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Category: Projects £10-15m Name: Jim Rooney Company: HBG Construction Project: Liverpool South Parkway Contract: ICE 6th edition |
Building this eco-friendly, futuristic transport interchange was fiendishly complicated on many different levels, but Jim Rooney delivered on every front.
The interchange provided access to the West Coast mainline railway, the local rail network, John Lennon Airport and the road network from a single transport hub. As such it embraced civil and rail engineering as well as construction as key disciplines, and Jim had to keep a wide range of stakeholders and funding bodies happy. His involvement in weekly user/client meetings proved essential to the smooth running of the contract.
Jim's dedication to teamwork and stakeholder satisfaction was accompanied by a proactive approach that brought considerable value to the scheme. He organised an early team-building exercise to encourage supplier input into the phasing and interfacing of the works packages, generating a great deal of buildability advice for the design team.
As a result, Jim was able to help achieve a cost-effective solution for the astonishing roof – a complex curved and parabolic structure that was widely thought to be unbuildable. He instigated early contact between roofing and steelwork specialists to develop the design, which required several thousand adjustable support brackets to give it the required flexibility.
His focus on teamwork likewise paid off with the interface design for the external envelope. Almost as complicated as the roof, it clad a structural steel frame with curved and tilted glazing, rainscreen and brickwork panels. Jim devoted time, patience and ingenuity to develop robust designs for the numerous complex details which had the potential to cause major cost overruns and programme delays.
Jim delivered this quality product on time despite severe delays to the construction start caused by additional soil remediation works. And as the contract progressed he resequenced critical activities to meet the rail timetable requirements for the opening date. His good relations with the supply chain proved a crucial factor in bringing in enough extra resource to meet the deadline, and the budget, on a stunning scheme.
