Name: Ian Ronchetti
Employer: Bovis Lend Lease
Project: Bankside 1/2/3, London SE1 0HX
Contract: JCT 98
Teamwork, planning and innovation were Ian Ronchetti’s three key allies during this complex project with high quality expectations and a fast-paced timetable.
Informal and respectful of the work of others, Ian generated a strong project spirit. He built an integrated team through away days at the start, and maintained it with beer festivals, family days, school visits and charity fundraising. It resulted in very low staff turnover, and most of the team on the initial workshops were still involved at completion more than three years later.
Ian shrewdly decided to construct the first building, Bankside 1, in fast-track concrete rather than steel, giving a more robust structure and saving £500,000. He also built Bankside 1’s concrete cores on top of a ground-floor steel grillage while simultaneously constructing the basement using plunged steel columns. The strategy cut 12 weeks off the programme.
He took the facade off the critical path by fully panellising the cladding and eliminating tower cranes. The 3m-wide storey-height panels were installed using a robotic manipulator from the internal floor slabs. He also trialled two metal formwork decking systems on Bankside 2 and 3 that allowed all the falsework to be erected from the slab below, solving the leading-edge safety problem.
He continually improved design and construction by ensuring that lessons from Bankside 1, which was built in advance of Bankside 2 and 3, were learnt and applied. He held 50 workshops to flush out knowledge and streamline project delivery.
Mock-ups were central to his quality drive, setting benchmarks of known and achievable standards, and promoting buildability. A four-storey mock-up of the external cladding was repeatedly built and dismounted to perfect the installation technique.
Ian even instigated a snag league, with a weekly table of snags cleared on a trade-by-trade basis. No-one likes to be bottom of the league. At practical completion there were no defects, and less than one snag per room on a project that had built over 3,000 rooms.
Ian’s leadership of this vast project was so successful that the client considers it a paragon of construction management quality. From the organisation that runs the UK’s largest commercial development programme, that’s praise indeed.