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Category: Projects £25-50m Name: Steve Gaffing Company: Sir Robert McAlpine Project: Scottish Agricultural Science Agency Headquarters, Edinburgh Contract: GC Works 1 1998 with quantities |
Mutual co-operation and good faith are fine aspirations for a construction team. That it happened on this project was largely due to the efficient and professional leadership of Steve Gaffing.
This complex building incorporated a range of specialist structures requiring more than 60 different works packages. Steve went to exceptional lengths to co-ordinate and manage the unwieldy supply chain, and steered all parties down the line of what was right for the project rather than their own interests.
Steve worked hard to ensure that the numerous packages with design responsibility correctly assessed the client's requirements. Initial tender prices were often hugely divergent, and he led intensive meetings to comb though bids line by line to ensure only fully compliant like-for-like bids were compared.
One of his most challenging tasks was to ensure that the building's users actually got the facilities they wanted. Individual scientists and department heads sometimes had conflicting views on what was required. Steve's negotiating expertise and diplomacy were essential in aligning the final product with what users really needed.
Although the client nurtured a team approach, the contract left Steve with some major risks. The biggest was the exclusion of adverse weather as a valid reason for a time extension but the site strip and excavation took place in one of the wettest summers on record. The programme constraints were also onerous, with damages set at nearly £2,000 a day.
With a proportion of any value-engineering savings retained by the company proposing the change, Steve encouraged the team to identify savings. Successful proposals ranged from rerouting service tracks to changing the entire heating strategy.
That the project was completed on time, one week before the Christmas break, to budget and to quality is a tribute to Steve's hard work and mastery of programme. It was a performance that won him the contract to carry out additional ancillary works at the site and to assist in moving the client's staff into the new HQ.
