What price excellence?

Achieving excellence in the private sector can and often does bring rewards; the opportunity to charge a premium for your product, to sell more or build a market advantage. For the individuals involved it can mean a monetary reward in addition to the recognition of a job well done. But it is not so everywhere...

For some in the public sector, achieving excellence is to attract attention that is not wholly welcome (some particularly close scrutiny for example) and presents greater difficulty in the future to demonstrate the incremental improvements that are the staple sign of good performance. For the individuals involved it probably does not bring greater remuneration but, almost undoubtedly, triggers additional work as people flood in to see how it was achieved.

People working in the public sector are generally more motivated by the benefits they produce for others than the financial return for themselves. Therefore to motivate these people to produce excellence we must, as a minimum, value the impact of their work on others and reduce the cost they pay for having produced this benefit.

Read more...

A shot in the arm...

Having worked in all three sectors I can testify that they each have their own frustrations and barriers to achievement. However the public sector, perhaps due to size and complexity, can make those barriers look insurmountable. Factor in procedures and structures that channel concentration and energy towards meeting the detail rather than the spirit of the issue and you’re a good way towards a culture where independence (and personal responsibility) of thought and action can be viewed as a high risk business. Even free thinkers such as MPs have been known to blame the system rather than their part in operating, or taking advantage of, it....

So it was a real boost today to go to a talk by someone who takes the core intent of the public sector and makes the system (in his case a PPP system) work to deliver on that promise. Richard Glenn, a project manager of nearly 30 new hospital buildings and now Project Lead for Alderhey Children’s Health Park, takes a transformational view of hospital developments. What I mean by this is that he tackles these complex projects by taking a real leadership role that not only keeps the ‘future patient’ clearly in focus but also seeks to transform clinical practice, aspiration and stakeholder perceptions through the development of the brief and the design.

At a previous project, ‘the Alex’ in Brighton, he brought together two groups – a children’s board and a group of what he calls his ‘young turks’ (clinicians who will go on to be senior staff members during the life of the new hospital) – to influence the development of the project and, in doing so, to form the basis of the culture and operation of the new service. Through this enthusiastic and honest engagement (which necessarily included frank discussions where ideas could not be realised) with these key groups the project achieved what many re-provisions struggle to – to transfer the affection and loyalty of the hospital community, and with them the broader public, from their previous magnificent, dilapidated and overstretched Victorian pile to a new home elsewhere in the city.

At Alderhey he has used design based tools such as ‘Enquiry by Design’ to engage the whole local community in planning changes that will effect local parkland, play spaces and pedestrian routes. In doing so the project has developed broad community support and a momentum of its own which, to paraphrase, would require a very brave politician to stop!

Richard’s mode of leadership is not one of lock-down, top-down control but rather to establish an environment where others feel they can make a difference. This is not to say that he abandons personal responsibility but that he sees that responsibility as being the person that clears away barriers; and having now heard him speak with some candour I can imaging the sheer force of personality that is employed to do this. This then gives space for those people responsible for making the hospital work to concentrate on what really matters – the creation of a joyous and optimistic place for children and young people.

Read more...

Who trains the trainers?

Now as a person whose job it is to advise people this is a interesting issue for me to talk about, but a fair few times recently I’ve been to training events where the experts brought more barriers than solutions. The two that stand out relate to experts in the judicious management of a development project...

Ever the optimist, I’d thought that experts in procurement law and project management might have a view on how to achieve a better outcome from the processes.... but when asked about incorporating, benchmarking and assessing the potential quality of the product both shied away and exhorted an auditable concentration on various readily measureable elements that have no lasting benefit for the building owners and users. One such expert enticingly offered up a wee workshop on determining “customer quality expectations (CQE)” - those factors that determine what the project needs to achieve - and defining the “acceptability criteria” that reflect these. Great stuff if he hadn’t then refused to address the primary CQE as he could not see a numerical way of defining it!

In both my recent disappointments the expert’s focus was avoiding claims, not getting a result you’d actually want; one which is worth the effort and expense. With such messages being relayed across the country it’s no wonder that overstretched and underappreciated people often choose simply to follow the advice given in the training their leaders have bought and paid for. ..

Perhaps, instead of helping client bodies gain the confidence to value what they aspire to, we should instead be training the trainers not to undermine what good clients have set out to do...

Read more...

Only human....

Firstly let me introduce one of my colleagues – Sam. No he's not the guy in the picture, but a fellow blogger.... By reading across the blogs that I’ve provided links to at the top of my page you’ll get a good feel for the type and complexity of issues we tackle in improving the built environment in Scotland.

In Sam’s piece on measuring design there’s a critical element of measurement that’s missed – the fact that those doing the measurement, and selecting the scheme or the team, are human. Despite our best endeavours and the most rigorous and objective, even soulless, selection processes; at some point the client must choose the work of one human being over another and that choice is influenced by the confidence and comfort the client has in the team they select.

Though seemingly against current conceptions of a fair process this element of measurement which we do subconsciously, and even unwillingly, can bring benefits. The most successful projects often happen where there’s a meeting of minds – a client and a designer who share a vision and can work skilfully together towards realising it. Clients often attribute the success the project to just such relationships “they knew how to really listen to us and understood what we wanted” . The soft skills to work through a project, to develop and maintain a constructive dialogue, are much prized by clients. However they’re not often an explicit part of the measurement they undertake.

From seeing a number of bidding processes from both sides over the past years two things have become clear to me.

• Client teams should make explicit how much they value ‘soft-skills’ in the selection process and rank them in relation to the design skills that are needed to translate an understanding of the client’s requirements into a successful or even a great outcome... “they not only delivered what we asked for, but also many things we didn’t know we hoped for”.


• Designers with the skills to deliver a great environment sometimes need to work on their communication skills. To come across as difficult is often to force clients to make up their mind between someone who may deliver a great building, but looks to be a pain to work with, and another team who listens attentively and reflects back to them their hopes and desires.
  

Given such a choice it’s hard for many clients – even if they can see a clear differentiation in the design potential on offer - to bite the bullet and take the higher hassle choice in the hope of a better outcome - they’re only human...

Ironically, a tool designed for measurement, AEDET (the NHS's toolkit for measuring design quality), has been shown to have a greater value in facilitating a constructive dialogue between client and designer. One of NHSScotland’s Design Champions, Dennis O’Keeffe of NHS Fife, showed in his recent research project that the true value of AEDET is in bringing people together to talk about what they need the building to do and how the design can realise that. This work-shopping contributed more to the quality of the outcome than using AEDET solely as a measurement tool.

Read more...