Name: Steve Leese MCIOB
Employer: Inspace Partnerships
Project: Regeneration Housing Scheme, Church End Estate
Contract: PPC 2000
What marks Steve Leese out as an outstanding construction manager is his ability to see things from a user’s perspective and to take personal responsibility for the entire project.
The good relations he developed with the residents on this five-phase regeneration scheme offered them vital reassurance and created an atmosphere of trust and respect. And when things went wrong, as they did one evening when the gas supply to residents on the estate was accidentally cut, Steve put their needs first. He ensured that electric heaters were distributed and visited residents’ homes himself until the problem had been fully resolved.
Respecting the tenants’ desire for a traditional build, Steve had limited opportunities for value engineering. However, initiatives such as replacing copper plumbing with plastic and the benefits of early handover allowed him to return over £100k to the client in shared savings at the end of the project.
He recovered from the major initial headache of unmapped water mains in the area, which delayed the first handovers by a month. Even though it took nine months in total to resolve the connection of new pipes from the existing mains, Steve rescheduled every milestone until the schedule had been recovered, and with such success that he ultimately delivered the project four weeks early.
The effort he put into building good relationships with the statutory authorities paid off handsomely. It helped him to incorporate successfully a late design change to replace gas central heating with electricity in one block that involved stripping out a newly constructed and fitted-out substation to install a larger transformer.
He paid rigorous attention to quality, drafting an 11-point checklist for each subcontractor milestone as well as first and second fix. He backed that up with stringent joint quality inspections at 21, 14 and seven days before tenant handover, resulting in an exceptionally low number of defects on occupancy.
Value: £14.1m