manufacturing is hugely important in construction. Common stereotypes of construction tend to focus on design offices or site-based activities, overlooking the key inputs of manufacturers and suppliers. In the UK, according to the Construction Products Association, the sector directly provides jobs for 313,000 people across 21,000 companies and has an annual turnover of more than £50 billion. And this importance is set to grow as the industry expands its adoption of Design for Manufacture and Assembly (DfMA) approaches in the coming years.

Sullivan rightly highlights the importance of off-site manufacture, and challenges the industry to become more like Formula 1 precision engineering. There are encouraging signs, even within one of the most conservative of UK construction sectors: housebuilding:

  • Earlier this year, Legal and General announced plans to “do for housing what Henry Ford did for the modern automotive industry” by manufacturing modular homes
  • Property Week recently reported the UK government and the mayor of London are drawing up plans to use modular construction to tackle the housing crisis
  • And when a skills crisis and a housing crisis coincide, you also need to review house-building skills (post).

Similar DfMA/off-site thinking is being applied to infrastructure projects and in relation to public and commercial buildings. Therefore, as Sullivan says, “We need to train differently“. We should be equipping people with 21st century technology skills, and breaking out of our traditional construction silos to learn from what the military, logistics and manufacturing can show us.

To change the image, first change construction

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We need to tackle some of the fundamental issues in the construction industry before we can effectively change “the image of construction”, and wider sharing of data should be part of the solution.

“The image of construction” has featured heavily this week for me (to be honest, it often does – as previous posts probably show).

On Tuesday, I was part of a CIMCIG-led roundtable discussion in London with Mark Farmer, the consultant helping the Construction Leadership Council to address issues relating to construction skills and the future needs of the industry (see gov.uk news release).

Yesterday I joined a panel discussion at the Women in Construction and Engineering Awards day, part of which focused on how current images of construction and engineering make them unattractive to potential entrants, parents, teachers and even careers advisors.

And today, I have been reading in Construction News (YouGov poll finds two-thirds of public would not consider career in construction) about a survey for Construction United showing:

  • more than half of the public view construction work as ‘strenuous’ or ‘dirty’, with just 11 per cent saying it was ‘exciting’
  • 23 per cent viewed construction work as creating ‘mess, traffic and inconvenience’
  • people do not see the industry as academically driven, with 41 per cent saying it was one the least likely sectors to require a further or higher education qualification

Such survey findings are nothing new. They simply confirm that the “image” problem persists year after year despite numerous campaigns to change popular perceptions. Industry insiders maintain that we need to “present how fantastic it is to work in construction and change some of those perceptions… all of us who work in construction love it; we just haven’t been very good collectively at expressing that message” (to quote Suzannah Nicol of Build UK).

To change the image, first change construction

At this week’s CIMCIG meeting, I repeated my view that the “image of construction” is a symptom of a more deep-rooted reputation issue. Bluntly, the industry’s reputation is not just the result of what it says and what others say about it, but – importantly – about what it does and how it behaves.

The reality, evidenced in report after report (read my Ethos blog post: Building a better built environment industry), is that the UK construction industry has for decades been recognised as:

  • overly-complex, fragmented and price-fixated in its procurement approaches
  • adversarial in its supply chain relations
  • poor in its payment practices
  • wasteful in its project execution
  • conservative in its adoption of new technologies, and
  • short-termist and reactive in its approach to human skills development and R&D.

Add to this the ‘macho’ culture on many sites and the painfully slow progress in addressing diversity issues (see: Let’s share more data on skills and diversity), is it any wonder that the industry currently known as construction has an image problem?

At a Constructing Excellence conference in 2014, I said the industry needed to stop thinking of itself as a monolithic entity and start to identify changes it could make across its many disciplines, and then get them communicating, running long-term, integrated, pan-sector campaigns, and working collaboratively with partners, trade bodies and (most importantly, perhaps) its customers and end-users. Currently though, we seem to be more focused on trying to fix the image, rather than fixing the reasons behind that image.

It’s not just about campaigns

CITB’s Jane Gleave was at the CIMCIG meeting and talked about the GoConstruct campaign (read my pwcom post); last month I noted the launch at Ecobuild of Build UK’s new video; and this week’s story in Construction News (which launched its own #LoveConstruction campaign in July 2013) is based on a poll undertaken for yet another campaign, Construction United, launched in February 2016 and building towards a week of events in October.

And while we’re talking about “image”, to me it is unfortunate that the campaign’s home page perpetuates a view of construction as site-based. Efforts are being made by the Chartered Institute of Building, among others, to get government agencies to accept wider definitions of construction that take account of the inputs of product manufacturers and of professions such as architects, engineers and quantity surveyors, according to a Construction Index report today. We also tend to underplay the key roles played in many construction businesses by accountants, lawyers, marketing, PR, HR and IT people, plus a myriad of administrators.

Nonetheless, Construction United does recognise that there is already an industrial strategy looking to address some of the underlying problems:

constructionunited“Construction 2025 identified a number of areas that needed addressing, so Construction United aims to bring everyone with a vested interest in construction together to raise awareness of the key issues facing the sector, including image, skills gaps and the wellbeing of employees at all levels.”

It’s not just about raising awareness of the key issues, but actually doing something about them. Construction 2025 and the Government Construction Strategy 2016-2020 (see previous post: Tackling skills gaps – can we learn from BIM?) prescribe a suite of changes aimed at making construction and the built environment more cost effective and sustainable. The BIM programme has shown that the industry can collaborate to tackle the underlying fragmented structures, silo-based attitudes, anti-collaborative behaviours and out-dated technologies – and BIM shows we can be sophisticated users of technology and data, not just stereotyped wielders of bricks, concrete and steel.

If government can inspire such changes in project delivery, surely it can work with industry so that construction skills provision also benefits from even more collaboration and more sharing of data? Incidentally, the UK was confirmed yesterday as the world’s leader in Open Data (see the 3rd Open Data Barometer report).

WhereTheWorkIsWhere the Work Is

Through the SkillsPlanner project, we see some signs this is beginning to happen. Yesterday, for example, SkillsPlanner programme director Rebecca Lovelace attended an Institute for Public Policy Research launch of a jobs and skills tool called Where The Work Is. This jobs data platform draws on historic data on over 1.5 million jobs posted online by employers across all sectors in the UK from 2012 to 2014 and normalised against government data on vacancies, and we have incorporated some of the same datasets into our developing SkillsPlanner data catalogue. Clearly, we would welcome more contributions of data to help improve our understanding of the construction skills supply and demand challenges.

Incidentally, Where The Work Is also provided supporting data for a report, “Jobs and Skills in London: Building a More Responsive Skills System in the Capital” (download PDF), which recommended that the Greater London Authority might be given a more active role in funding adult education providers, and be given the capability to shift to a results-based funding model for adult skills in the future. This fits neatly with some of the aspirations we have for SkillsPlanner – if we can demonstrate its success in construction, we feel its data-driven approach can be applied to many other sectors of the economy too.

Government recognises skills planning needs

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GCS 2016-20

It was with some trepidation that we looked at the latest UK Government Construction Strategy 2016-20, released last week (available here). The previous strategy, Construction 2025 (published in July 2013) and the wider-ranging Digital Built Britain strategy (February 2015 – read our July 2015 blog post: Building a better built environment industry) were both produced under the coalition government, but the current administration has reduced some elements of government engagement with the construction sector – the Construction Leadership Council was pared back, and the post of Government Chief Construction Advisor was discontinued. Would the Government, collectively construction’s biggest single client, be reining back its industry ambitions?

Data and skills

The initial signs, however, are encouraging. The direction of travel remains broadly the same, with heightened commitment to “digital and data capability,” and to improving the sector’s skills and resilience. In the ministerial forward, Lord Bridges says:

“we need to improve skills, both within government and the construction sector overall. Our strategy aims to improve government’s capacity and capability as a client, while helping the sector recruit and retain skilled employees.”

The body of the strategy mentions apprenticeships (“delivering 20,000 apprenticeships through central government procurement over this Parliament”), it talks about the need for skills in building information modelling (BIM; read our previous post: Tackling skills gaps: can we learn from BIM?) – still a major component of the digital vision – and then underlines the major skills challenges:

“Employers are facing difficulties in attracting skilled employees and 13% of employers reported not having enough skilled employees for some of 2014. This skills gap, if not addressed, will lead to inflation and reduced productivity in the way the industry operates. … Young people are currently underrepresented in the construction industry compared to the economy as a whole, only around 10% are aged between 19 and 24.”

Skills planning tools

Interestingly, to support its skills drive, the strategy says the Construction Leadership Council is developing a guide on what good skills investment looks like, to aid both government procurers and the industry when bidding for future government contracts. And since publishing its National Infrastructure Plan for Skills (September 2015), Infrastructure UK, now part of the Infrastructure and Projects Authority, is developing a tool to help clients utilise pipeline data to model current and future skills requirements. There is also talk of “sharing market intelligence.”

We hope these ambitions are carried through, and that there is a lot of joined-up thinking. As we have previously argued (Data for efficiency and growth), there is considerable scope to take the government’s enlightened approach to open data, and to pair this with ongoing initiatives – such as SkillsPlanner (part government-funded through Innovate UK) – that are focused on improving the match of skills to jobs and enabling training provision to be responsive to industry needs.

Tackling skills gaps – can we learn from BIM?

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CITB 2016-2020 forecast

One of the UK construction industry’s biggest trade shows, Ecobuild, was held at ExCEL in east London this week. Despite its name, the three-day event is no longer just focused on sustainability, but features a host of seminars and conference sessions to update and inform attendees about various current industry issues. Not surprisingly, the skills shortage was identified as a hot topic, with speakers in the main conference arena discussing the Next Generation yesterday.

Broadcaster Daisy McAndrew introduced Pauline Traetto, academy director of the BRE Academy, who briefly talked about the findings of its latest skills gap survey. She was followed by David Hancock, head of construction at the Cabinet Office, then Suzannah Nichol, chief executive of construction contractors trade body Build UK, with Steven Radley, policy and strategic planning director of the CITB (also a partner on BRE’s research), bringing up the rear. In a short session, the four could do little more than skate over some of the challenges facing the industry, with the new BRE survey providing some useful context.

The skills crisis (again)

BRE Academy graphicAs if we needed reminding, the BRE Academy survey findings (based on 300+ industry respondents, surveyed November 2015 – to January 2016; survey summary here; news release) confirmed:

  • the poor public image of construction – 91% of respondents said people outside the industry have a different perspective on the industry to those within it.
  • the continued gender diversity gap (see Let’s share more data on skills and diversity),
  • the lack of clear and appealing career pathways (74% of respondents said these should be ‘actively promoted’ – good excuse later for a disco-pounding Build UK video!), and
  • skills shortages – in sustainability, environmental and trade skills, plus building information modelling (BIM) and smart technology skills, and – interestingly – communication skills.

BRE Academy Director Pauline Traetto said:

“Construction currently contributes £92 billion a year to the UK economy with a workforce of 3 million people. In order to support future growth in the UK as well as rapid expansion in developing countries a talented, engaged workforce is critical. Only by grappling with the skills shortage highlighted in this report in areas like sustainability and digital design will the industry be able to deliver a low carbon, high performance future.”

Not really a crisis – more a deep structural challenge

Coincidentally, another academy has also just reported findings from its annual trend survey and mentioned communications. Albeit from another small sample, the PR Academy identified crisis communication and public affairs as the top skills gaps among communicators. This set me thinking….

The construction industry skills ‘crisis’ has been a long-standing issue, so is perhaps not what most communication professionals would define as a crisis (usually something which flares up unexpectedly and creates an immediate reputation issue). But the mentions of communication skills and of public affairs were perhaps more appropriate, for the symptoms of the problem were plain to see at Ecobuild.

The UK Government is keenly aware of the need to address the skills shortage and wants industry to help it resolve the issue, but a key challenge is industry fragmentation. Even just focused on the conference platform, we had two bodies – Build UK and CITB – organising seemingly separate campaigns (Build UK showed its Get Into Construction video, while the CITB talked about its three-year Go Construct campaign) to promote the industry. And there are literally hundreds of other construction professional and trade associations – many of which are separately engaged in similar, but often disconnected, campaigns.

But it is not impossible to orchestrate the industry to achieve some major changes. It just takes concerted action (and funding) from the government and from industry to do so. BIM is a particularly topical example.

Follow the BIM example

Skills needs - BIM and communicationIn 2009, the appointment of the first chief construction advisor started what has become a powerful modernising movement aimed at making construction and the built environment more cost effective and sustainable (“Cash is King, but Carbon is Queen” was the Paul Morrell mantra). BIM is just a minor part of a suite of changes pushed in successive government construction strategies. But because deployment of BIM was made mandatory for businesses wanting to work on centrally procured public sector projects from April 2016, we have seen an unprecedented effort to change industry practices, cultures and behaviours, as well as technologies, to accommodate this new (still evolving) and more collaborative way of working.

Breaking down silos is a constant refrain within project teams; progressive clients and their supply chains are also developing longer-term approaches to procurement (frameworks, alliancing, etc); government is demanding “open, shareable asset information”; and we are moving from analogue, largely paper-based processes to digital working.

Such changes will help transform “the image of the industry” but they will do it more quickly if they are sustained by the same government-impelled, pan-industry effort achieved to push collaborative BIM and related commercial, legal and cultural changes. In short, the BIM campaign has progressed because it has wasn’t just about “image”, but about addressing the underlying fragmented structures, attitudes, behaviours and technologies. We need to do the same for construction careers.

Collaboration and data are key

SkillsPlannerLogoLargeSkillsPlanner has grand ambitions but is on a (currently) much smaller scale. We have already managed to create a growing consortium of clients, contractors, local authorities and other industry organisations, plus some technology and data specialists, and got them collaborating, collating and sharing skills-related data. By maintaining our pan-industry approach and by basing our platform on future-proof Open Linked Data, we think we can make great strides in helping the industry tackle its skills shortages. But we need more industry organisations, and more joined-up data, to support our effort….

Building a better built environment industry

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Shard and crane

With collaborative platforms, mobile, BIM, ‘Big data’, the ‘internet of things’, we are tinkering with enablers of change. “Digital Built Britain” envisages entirely new business models for the industry currently known as construction.

21 years (and more) of industry reports

While some industry sectors have changed profoundly in recent decades, some have remained resistant to change. The UK construction industry, for example, has for decades been recognised as overly-complex, fragmented and price-fixated in its procurement approaches, adversarial in its supply chain relations, wasteful in its project execution, conservative in its adoption of new technologies, and short-termist and reactive in its approach to human skills development and R&D.

Such issues have been debated many times in a sequence of industry reports stretching back to World War 2: Simon, Emmerson, Banwell, Latham, Egan …. The ripples of the 1994 Report by Sir Michael Latham continue to be felt, not least because it stimulated some changes to procurement (we started to talk about strategic partnering and frameworks), and the change potential of IT was eventually picked up by Sir John Egan in his 2002 report Accelerating Change, and later championed by the first chief construction advisor, Paul Morrell from late 2009 onwards.

By this stage, the global financial crisis was scything through weak companies, projects were being moth-balled or cancelled altogether, thousands of workers lost their jobs, and the industry was desperate to find positive routes forward. Morrell responded to the challenge. Low Carbon Construction (2010) set the foundations, then the 2011 Government Construction Strategy instigated a more wide-ranging set of measures.

To many, this has all been about building information modelling (BIM), but it also created the conditions to test new models of construction procurement. Much of the endeavour, however, has remained siloed. To deliver the latest industry strategy (Construction 2025, published in 2013), we need to break down these silos, build on the progress made during the recession (lessons learned are being forgotten and businesses are ‘reverting to type’), and ensure they extend beyond just the progressive fringe.

‘Disruptive’ trends

The web, broadband and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) have all helped change perceptions about technology and information management (a once paper-centric industry is moving more online). Information mobility has been a factor since the advent of smartphones (c. 2007) and tablets (c. 2010). BIM has, of course, been an increasingly dominant theme over the past five years and is set to continue as the government’s 2016 mandate comes into effect; social media has – maybe somewhat grudgingly – begun to challenge existing models of communication; and we have also become more aware of the power of data – ‘Big data‘, interoperability, linked open data, and outputs from the ‘Internet of Things‘ (in short, some of us are no longer document-centric but data-centric).

However, these technological changes are not, on their own, going to overhaul the construction industry. They are, at best, enablers. We also have to tackle the existing siloed structures, attitudes, cultures and resulting behaviours within the industry. These are holding back business; they helped create the industry’s poor reputation, and this reputation makes construction less attractive to potential home-grown employees at a time when there are deep skills shortages and the existing workforce is ageing.

The future direction and shape of the industry currently known as construction is more likely to be influenced by political, economic, social, legal and environmental factors. Globalisation, carbon, population growth and resource shortages will have an increasingly important and direct bearing on what industry clients identify as desirable business outcomes, making them more alert to whole-life performance and to wider business, social, economic and sustainability outcomes.

New business models

New Business Models

Digital Built Britain, published in February 2015, is therefore a key document. It synthesises four industry strategies: Construction 2025, Information Economy, Smart Cities, Business & Professional Services; it tells a wider audience than construction that it needs to build and exploit a “new digital economy”. It talks about the need for:

  • New ways of doing things
  • New business models
  • New business relationships
  • New institutions
  • New performance metrics

This fits with the Ethos VO view and with Constructing Excellence’s vision which says delivering ‘best practice’ is not enough. The successful businesses of tomorrow will break through the current industry ceiling, making radical changes and building collaborative business relationships so they can deliver exceptional performance:

New Business Models

BIM, mobile and data are part of this picture but only as enablers. Over time, they will become normal – as much part of the way of doing things as CAD, spreadsheets and email. Supply chain organisations in the industry currently known as construction will be rationalised and more integrated, transformed into providers of leaner, safer, lower-carbon and data-supported “asset services” (delivering ‘illumination’, not light fittings, for example – “Buildings-as-a-Service”, BaaS perhaps), rewarded across the life-cycle for the value delivered by the built assets they create, and having the reputations and market valuations more commonly found among sophisticated manufacturers.

And workers will be rewarded for their value-adding contributions; many will be recruited and trained to apply their skills in off-site manufacturing facilities; there will be a more strategic and long-term view of employment supply and demand (managed through platforms such as Ethos’s SkillsPlanner project), and new professions will emerge as we start to exploit the rich data opportunities of Future Cities.

This is not achieved by focusing on technology – it is achieved by radically overhauling existing structures, processes and cultures, driving out waste, creating collaborative business relationships (both corporate and interpersonal) that nurture innovation, and having supply chains focus on what delivers best whole life value.