It’s in our gift to change water industry procurement
The water industry is poised to make its biggest ever investment in infrastructure over the next five years and building engineers will need to play a significant role, according to the regulatory body Ofwat.
However, director of environment and innovation Dr Jo Jolly, told the Behind the Built Environment podcast that getting the best value out of that investment depended on improving the way projects are delivered.
She told podcast host David Frise, CEO of the Building Engineering Services Association (BESA), that delivering the best value to society depended on improving collaboration and data sharing. “It also depends on having the will and the passion to do this,” she added.
A major change would be placing more emphasis on how people behave towards each other and ensuring they feel empowered to make more sustainable choices rather than being restricted by contract conditions or legal fears, explained Dr Jolly.
“I fundamentally believe that the whole system is [currently] set up to fail in terms of how we procure, how we contract, how we reward, how we incentivise, and how we pay,” she said. “The entire system needs to change…[but] I also think it’s in our gift to do that.”
She said that putting more emphasis on understanding the way members of a project team behave and make decisions, rather than having a restrictive focus on contract conditions and cost, led to better delivery performance.
“There are people doing this, but only in small pockets,” said Dr Jolly. “When projects fail, what’s the main reason? It’s people, it’s behaviour. I spoke up, but nobody listened. I was too scared to speak up. [Consider] the tragedy of the Challenger disaster. People knew those O-rings were going to fail.
“We need to look back on every single lesson learned. People in the team knew, but they weren’t heard, or it wasn’t acted on.”
She said the industry could make more use of powerful data and analytics tools that can capture and quantify human behaviour.
“Behavioural insights start to give us lead indicators on how the team are feeling. Why not have that on your dashboard next to your time, cost and quality?” she asked. “Then you start to get a much richer picture.”
Dr Jolly praised the ability of BESA members and the wider building engineering community to “unlock potential” and solve “many thorny issues that are at the heart of what our country is grappling with”. She added that water services were “the lifeblood of a building” and should enable better connections between different elements of building projects.
“All of the potential that your members and your industry leave us is extraordinary. I’d love to explore how we can work more with you [at Ofwat].”
The podcast also delved into some of the planning problems that hold back project delivery and innovation. She said Ofwat was collaborating with the Environment Agency and the Drinking Water Inspectorate “around how we support and enable those early design stages of major infrastructure projects”.
She said there was now an opportunity to also look more closely at how the building regulations and other aspects of water usage in planning and building could work more collaboratively. The political landscape should help because the new government has made planning reform to tackle the climate emergency a priority, added Dr Jolly.
“If you have leadership from the top, with our government saying this is our most important and biggest and most urgent threat…that’s massive.”
You can access the full podcast here.
