Meet me and my agenda!

Hello. As we're going to be communicating with each other over the coming months, I thought it only right that I should introduce myself. I say communicating, as I hope I will inspire you to reply through the letters page either in response to what I have to say, or with ideas on topics you might like me to write about.

Anyway, back to my introduction. I'm Kevin Thomas, and I've been involved in facilities management, investment management and construction since I was 18. I started out with the Property Services Agency (PSA) of the UK Government. I was a sponsored student for a five year thin sandwich degree in environmental engineering: buildings at City University, London. City was semester based with two semesters a year, so every six months you went somewhere new to discover what really happens. Over the five years I saw just about every aspect of PSA activity, including a three month spell in the Directorate of Ancient Monuments and Historic Buildings, where I discovered construction for the first time. I though this was great (still do) and after graduating I selected Air Force Defence Works (USAF) as the place to begin my working career.

I was based at Ruislip as part of multidisciplinary teams responsible for building everything from sports and leisure facilities to bomb proof, chemical, bacteriological and electromagnetic pulse protected facilities.

I know integration and collaboration work, I’ve proved it for myself. Over the coming months, I hope to show you why and how.

In 1987, I came across the "You can't get promoted until it's your turn no matter how good you might be" government syndrome and left. I joined the pharmaceutical industry with Glaxo, partly because they thought it was a good idea to let m&e engineers run things – pretty rare. I also joined Glaxo on a bit of a mission. My time at PSA had been exclusively focussed on lowest cost tendering and I was determined never to go that route again for non-commodity procurement.

I started to focus my small refurbishments team on the creation of what we called a "pool of preferred suppliers". People we used on a regular basis and with whom we were able to build trust and commitment both ways. In time, the successes allowed us to take on larger projects and to explore two stage tendering and open book costing and even to bring some, but not all, of our procurement colleagues along with us. In 1995 Glaxo merged with Wellcome and we were suddenly presented with needs which couldn't be achieved using the historic models. I used the opportunity mercilessly to be let loose to run a £20 million lab restructuring project the way I felt all project should be done. I held the doubters off with a "the board say this must happen do you have the guts to stop me?" tactic, and FUSION was born.