Finalist |
||
 |
 |
Category: Restoration |
When Tony Shenton arrived at this project, the tender team had become bogged down by 12 months of protracted negotiations. He immediately called a meeting of the entire project team to determine individual goals and accountabilities. The exercise brought focus and ownership to the whole project, and helped haul the team back on track and form a cohesive group to lead into the construction phase.
Tony and his team then reviewed every single working drawing for risk, buildability, time and financial implications. Combined with the high level of risk investigation undertaken during preconstruction, this brought down the client's contingency budget to well under £1m.
But however much you plan, something can always go wrong – and it did. The discovery of two wells and inconsistencies within the existing foundations delayed the temporary works by six weeks. Tony developed sequences to recover the situation, which gave him the leverage to persuade the demolitions and alteration subcontractor to change its methodology. It allowed Tony to recover those six lost weeks by month four of the contract and the early win bolstered the team's can-do belief.
Tony excels in the soft skills. His strong eye for the commercial and risk side of the project was instrumental in generating a feeling of true partnership with the non-construction team members.
So when the client made clear its keenness to cram as much community space as possible into the building to improve its year-on-year revenue, Tony proposed resiting the plant from the basement and into an adjacent underground car park. The creation of an additional revenue stream for the client easily offset the extra capital cost.
Tony used his strong leadership to drive safety and production. He instilled a team culture, ensuring that small disputes did not give rise to different parties striking contractual positions. And he used his own team as an assessment tool before deploying some powerful persuasion, problem solving and pragmatism to broker agreement with a client ultimately delighted with a quality building.
