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E17: How do European and UK projects compare?
67 Plays2 years ago
In this episode, Jason & Carlos discuss the differences between Europe's biggest infrastructure project and the UK's largest.
Does a calm project environment deliver better results than a high-energy one?
Would communal meals work as well in the UK to bring everyone together?
They also discuss the top 50 construction technology start-ups, and how these could impact real-life projects.
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Transcript
Introduction to Episode 17
00:00:00
Speaker
Hello and welcome to episode 17 of the ops site podcast where we share all things construction and technology. My name's Carlos Cavallo and I'm Jason Lancini. G'day Carlos. How are you doing today? Pretty good until I just said the word chat in a really weird way.
00:00:15
Speaker
That's it. That's the take. We're sticking with it.
Unexpected Episode: Jason's Holiday Plans Cancelled
00:00:19
Speaker
I'm good. I'm stuck at home. I'm working today. Well, I was supposed to be on holiday. Our little son has come down with an illness, which meant we weren't able to go camping, but it does mean we get to record a unplanned podcast episode.
00:00:36
Speaker
So it swings around. For anyone listening, Jason takes less holiday than Elon Musk. So, uh, it was a big thing for him to take the week up. So yeah, you're going to have to rebook that. Yeah. I'll, I'll, I'll find a good weekend. Oh, maybe an afternoon or a weekend to take off course. Sounds good. Uh,
Carlos' Birmingham Visit for HS2 Project
00:00:58
Speaker
you've been traveling around.
00:00:59
Speaker
Yeah, this week's trip was up to Birmingham. I went to visit the team that are going to be delivering the Curzon street station. So at the end, the other end of HS2, or I should say the other end, the midpoint of HS2. That's a bit of a contentious statement to say it was the end. Yeah. Awesome team kicking off soon. So yeah, looking good.
00:01:19
Speaker
Wonderful.
Cultural Differences in Construction
00:01:20
Speaker
And I think the week before you were over in Europe, because I think we spoke about this in the previous episode, but you were heading over to Germany and to Denmark. Was there anything on one of Europe's largest infrastructure projects and then a week later on one of the UK's largest, was there anything that sort of jumped out at you as the same or different between them?
00:01:44
Speaker
Yeah. So the project over in Europe and I won't compare it to high speed two that was at the other day, that like kind of pre-construction small team. It's not in full flow. But if I think about it in comparison to say cross rail, which obviously we experienced for a long time.
00:01:59
Speaker
The first difference, I guess, was quite on the sort of culture sides of things. You walk through their office and it's super quiet. And it reminded me of, uh, when we were on Crossrail, there was this idea or view that a quiet office was not a good thing because it should be like this buzz, people shouting this high energy sort of environment. And this was the complete opposite where everyone is quietly working. Like a wolf of all strange.
00:02:27
Speaker
Not quite the, uh, yeah, the band and the music and everything going on. But yeah, it was, the difference was crazy, but everyone was just sort of quietly getting on with their work. It was very like calm and relaxing. And I think Denmark and sort of Scandinavian countries are naturally quite sort of, they seem like quite relaxed, calm, happy individuals, like compared to the sort of high stress London projects environment.
00:02:53
Speaker
But the difference was mad.
Australian vs. European Construction Environments
00:02:55
Speaker
Rob actually said, Rob came along with me, that he actually reminded him more of the projects he visited in Australia. So does that sound familiar to you, if you compare it to like Crossrail, which you worked on? I would say the total opposite actually, like Australian projects, there's not many people like shouting over. If I want any call with any Australian project,
00:03:16
Speaker
Uh, they have to constantly go on mute or unmute because as soon as they come off mute, there's like, it's like, they're on like an old school trading before from like the New York stock exchange. There's like people just shouting over each other. Like, have you got that order yet? You know, buy high, whatever, you know.
00:03:31
Speaker
So I'd say it's like the total opposite. If you went to some calm, productive, quiet office where people were just smashing through work without yelling at each other, that's totally foreign to me. I was surprised when he said it. So maybe he just saw a particularly quiet office because I know Australians and they aren't quiet, probably colorful language.
00:03:56
Speaker
I was pretty surprised when they did mention that. Another really nice thing they did, which I just can't imagine happening in the UK, but they have communal meals. So each day everyone says, yeah, I'm happy to have like the meal.
Efficiency in Danish Construction Sites
00:04:08
Speaker
And then everyone just digs into these communal plates and holds a plate and sits down and eats together, which is nice. I can imagine in the UK. I think that's, I think that's a wonderful.
00:04:18
Speaker
Yeah, it was really nice in the UK. You'd have half of the team not paying and taking it anyway. You'd have like some people taking way too much and it would all be chaotic. I can imagine. Um, it gave it a really nice sort of, yeah, real team feeling, but more on the construction side of things, then the team definitely felt lean considering the size and scale of the project. There aren't hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of office staff in the same way that we did on like cross rail, for example.
00:04:47
Speaker
And I guess part of it could be contracts. Part of it is everything is very well structured. They actually had data that flowed through different aspects of the projects, feeding reports, everything was automated. There's just people sort of clicking a button at that time each month and things were being done automatically. So they put a lot of heavy investment in how they structured project processes and reports early on.
00:05:09
Speaker
It felt like, and the feedback from them is it wasn't time intensive because they really were spending their time out on site and thinking how could we do things differently and optioneering rather than this sort of firefighting kind of office environment that I guess I'm used to.
00:05:24
Speaker
Did it feel like, uh, like, cause you got to walk around, yeah, like an enormous construction site with a scale of scale of construction. That's, um, hard to really fathom or explain while we're talking now. But was it, did it feel
European Construction's Production Line Approach
00:05:38
Speaker
like that energy, there was, there was things happening on site, like, or was that the same as the office like quiet productive?
00:05:45
Speaker
No, so one thing that was really apparent walking around site was like everyone's pee pee was clean. It was not a new job. Everything was clean. The site was extremely tidy. Everyone's very polite. You sort of talk to them and they were very knowledgeable about everything that's happening around them.
00:06:02
Speaker
Not to suggest people on site here aren't that knowledgeable, but it's a bit more chaotic. There's lots of things going on. You wouldn't disturb a gang because they're fully invested in what they're doing. Whereas they were conscious that there's a guest there and they wanted to interact with you. Considering the scale of the project, everything just seemed so well-oiled. It was like this conveyor belt of activities and things going on that was just so well thought through.
00:06:27
Speaker
It was just really impressive to walk around. It felt like the closest thing to a production line that I've ever seen. It's like a car factory setup. To then pull you to, I guess, a more controversial topic. When you guys
Lean Teams and Productivity in Europe
00:06:40
Speaker
came back from that trip, you said, that site feels like there's almost 10 times more things happening on site than a typical UK mega project, or even comparing to Crossrail.
00:06:50
Speaker
What do you think drives that? Let's just assume that's true, it may or may not be true, but let's say that that assumption or that impression was correct. What do you think drives that? There's a lot of people talking about how construction productivity in the UK, we've spoken about it in previous episodes with different reports, looking at construction productivity in the UK as a problem. We've also looked at a report from the Tony Blair Institute that looked at how projects were inefficiently delivered.
00:07:19
Speaker
If you were to point to like one thing or the number one thing that you felt that was different about what was driving productivity there versus what you see in the UK, what would it be? I think there was a real benefit from not having hordes of people.
00:07:34
Speaker
It's a lot easier to control your messaging and narrative and align everyone on these common goals when you do have a lean team where everyone is sort of high performing. That sounds really qualitative in terms of an answer and it's quite hard to put a pin on it but everyone really knew their job but everyone had a good understanding of everyone else's jobs and I think it's really hard to achieve that when you've got hundreds of people in a project office. That messaging is really difficult.
00:08:01
Speaker
And I don't know if that's a cultural thing, a contractual thing, or a coincidence that they just have a great team. It's really hard to distinguish that.
00:08:10
Speaker
I think reflecting on the conversation that you had and Rob from our team had when you guys came back and the parallels he drew to Australia, I thought a lot about what it was like in terms of productivity on major UK projects versus Australia and trying to work out.
Inefficiencies in UK Construction
00:08:27
Speaker
I definitely feel like the amount of work done per person, per hour of work, the amount of output, the measure of productivity does feel qualitatively lower there.
00:08:39
Speaker
And there's probably like a ton of reasons for that. And there's probably half the people that will listen to this and disagree with it. When I think about one of the really obvious and tangible differences that I felt between those two regions is the relationship between the parties and the parties being like the client and the contractor and the subcontractors. I definitely feel that there's more of this like Ask STEM mentality in the UK.
00:09:06
Speaker
Which that mentality is always somewhat present because everyone has their own employer. There is a contract in place. Companies are taking risks for certain elements in the delivery of the project. But the UK are in certain situations, it felt like that was heightened to the point where for some people on the project, it almost doesn't matter like what's happening on site. It's like all about the, are we sending this let? Are we arguing this cost?
00:09:30
Speaker
I don't know if you'd agree with that and if you don't, why not? What do you think drives that? This particular scheme, they referred to the client as the owner, which is not common in terms of how we've described that relationship in the UK, but it was very positive. They definitely make decisions collaboratively together. It's definitely this, a lot of projects say here, this one team approach trying to deliver something, but in reality, there's a lot of friction and difficult relationships.
00:09:58
Speaker
but it just seems like a very positive relationship not just with their owner but their supply chain and I don't obviously know the ins and outs of how they got to that relationship or whether it's standard sort of culture in projects in those particular countries but that definitely gave them none of them in the way they were speaking were very contractually pessimistic
00:10:19
Speaker
I
Critique of NEC Contracts in the UK
00:10:20
Speaker
guess is the thought there. You constantly have that mindset on projects that I've been on of, are we getting screwed from above or below? You never just assume that it's just this thing that benefits everyone and generates value for all.
00:10:35
Speaker
Yeah, again, it's hard to put a pin on it because... Yeah. For me, like, not to like... I'll just say, I'll take a position. Like, for me, I think the NEC contracts, very skeptical. Like, they're supposed to be something that drives collaboration on projects, but when I compare those contracts to what my prior experience was in Australia before moving to the... I don't know whether that project was on the NEC contract. That probably should not.
00:11:04
Speaker
I just find that under those contracts, the ratios of people that are managing construction work to those managing like the business of construction is like totally out of work. Yeah. The strict nature of NEC that drives contractors, it goes into this like death spiral. Like the strict nature of NEC contracts drives contractors to like throw paperwork at each other. You know, like contract that throws paperwork at the client with notices and letters.
00:11:30
Speaker
And then because so many of the mechanisms have strict timeouts on them, you can almost run this like inundation strategy. They don't have enough people to answer all the letters and the responses that you can just keep throwing more paperwork at them. And some of them will get through because I'll legal tactic, bury them in paperwork.
00:11:50
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. And it does feel like that that is a strategy that some contractors and not even just contractors, clients, like it is a strategy that I've seen like almost like employed on projects in the UK. But then that like then starts this next step, which is okay. Well, to not run the risk of like losing out on a change or something, because we didn't respond in the right time or with the right letter or, you know, in the right format, that forces team to like add more resources, usually in the role of like quantity failure.
00:12:20
Speaker
Then those resources are overhead to the project. They need to justify or recover their costs. So they just throw more paperwork because they need to justify the value of that overhead and recover that money. And then you just get into this paperwork desk spiral. So for me, I don't like those contracts.
00:12:37
Speaker
The best projects I've ever worked on in any country are where there's a contract signed between two parties. And then when the team go to deliver it, it's put to one side and the team like muck in and try and deliver the project together. And obviously there are disagreements. People try to work out the disagreements reasonably. And if they can't, then the contract comes out. I find that NEC forces you to go contract first and relationship like second.
00:13:03
Speaker
It's a really weird concept to have contractual collaboration. Like imagine having a contract with your wife, your girlfriend about this relationship will work because it's in, it's in writing here, what we all do to make it work. It's really, it seems really strange, doesn't it? The solution, the solution to our relationship is whenever we've got an issue, we'll send each other a letter saying we've got an issue and then you have to respond to my issue in 28 days saying, I've thought about your issue and we've resolved it or whatever.
00:13:30
Speaker
it's a ridiculous idea and if and if you reject it you need to give me three one of these reasons why three yeah exactly it's just a it's i just think it does it doesn't work i don't want to be like but yeah i hate it
00:13:46
Speaker
I was escalated from like, at the start, I was like, it's like a little bit bad. I'm just out. It's like, I hate it. Yeah. I love how you sort of, sort of raised the topic subtly and in your mind, you're just, you're inflamed screaming hate.
00:14:02
Speaker
Okay, let's get off that topic before we, before we, before it escalates even further.
Semex Ventures' Top Construction Tech Startups
00:14:08
Speaker
The other thing I wanted to talk about today was, I'd shared with you the other day, this list. So Semex Ventures, which is like a corporate venture of the company Semex.
00:14:20
Speaker
They do this top 50 construction technology startups list every year. And it's a bit of a beauty contest. I would say that both because we didn't make Liz Carlos when we started, but also we're not that good looking. But the top 50 startups from this year is what I shared with you. I thought it might be interesting to go through that together.
00:14:44
Speaker
Because obviously the ideas have evolved a lot in the last few years. There's a lot more AI stuff. There's a lot of different ideas that weren't existing two years ago. I thought it might be a nice idea if we both reviewed it and then maybe picked what we thought is the most interesting or something that we could see broadly on projects. I'm sure all of them have customers and stuff.
00:15:08
Speaker
broadly on projects in some point in the future. So I can stop talking for a moment. Do you want to go first?
00:15:15
Speaker
I did the exact same thing as you, which was open the document, scroll down, see the listing, go, where the fuck is Apex? We don't, we don't do AI. So you can't make these lists. No, no. And to be honest, like, uh, I think our window to make it this past, you have to be like quite early to, to make these lists costs. That's at least how I justify it. But also that in this, uh, year.
00:15:39
Speaker
They were looking for companies specifically in, I think they said four categories. The categories were green construction, enhanced productivity, which is quite broad, construction supply chain, I guess that's also quite broad, and future of construction, which in reality, all those super broad.
00:16:03
Speaker
So yeah, which of the 50 jumped out to you? So
Civils.ai and Data Efficiency
00:16:10
Speaker
I'm going to caveat my answer with I did not review 50 companies, but I did pick out 5 to 10 and have a flick through and saw what I thought was the best.
00:16:19
Speaker
Um, one that jumped out is cool. So this is a sexiest name. This is sexiest name competition. Yeah. Yeah. If you had a, if you had a bad name and a dreadful logo, then I wasn't having a look. So civils.ai, it is a platform that allows you to give effectively access to all of your data, your models, your, the wealth of information that we have on projects.
00:16:42
Speaker
And you can query it and it will provide you answers and it will give you answers in the context of the model, not just written answers. So nothing new. There's lots of apps that will allow you to query big datasets, but obviously it's a specific one for construction. I think I can see this doing particularly well. And I think we discussed this a number of weeks ago, where a lot of contractors and even large schemes have this real big problem with, and just to pick one small aspect of it, best practice.
00:17:12
Speaker
They have thousands of documents across companies that have best practice examples or processes or ideas. They're all saved in the likes of SharePoint and other dreadful systems which are just documents in folders within folders. So trying to find information that's relevant out of those is really difficult. So I can imagine plugging in a system like this to that makes it extremely easy to pull out relevant information from the topic at hand. So if you're doing a
00:17:38
Speaker
concrete core and you want floating concrete or whatever that niche might be, you're going to find that relevant information really quickly. But then more broadly on projects, I mean, navigating Acanex and the other systems that we used to use, it is quite time consuming. You're screwing around with filters, you're changing your search names. To have something that actually understands a question and to produce an answer, you'd bet on it being a huge time saver. Yeah, that was my pick out of the crowd.
00:18:06
Speaker
Yeah, the data is definitely like project data, especially in the construction phase is definitely not optimized for any sort of use of that data in any meaningful way. I don't know if you've had this, but on a previous project back in Australia.
00:18:22
Speaker
produce whatever document it was in Word or in some office tool, then print it to a PDF, would attach it to some document management type system. And then on the client side, they would print it out, physically print it out. They would take it around the office to each of the people that needed to approve or document, and they would hand write up markups on there. And then they'd get literally a big old physical stamp
00:18:49
Speaker
that like smash it with this big stamp and then put like code to not approve and then scan that up send it back to and by the time you ever sometimes that these documents even to go to people in like three different countries so I might have had to go to Australia and then to like Thailand and then maybe the US somewhere
00:19:09
Speaker
So the time it's been like printed and re-uploaded three times and it comes back to you, you're literally left with like, yeah, something that looked like it was taken from like a photo from a potato in order to read like what you were, what exactly the comments on this document. If this company can like somehow read that good on them, that's brilliant.
00:19:30
Speaker
Yeah. The thing that annoys me about it is we're almost letting SharePoint off the hook for being terrible because you can just continue to do SharePoint as you do now. And this system is going to be the difficult part, which is give you relevant information. It makes use of SharePoint in its current form a little less difficult.
00:19:53
Speaker
What did you pick out?
Ocoli's AI Construction Monitoring
00:19:54
Speaker
Yeah, the one I chose and looked at was called Ocoli. It's a company from Germany and I think it's quite cool. So they basically start with a camera system. So they set up like, you'll set up cameras that overlook your site. So I think like a building project, maybe on a nearby, maybe on the, on the, um, on the mast of the tower crane or something.
00:20:17
Speaker
overlooking the project. And then they have an artificial intelligence engine, which will watch, basically record all the video of all the work that's happening day, night, you know, night vision.
00:20:29
Speaker
And then it has an AI engine, which will track people, plants, and the actual work that they're performing and turn that into sort of structured data. So, you know, people, you know, how many people are on site. And, and the bit that got me super interested was that they claim to be able to progress the schedule.
00:20:49
Speaker
from the video feed so to say that this activity is you know 80% complete or 70% complete or 100% complete or whatever. There is obviously all sorts of problems with like certain work that you can't see with cameras and and there'll be things obscuring the video and you know you can probably see that you poured 70% of the concrete on a floor or something and that's kind of you could imagine how that worked but but in general I find this a super exciting area and we know people working to build similar things in the UK
00:21:18
Speaker
Yeah, that's interesting. The progress part, I was talking to a Lang and Rook project the other day and they had a handheld device. I'm pretty sure it's build up. So you walk through and it will progress based on what it can see. So it will show you how complete something is or when it is actually complete. Yeah, the actual labour and plant is such a big question mark at the moment on most sites. Like no one's effectively done it yet in a
00:21:38
Speaker
in a proper way. So that's really interesting. There is one contractor that comes to mind that's working on something at the moment, I won't name it, but it's definitely a valid space, particularly when we think in the context of our customers, actually knowing what everyone was doing without having to manually write that down in the site diary is a bit of a game changer, not just from progress updates, but understanding your burn, yeah, and building that record.
Importance of Accurate Data in Construction
00:22:02
Speaker
giant black hole and I spoke to someone that works for one of the biggest like forensic analysis firms for construction contractors the other day and told me that still like when projects go to dispute and they end up with hiring them to do the forensic analysis.
00:22:19
Speaker
they still spend the vast majority of their time recreating records from manual QA records or the remnants of site diaries and just having better feeds of data, whether it's from video or sensors or something.
00:22:36
Speaker
has all sorts of flow on benefits, not just the like, oh, we can progress the schedule, we can see them. There's just like, you have a new, I don't know if you ever saw like cameras at your house calls, but like once you do it, it's like you would never go back. You know, you're away somewhere and you go, oh, I want to just check if I, you know, the house is safe. You can just pull up the app or whatever. Once you do that, it's like you never go back to the other way. Yeah. It's really difficult to adjust backwards with things like that.
00:23:02
Speaker
I think that's all we've got time for today. Thank you very much for listening, everyone. Thanks, Garth.