Name: Phil Hodgson
Employer: BW Interiors
Project: Geneva House & Zurich House, Aerospace Centre, Farnborough
Contract: JCT 1998
Phil Hodgson gives his all to his work. His prime goal is to deliver outstanding quality that exceeds the expectations of the client and the professional teams. And he is clearly successful in doing just that. He had successfully completed a previous, smaller project for the client, and his appointment as the site-based manager was its condition for awarding this contract to BW.
But success in a construction project is always a hard-won prize, and this one started off as a financial minefield. The validation of the existing building resulted in unexpected additional costs of nearly £1m with the discovery of severely corroded pipework. The entire system had to be stripped out and replaced with an all-new mechanical air-handling and electrical installation.
Phil expertly guided the project through its M&E horror story. He drove the battery of value-engineering exercises required to make the whole project work financially, working extremely closely with the design team to find savings without compromising the design or dashing the client’s expectations.
He then worked hard to ensure the new plant was installed without blowing the existing programme dates. He initiated special measures to complete the extensive M&E work while accommodating high-level architectural features. It was all held together by his implementation of a series of co-ordination meetings that took the design team down a path of intensive collaboration.
The astonishing result of his endeavours was that he not only stripped £100k out of the budget, but completed three weeks in advance of the original completion date.
And far from skimping on the quality, Phil actually delivered his refit of the two buildings snag-free. He did it by holding weekly quality control meetings with the designers and subcontractors at which he insisted on subjecting all the issues to proper scrutiny. To manage expectations, he built a fully finished mock-up area and held regular sample approval meetings.
Overcoming the huge financial challenge to this scheme makes its delivery on budget, on programme and to quality a fine achievement. No surprise, then, that he was immediately promoted to contracts manager on its completion.
Value: £7.4m