Ice Breaking Question Give a Brief Run Through of Your Personal Background and the Nature
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Ice breaking question give a brief run through of your personal background and the nature of the business of Dewjo’c?
I am an architect qualified for 20 years. Interest is in area of design management. Before Dewjo’c I was director of projects for the Conrad group. A multi disciplinary design company, large PLC with lots of different interests. I looked after the downstream part of the project. At the moment I am the director of D and look after the Newcastle office – one of three. The other two are in London and the head office is on Teeside, which is where the company originates from. We employ about 80 people, the company is about 103 years old with a turnover about 3 ½ billion pounds. We don’t do anything other than consultancy, we have no product that we sell apart from our imagination and advice. I look after the post graduate programme for professional education for architects (contract administration, management, job costing and a little bit of work in knowledge management) for NewcastleUniversity.
How did your interest in teaching and academia come about?
When came back to Newcastle I was invited to Northumbria to do some visiting lectures and I enjoyed it and then became external examiner and got more interested in teaching and research.
The main sector is in the design of clean rooms in the pharmaceutical industry and some extent the electrical sector. This work is not just in the UK but also internationally. The work is often process engineering led rather than architecture which is quite unusual.
What is the difference between the two?
The process is the driving force of the work and it is the movement of people and materials that is important and we analyse this. The technology of clean rooms in construction terms is quite high tech. The quality control in this is stringent and at the end of the design there is a process called validation - the cleanliness is validated. Passing the validation process is crucial and built into the design from day one. Air movement and purity and maintenance issues are also important aspects of the work.
Do you have to have knowledge well outside architecture?
Knowledge is never that tightly bounded and you do have more than your field. The knowledge is more experiential than formal training. There was an Msc in clean room design but this is more at the engineering end than the architecture end.
There is a subsidiary of this company called clean design. At one time the clean room design accounted for about 70% of our business but we diversified as it wasn’t felt to be healthy to have so much in one area only. We diversified by a sidestep into laboratory design and a lot of this is in higher education for universities. In one of these we were asked to design a sustainable laboratory building.
It is interesting that you talk about architects and engineers working closely together. This is something that doesn’t always happen as much as it should.
The decision to work with these groups was more opportunistic than a conscious one. 20 or 30 years ago we had a partner who was approached by a pharmaceutical company who wanted to build a large plant and they took us on to do that and we developed it from there. We learnt from the client on this occasion but on later occasions we were able to pass on our knowledge of what worked and what didn’t to other clients. The knowledge base of clean rooms built up from there. The building up of this type of knowledge is a combination of observing, learning from the client and then an interaction between past experience and the present client. The process is iterative between the client and the architect. (the process and the building as well as criteria for regulations and materials and finishes in rooms etc.) Developed a set of questions to ask the client - data collection sheets. We act as a conduit for the knowledge flow between clients although we sign confidentiality agreements for specifics on jobs there is a lot of generalisable knowledge that can be passed on from one client to the other.
We moved into work in health care design and social housing and the transport sector.
Work is organised project by project and not split between the three offices.
Front end studies in other countries will often lead to a decision not to build in that place as all the factors are not right. This is a form of feasibility study. They are paid on an hourly basis as the length of time they take is not very predictable.
The language you use is more engineering than architectural – upstream, downstream
Was there a specific point in time when the company decided to capture the experiences in some form – e.g. the set of questions you mentioned before?
Not specifically. A significant point was the partners at that time made a very careful decision to exploit that market and they set up a group within the company to do that. A partner at the time set up a plan for the succession of the knowledge. Had young architects who were brought on in this type of working to pass on the knowledge.
You mentioned that this practice tends to be working more in terms of the business process values as opposed to purely architectural methods, do you think that is because of exploiting ?? that you decided to adopt such a pathway?
It’s more a matter of the culture. In architecture you tend to have people who are very good designers and people who are very good at realising projects and a small number of people who are good at running the business and those people tend to rise to the top even though they are not necessarily the most talented architects. So what happened was that the career path was more given over to people with the business like approach. We are quite a big practice in architectural terms. So we needed a certain amount of business skill. Marketing etc
Was this consciously planned for?
It was more reactive, we realised if we were going to keep the business going then we had to do something about it. Also it was ad hoc, no mid career training. Almost a peer or mentoring process and learning from peoples previous mistakes. We have since formalised a lot of this, we are running a course on presentation skills in house for people so we are trying to pass on within the organisation what we have learnt about.
How is that done?
Two people went on two separate courses and we decided to capture what they’d learnt and transfer it to a wider group within the organisation. In this way it could be tailored to our needs. As a lot of our business is repeat we felt it would be good to have customer care skills. It can often take 2 years to complete a project and we need to be aware of customer relations. This is something we have learned to now do proactively.
With the repeat business, how is the knowledge from this shared between people in the company?
Repeat business is now carried out on a framework i.e. you sign up to a client for 5 years and after that you are invited to bid to work with them again. Three architects work on each framework and they hand out the work on the basis of skills. We do not pursue risky business and this is often new clients.
What are the risks involved with new clients?
The risk is that clients expect you to do a certain amount of work to establish the feasibility before they start paying the fee and in some cases the work is not carried out. It is a question of losing profit.
I want to focus on the 80 people you employ in this office, what is the general make up of these people?
The oldest employee is nearly at retirement age and all those in the office are graduates, not necessarily an architect, some are in architectural technology
What sort of proportion are you talking about?
The structure of the company is that we have directors and associate directors, senior architects, architects, and graduate trainees. It’s a 5 level structure. We probably have more people at the senior end of the scale. Part of the reason for that is the introduction of the CAD system. The juniors and draftsmen are no longer needed. Alost h kind of work we do e.g. it requires a certain amount of experience and technical knowledge we tend to employ people at the top end of the scale.
The CAD system probably came into force about 15 years ago.
How long on average have the senior architects worked for this practice?
We have a stable workforce and I would say that most people stay around 10 – 15 years or more.
So does that make you quite dependent on them and their experience?
Yes, we probably are.
But the3 positive side is that they have been here longer one would assume that they ??? is that the case?
Yes and then particularly this office which is the smaller one they work in tow large open plan studios and that is quite deliberate. When we moved in as this is a listed building we had a lot of difficulty in getting permission to knock down walls to make the big space. We need this as we feel a lot of knowledge transfer can be done by eavesdropping, people hear others talking about the projects and we shuffle people around so that they sit in different places depending on what project they are working on. In this way they can all hear what is going on in the project and learn about it and keep up with the developments in it. The informal interchange of information is what is enabled in this way.
How big are the project teams on average?
Not very big, very rarely will there be more than 5 or 6 people working on a project. Typically there will be 3 or 4.
In terms of the graduate trainees they finish part 1 and 2
We have two types of graduate trainees, some have finished part one and are doing the period between their first degree and the second, they stay with us for a year and go back to university. Then we have what we call part 3 graduates they are doing the final exams and they spend 18 months working with us and then they do that. There is no formal training that we put people through, they get that from university.
How many graduate trainees do you take on?
We always have two in this office and two in the Teeside office, it is hard to get graduates in London, at the moment we don’t have any there. The two graduate trainees we have at the moment have just qualified so we are going to recruit again in June. We also have people that we send part time to university to do architectural technology degree, we have 3 of them and all passed in 2004- 2005. SO actually we don’t have anyone on that route.
Is it difficult to get new people to come in?
Yes and no. We have the people we need. It is more difficult now than it has been. There is a bit of a skills shortage in the North East at the minute, but its not serious.
You have a high turnover of graduates, do you do anything to capture the projects they have been working on before they leave?
The graduates that we take on to do part 3 tend to stay at the end, we don’t take them on just for the training, we take them on really and we assume that along the way they will pass the final exam and stay but its not a fixed term contract that means that when you pass the exam you have to go and look for another job. It’s those in the year out that will leave and we do have to download the knowledge at the end. This is often quite minimal as they will have been working very closely with someone at a higher level and therefore there is very little ‘original’ knowledge that they take away. Occasionally we may have to get in touch with them once they have left to find where they have put something. But we don’t have a formal end of year download session.
What about your permanent staff, do you have a library of your past projects that all 3 offices have access to?
Yes and no. We do keep everything backed up and we have libraries to use that are kept by project. You could use them to track down roof information. We have referencing systems that are standardised and by using these you can track through the projects for specific pieces of information.
Do people make use of that?
Yes and no. What they tend to do is they tend to go back to the job they have worked on where they know to find a specific piece of information. This has always been carried by people.
It reminds me of academics actually, academics would personally carry the information
In doing a project people come together to form a temporary coalition and then they fragment and then they carry the knowledge to the next project and sort of infect each other, they can carry bad things as well as good.
How do you know what is good knowledge?
We rely on professional judgement. There is no formality in terms of this is what I’m going to do, I did it on a previous job, was it a good idea, can we validate that opinion. The checking process would be the signing off of the drawings. The acid test is the building itself, and the client comes back. Implicitly the knowledge is carried forward and used again rather than explicitly. You also have to remember that knowledge is exchanged within the global system, when new products come on stream.
You talked about it being intuitive then?
At one level its intuitive and at another it is quite institutionalised in the sense that we use the NBS specification which I think most architects would use and they are a standard library of workmanship and materials and British standards codes of practice and its quite sophisticated and its all online. We pay to have that constantly updated. We also have a hard copy technical library and we pay for a librarian to come in to refresh it. There is a formality to this side of knowledge.
Architectural press as well?
Yes and we are committed to keeping fresh and up to the moment so we have regular updates on new building regulations etc and that is often provided by outside bodies. You can either pay for this or accept those who come in with the sales pitch, in which case you get it free, so we tend to accept the ones with the sales pitch. There is some formality to it in that sense but there is no project knowledge file.
What about post project reviews?
We send a questionnaire to the client and we get feedback from them. They tend to be very qualitative things to do with the process rather than with the building although some of them deals with building satisfaction.
You say that a lot of your clients are repeat clients, if that client repeats is that information passed on to the new team?
Yes it’s a good question. The problem is though that the client is a big organisation and sometimes the project team is quite a different team so it is almost like working for a new organisation. It’s the same terms of business, the same people that sign the cheques but it’s a different group of people that you are working with. Sometimes the knowledge transfer doesn’t happen on their side it happens thorough us, we absorb and then take it to the next project team and sometimes we can point out things in their procedures that they didn’t realise weren’t their procedures. The idea of sitting down at the end of a project and saying this is what we should take from that is something that we’ve looked at but have not got round to doing. How much benefit will it give in relation to the time and effort that we need to spend on doing it and the problem is its so hard to put a monetary value to them. When the client is paying for your time to learn something in one sense it doesn’t matter how long it takes as they pay you. When it comes to doing something for a fixed fee the more efficiently you can do it the more cost effective it is.
How can you measure your success and productivity and what does that mean to you?
Productivity , we recently introduced something called TIME minder, an online job recording system. You can very quickly at a push of a button download your cost to date, time on job etc. Alongside that we a programme called suretrack which is a project management tool. We have a director who is responsible for resources who is constantly trying to make sure we have the right people working on the jobs, when new jobs come in. Some of this is a demotivating process as the model will change over time due to many things e.g. planning permission being delayed. In terms of productivity we have to do an evaluation of our work in progress for accounting processes, that’s work that we have done but we haven’t yet invoiced for and each month our management accounts records have to collect that information and that can be quite complicated and what you are basically doing is saying that the job is 20% complete. If you have then used 30% of the fee then you are in trouble but if you use 10% of the fee then you are doing really well. So you measure the valuation of your working progress against your notional, but quite objective valuation of the job. We programme the job on the basis of segments of the whole fee and this is worked on industry standards. If there is any error it is more that the fee agreed in the first place was too low rather than the productivity being low.