Chris Blythe: Professionals need to help themselves

It was Sam Walton, the founder of Wal-Mart, who said: “There is only one boss: the customer. And he can fire everybody in the company, from the chairman on down, simply by spending his money somewhere else.”

It was a sentiment lacking from some of those attending Talk Construction, the CIOB’s annual conference at the end of November. The propensity to blame the client for the ills of the industry is too prevalent for my liking. Some clients, such as retailers, are probably bigger construction companies than the contractors. They know their business and the construction business. The intelligent client might realise that they don’t need to use contractors.

A good example is Transport for London. They have to a certain extent gone and done what Sam Walton warned of and are spending their money elsewhere by doing their own construction management

It’s a bold move and I hope it is successful. I would welcome a variety of business models for the delivery of construction projects and it would be good for professional construction management by broadening the opportunities available. It has taken many years for the professional construction management skillset to be fully recognised for the value it brings to the built environment. It is a skillset recognised outside the construction industry. A CIOB fellow (Howard Shiplee), for example, is working with the Department of Work and Pensions trying to knock the department’s Universal Credit programme into shape.

There are other examples of that skillset being used in other industries. It is that adaptability and transferability of the skillset which makes the construction manager very different from other professional groups.

As if to prove the point, professional construction management has been recognised by the Privy Council approving the title of Chartered Construction Manager to be used by corporate members of the CIOB, as recognition that construction management is a distinctive professional discipline which spans a wide range of management activities in the built environment. It seems appropriate that the new designation will be introduced in 2014 in what is, the institute’s 180th anniversary year.

The Talk Construction event also saw the publication of some research into the dissemination of the Industrial Strategy for Construction 2025 published jointly by the government and the industry in the summer.

The headline numbers were that 53% of respondents had heard of the strategy, but considerably fewer had read it or knew what it was about. This is disappointing as the strategy seeks to create the kind of construction industry we would all like to enjoy but it needs a collaborative effort by those directly engaged in the industry, not by the suits who work in the umbrella bodies three steps removed from reality, to break away from where we are now.

A building is worth far more than the sum of its parts to its owner. But it is nothing short of economic suicide when constructors typically make between 2-3% margins.  We have effectively sold a building for the sum of its parts. Is it any wonder, therefore, that clients don’t understand the business model and are wary of the industry.

Anais Nin, the French author, wrote: “We don’t see things as they are; we see them as we are.” There is a reality gap in the industry as the research identified. I think it is the job of the professional construction manager to eliminate that gap.