The YES! man

Do not, under any circumstances, send your business development manager to this man.

“I have a natural aversion to them,” he says. “The moment they get a sniff of something you get all the invites under the sun and they think your decision is going to be influenced by whether or not you get an invite to a tennis match or a football match. It’s so transparent and in some ways it still offends me.”

This goes way back. At Grosvenor Estates Stephen Lewis was responsible for the Allied Irish Bank HQ in Uxbridge, Middlesex. Back then UK firms were teaming up with American companies. One Monday he interviewed a rep from just such a team, an American from a large US contractor. He’d flown in that morning and made a point of apologising for jet-lag, which irritated Lewis.

He felt the American was showing off.

“My retort was, I guess you haven’t seen the site then? It’s difficult to talk about something if you haven’t had the bother to go and see it in advance.”

The contract went to the next interviewee, a no-frills fellow who’d figured out (having seen the site) that the main challenge would be to stop flooding.

“It was such a contrast within half-an-hour,” Lewis said. “One jetting in from Chicago and this other guy driving in from Neasden, basically a site agent who’d been promoted.

“I don’t want to know whether people have built leisure schemes, or where they’re working in the world. I want to know which people they’re going to put on the job. What are their commitments in terms of resources?”

Point Two: Big up your experience in offsite manufacturing. He doesn’t want the place clogged with cement lorries. He doesn’t want stupid mistakes.

“On a lot of large developments you still get tilers in. You still get all the co-ordination problems where the pipes coming out of the walls clash with the soil pipe. That, in this day and age, is inexcusable.”

And he doesn’t want merely to import cheap prefab bits from the Far East, either. After all, Rotherham is steel country. He will press the successful main contractor to talk to local specialists – which prompts another outburst about “some main contractors”.

“If they actually start talking to some of the smaller, local companies, and don’t get into the big company, bullying mentality, you see what skills they have, what benefit they can bring to the project, rather than use a banal checklist that really only favours a certain category of subcontractor that conforms to their sterile, risk-averse corporate policy.”

Okay? Point Three: Line up your most collaboratively minded personnel for this bid. He wants a team that will pull together, not a pack of prima donnas. For this reason, he will not be touching the JCT suite of contracts with a barge pole.

JCT is too adversarial. on a scheme this big you will never, ever have every last detail sorted out

Stephen Lewis

“It’s too adversarial and too inflexible and one will never, ever get the level of detail to get the security of cost that is purported to rest on that form of contract.”

Is he sure?

“On a scheme this complex you will never, ever, in a month of Sundays, have every last detail sorted out to get a fully robust tender one can rely on.”

Right. Point Four: the actual form of contract to be used. Oak Holdings and the project managers Tropus are old hands at contract stuff. Oak’s chairman Malcolm Savage was on the British Property Federation committee that produced the BPF form. And you may remember that Tropus, one-time project manager of the Wembley National Stadium, blew the whistle on the client’s handling of the contract award. And for Steve Lewis, The Form is a subject very, very dear to his heart.

So what are his leanings on this job? It’s big, it’s complex, and the package interfaces are intense, so Lewis wants to break it up into bits to avoid the team getting “intoxicated” by the scale. The main contractor will have an over-arching role, and lead on CDM compliance and health and safety, but the package contractors will play big roles, too. So he wants a form that promotes teamwork. Also one that rewards time-saving and quality-enhancing risks. To achieve this in the past, he has tinkered with established forms. While a director for the showbiz restaurant chain Planet Hollywood, he had to install a £20m restaurant and live entertainment facility inside an existing night club at the Swiss Centre in London. He tried a kind of hybrid of construction management and design and build.

“It’s complete anathema, but it meant we could select a team that understood the challenge and the deadlines. There were individual packages, but each package was on a D&B basis, so everybody knew what they had to do, when they had to come in, what information they would get by when.”

The project ran into trouble in the second phase, but Lewis maintains it was due to external influences, not the procurement technique. He says projects work best when package contractors are held strictly to account on one hand, but given power on the other.

“The best detailer of joinery is a joiner. If there is a process where the joiner can talk to the detailing architect, rather than a detail architect try and tell a joiner how to do it, first of all it’s a lot more productive with time, resources, but it also gets buy-in from the contractors.”

The appointed main contractor for YES! will need to take a view on how to split the packages, whether by trade or by use or by area, in consultation with the architect – and, of course, himself.

Which leads neatly to Point Five: Attend to this man. Tropus will handle the project delivery but Lewis is sure to be prominent, especially at the contract award stage.

“This will be my baby from start to finish and I will be very, very heavily involved in directing the strategy.”