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Category: Projects £7-10m Name: Chris Holloway Company: Bluestone Project: Knightwood Nursing Home, Hampshire Contract: JCT 1998 with contractor's design |
Starting out long ago as a carpenter, Chris Holloway has spent the last 20 years in construction management. The lessons he learned in planning, communications and proactive management during that time have been put to excellent use in this project to build a 20-bed nursing home along with 30 apartments and seven bungalows.
Chris handled his two project masters – a property developer client and a healthcare end-user – brilliantly given their sometimes mutually contradictory mindsets. He provided clear project leadership and a non-adversarial stance, always prepared to concede a point for the benefit of the project.
He refused to compromise on quality and never accepted second best from a subcontractor. The high standard of workmanship he fostered culminated in practical completion with almost zero defects. He was proactive and open in communicating issues, allowing their early identification and resolution, and engendering an unusually high level of team spirit.
Chris also introduced an electronic defects management system that has since been rolled out across Bluestone. The system involved equipping the quality checkers with PDAs programmed with predefined defects lists for every one of the rooms in the building. The inspection records were uploaded to the system, which emailed defects to the parties responsible for clearing them and generated a defects log, saving hours of list writing and copying.
Chris took to heart the client's desire for cost efficiency and value. His preconstruction involvement contributed enormously to buildability and value engineering. For example, he raised the main building by 250mm to allow greater reuse of the spoil from the foundation excavation, and he re-engineered the concrete frame structure to incorporate wide slabs and some steel frame.
Foreseeing the implications of plastering the masonry walls during winter, with slow drying-out times dragging on the programme, Chris decided to deploy dehumidifiers to speed the process up. It proved so successful that he completed construction three weeks early. That Chris also finished this project under budget likewise owes everything to his ability to keep his eye on the overall scheme without losing control of the day-to-day activities.
