Getting the job done

EU infrastructure meets Mott MacDonald's MD of Buildings and Structures, Mike Barker, to talk about why managing large projects requires a unique blend of vision and experience.

“Modern design teams are really about collaboration, and the edges of the disciplines can get quite blurred at times”
-Mike Barker, Mott MacDonald's MD

Mike Barker rolls his eyes and looks to the heavens. “Talk about bureaucracy,” he sighs with mock exasperation, waving his hand over the plans in front of him. “It’s a nightmare!” He’s talking about one of Mott MacDonald’s newest (and most controversial) projects, the proposed Maze Stadium in Northern Ireland. The build aims to bring together Gaelic athletics, soccer and rugby in one world-class 21st century shared facility and put Northern Ireland on the map for hosting major international events; as lead consultant, his company is expected to project manage the build from start to finish. But as Barker is only too well aware, managing projects with a political dimension can be a challenging experience.

To date, progress has been far from smooth. Quite apart from the problems inherent in dealing with three different sporting administrations and the red tape involved in gaining consensus from multiple clients, there have also been community-based issues regarding the proposed site for the stadium: that of Belfast’s notorious former Maze Prison, where 10 hunger strikers died in 1981 during the Troubles. Such a complex back-story would deter more than most, but Barker remains enthused by the project and the opportunities it offers. “ It’s hit some problems at the moment due to the politics of the situation and the fact that they’re trying to take three sporting codes and unite them under one roof in one facility,” he admits. “It’s quite a challenge from a design perspective, but one we’re really excited about meeting.”

Such ambition is typical of a firm that has a long history of pioneering design and construction, most recently on the groundbreaking Wembley stadium project in the UK. From its early work in delivering the world’s first underground railway in London to more recent efforts such as the Channel Tunnel linking England and France, the spectacular Dubai Marina development in the Middle East and Heathrow’s revolutionary Terminal 5 building, Mott MacDonald has established a reputation for delivering innovative designs and project management excellence around the world. For Barker, it’s all about communicating good ideas well.

“Modern design teams are really all about collaboration, and the edges of the disciplines can get quite blurred at times,” he says. “This is especially important in a global economy. What we try and do is bring a fresh approach into the design and development process that isn’t blinkered by what we’ve done before as industry specialists, by having people from different disciplines working closely together and sharing ideas and maybe incorporating best practices or ways of working from other areas of the business. It allows us to innovate without taking unnecessary risks.”

Indeed, in an industry in which great design is the bedrock for success, having the freedom to incorporate innovative ideas is critical. But as Barker is quick to point out, achieving the balance is easier said than done. “Our environment is becoming increasingly litigious, and that can provide a cap on innovation as people are less willing to take unknown risks,” he concedes. “Nonetheless, we always try and provide added value, and innovation plays a key role in this. For instance, we have a professional excellence programme across the group that we use to bring the latest thinking into the workplace. I suppose if I were really honest about it, you’d ideally like to use ideas that have already been successfully trialled in the market, where somebody else has had a go and made them work, so you’ve got a precedent. I mean, there’s nothing new under the sun; everything’s been tried before, generally. And so really we’re looking at refining existing ideas and making them more accurate, and bringing more certainty into what we’re doing. On the construction side, it’s a case of refining what we’ve got, and the innovations are probably going to come when looking at how to improve the energy efficiency of the build and the build process, that sort of thing.”

As Barker explains, a major part of this innovation process comes from the organisational culture at Mott MacDonald. “Better innovation should always be a by-product of your company culture,” he says. “What we try and do is to make sure that each of our teams are using the same working discipline in different locations, and it’s like that across Europe and across into Russia and the Middle East and everywhere we work. We try and utilise best practices in our approaches to problems so that people can benefit from being part of a larger organisation that is able to provide better direction, better training and a greater understanding of what current needs are and what cutting-edge thinking is all about. You wouldn’t necessarily get this if you were sitting by yourself in an office of three people. But by having a community of best practice across the group, it enables those three people sitting in an office somewhere to feel part of a 200-strong team. And that 200-strong team has a critical mass that enables each of those smaller teams to bring current thinking and the expertise of the whole group into whatever projects they are working on.”

Innovation breeds sustainability
One of the things Barker is most excited by is the idea of channelling innovation to help promote concepts such as sustainability and energy efficiency. So how is Mott Macdonald building a greener focus into its design and construction processes and reducing the environmental impact of large projects? “As much as possible, we try to build sustainability into our designs from the beginning. It’s much easier to do this from the beginning than it is to try and add sustainable features or greener practices halfway through the build,” he explains. “You’ve got to have it in right from the beginning, because it actually affects the whole aspect of the building and the way it’s put together.”

It’s an area that has increasingly moved up the corporate agenda for everyone involved in the infrastructure sector over the last few years, but Barker sees it as much more than just a fashionable buzzword. “In a couple of years’ time I think that we’ll start to see less of a focus on sustainability and environmental issues – not because they’ll become any less important, but because they’ll become so ingrained into everything we do,” he says. “Sustainability is going to become second nature, because it has to do. It’s going to become more and more and more central to every single thing we do, and is going to be totally embedded in the very fabric of our culture as an industry.”

And with the construction industry one of the largest consumers of natural resources in Europe, an essential starting point is to re-examine the basic materials that are wasted every year. Barker reels off a few revealing – and shocking – statistics. “The construction industry is the UK’s largest consumer of natural resources,” he says. “Around 400 million tons of material gets delivered to site every year, and 60 million tons of that go straight to the tip. It’s absolutely staggering – brand-new materials just get junked because of poor ordering, poor storage or over-ordering.”

In addition, the UK construction industry accounted for approximately 8.5% of GDP, but churned out a third of the nation’s total waste. So what can the industry to do reduce its consumption of energy, water and raw materials, and what opportunities are there for better waste management in the construction sector? According to Barker, the UK has already made a start in addressing the problem, but other countries need to follow suit. “In the UK now, every project that’s over UK£300,000 capital value has got to have a waste plan, and that waste plan has got to determine how waste is going to be dealt with, and how waste is going to be minimised,” he says. “It’s called a site waste management plan, and it’s an attempt to try and bring this appalling waste of materials under control. It really is quite amazing how badly the construction industry has been faring in relation to waste reduction.”

The next step is to try and implement similar initiatives across Europe. “I imagine the EU will start to implement something quite shortly – it’s going to be a bit more difficult because of the diversity of the countries in Europe, but I believe it’s necessary. And I think everybody’s in a similar situation – some are more advanced than we are, of course, but I think there’s a desire to address this issue across the EU, particularly given the prospect of a recession looming.”

Potential downturn
The possibility of tough economic times is, of course, the elephant in the room as far as the industry is concerned. So has Barker witnessed any evidence of this so far, and does he anticipate any potential downturn to have much impact on the construction sector in general? “It has already started to impact on us in certain instances,” he admits. “We were doing a lot of work on larger housing schemes, and that’s all dried up now. All the contractors who are dealing with housing developments are finding it really hard going.”

So rough times ahead, then? Not necessarily. “This is where our strategy is paying off, because we’re very diverse,” explains Barker. “Mott Macdonald has around 13,500 people worldwide, and we deliberately made the decision to limit our work to technical work, to the professional side of things, rather than getting in to more blue-collar types of work. The thinking behind this diversification strategy is that if we are active in many different industry sectors, not all of them are going to trough at the same time. Some will be peaking. For example, energy is a very strong market at the moment for us, because there’s such demand for new energy provision.”

From that point of view, he thinks his firm will be able to ride out the storm better than most. “I do know that some of our competitors are hurting quite badly at the moment, particularly those who haven’t got that breadth of exposure into different markets that we have. I suppose it really depends on how deep and for how long the recession bites – and that’s anyone’s guess. I was talking to a friend of mine who’s a fund manager, and he was saying how even within the financial sector there are numerous different opinions about what’s going to happen.”

The good news – for those farsighted enough to get involved in those markets – is that China and India are still displaying a huge appetite for raw materials. “If you’re exporting to that part of the world, then there’s a good chance that you haven’t even started to feel the effects of the recession yet,” continues Barker. “In Australia, for example, they’re still booming along like you wouldn’t believe in relation to exporting raw materials and minerals into China. For them it’s like, recession? What recession? Similarly, we’re working on a huge project down in South Africa at the moment providing railway and port access for the raw materials export business – because there’s also a huge demand for natural resources out of South Africa, to meet the ever-increasing appetite for raw materials in the Far East.”

And on the domestic front, he points to the huge amount of homes that still need to be built to meet rising demand as evidence that all is not doom and gloom for the sector. “There’s still a demand for housing, certainly in this country,” he says. “I think people would still like to have their own house and garden and things like that, and there’s a huge deficit there. So there’s plenty for the sector to feel optimistic about.”

Market opportunities 
As there is for Mott MacDonald, too. The company has just completed an award-winning project to design and build a new civil justice centre in Manchester, and is hoping to use the lessons learned from that as a means of benchmarking future projects. “The whole of the design is actually based around its sustainability performance,” explains Barker. The UK£113 million centre, which provides 47 courtrooms in a sustainable 16-storey building designed by architect Denton Corker Marshall, features an 11-storey atrium and a spectacular 60m by 60m glass facade along the western edge. Meeting the requirement for natural ventilation means that the structure had to be designed to accommodate a complex web of ductwork to allow air taken in at the sides of the atrium – through wind scoops facing the direction of the prevailing wind – to circulate through the building. The natural ventilation system is designed to maximise free-cooling potential and comfort in mid-season. An intelligent building management system brings in a back-up forced ventilation system if the wind speed is too low to achieve this. Other features include an ‘environmental veil’ on the east façade to control solar gain but also maximise natural daylight, and groundwater cooling, which alone reduces cooling load energy consumption by around 15-20 percent. Barker and his team already aim to better these performance figures on a similar courts building they are working on in Birmingham.

And as governments increasingly call on the private sector to take part in infrastructure development, Mott MacDonald is also sharing its expertise in public private partnerships (PPPs) in all areas, from transport to health throughout Europe. In the Slovak Republic the firm examined the feasibility of using PPP to fund 90km of D1 motorway in the north of the country, while in Poland the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development asked the company to study the introduction of municipal road PPPs in Lodz, Krakow and Poznan. At the same time, the Mott MacDonald team is helping deliver nationally strategic mainline rail upgrades in various countries including Hungary, Poland, the Netherlands and the UK – where one of the largest is Network Rail’s £7.6 billion West Coast Route Modernisation programme.

Clearly, the European market is an important area of future growth. “We operate a global company, and one challenge is trying to make sure that we uphold our high standards and bring a sense of commonality across the whole group at all our diverse geographic locations,” says Barker. And in terms of opportunity, he has no doubt as to where the main potential lies. “Eastern Europe is going to bring the most significant changes into the region. I don’t think we’ve really tapped or fully understand the market yet. They’ve got lots of natural resources, therefore they’ve got lots of potential for wealth creation and the people there will want the same sort of standard of living as others have elsewhere around the world. And that will come.”

He sees similar potential in Russia. “It’s such a huge country, and there’s loads of natural resources there. I think that’s actually going to have a big impact on the whole of the European construction industry. It’s going to be focused more and more on the development of those countries. We’ve already got projects and offices there, and we’re pushing forward on that basis. And there’s a huge amount of development that needs to happen there. The construction industry is already gearing itself up. The natural resources, minerals and oil-related development will fuel huge opportunities for us all. I’ve seen it. I’m in and out of Russia all the time. I’ve seen the opportunities going on there. Kazakhstan’s the same; there are amazing opportunities there. And I think eyes are turning east all over Europe, really.”

European focus
Mott MacDonald’s activities across Europe cover every sector and every discipline of expertise. Just the briefest snapshot includes:
• Education, urban regeneration, building and transportation developments in the UK, Ireland, Portugal, Denmark and Greece
• Health advances and power stations in Spain, Poland, Turkey and Italy
• Water and wastewater projects in the Netherlands, Serbia, Bulgaria, Romania, Russia and the Czech Republic
• Environmental and water assignments in Tajikistan, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan
• Transport projects in Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia and Russia

Hague wastewater treatment plant PPP
On the €362 million Hague wastewater treatment plant – the first PPP deal in the Dutch water management sector – we are providing technical advice to the commercial lending group, including the European Investment Bank (EIB). This landmark project comprises a 30-year concession for the design, construction and operation of a new wastewater treatment plant at Harnaschpolder (capacity 1.3 million population equivalent) and the refurbishment and operation of the existing Hague wastewater treatment plant at Houtrust (capacity 0.4 million population equivalent). The combined plants will meet stringent EU standards for removing nitrogen and phosphorous before the effluent is discharged to the North Sea.

Mott MacDonald’s role involved serving as technical advisor to the lenders throughout the bid and negotiation phases and then reviewing and monitoring of the project during the construction and operation periods. The two plants are scheduled to be fully operational by November 2008 to meet the European regulations on wastewater quality.

Heathrow Terminal 5
As one of BAA’s first-tier integrated suppliers, Mott MacDonald has been design engineer for all the UK£4.3 billion project’s sub-structures and foundations. We’ve also provided rail assurance and integration services, risk and safety management, project and programme management, tunnelling advice and the design of rail, road, wastewater and passenger transfer tunnels.

Making Terminal 5 accessible is vital to its success, and Mott MacDonald has been instrumental in bringing people to this new development. Among the tasks undertaken is the 1.7km long Piccadilly Line extension, which connects into the existing Piccadilly Line near the central terminal area. Similarly, the Heathrow Express Extension (HexEx) now takes the Heathrow Express rail link from the existing rail station at the central terminal area to the new rail station located beneath the new T5 terminal building.

Mott MacDonald has also been the leader of the task team responsible for development, co-ordination and design of all substructures, including the multilevel basements beneath the main terminal, concourse A and B, over and outside roads and all geotechnical design associated with the close proximity of underground tunnels. Other substructures worked on include taxiway bridges for aircraft over airside roads, concrete underground structures for the track transit and baggage systems as well as underground service tunnels and airside roads.

Recently, Mott MacDonald successfully completed work on the airside road tunnel, a complex job involving working under one of the world’s busiest airports. The company was responsible for the design of the tunnel bores, the approach structures, highway design, mechanical and electrical definition design and instrumentation and monitoring of this prestigious project. Completed on time, under budget and with no impact on the airport’s day-to-day operations, the dual-purpose tunnel will provide road access from Terminal 1, 2 and 3 to Terminal 5. It will also serve the remote aircraft stands on the western edge of the airport from the central terminal area.