Is Building Project Management a luxury?
I read a quote at the weekend from the head of the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in Hyde Park, Chris Meyers. He said:
“Luxury is realised when service is intuitive and goes beyond obligation.”
I’d like to look at this from two angles:
1. When does service go beyond obligation to be intuitive?
2. Is this luxury?
I have never stayed at a Mandarin but I have been lucky enough to eat in one when we were living in Hong Kong building a new hospital. I think Chris Meyers is thinking of that kind of telepathy that has things organised before you’ve even had a chance to realise you were thinking of something that needed doing.
This is the sort of service that we at Charlie Laing PM look to offer, and yet we don’t consider ourselves a luxury. Maybe we should but I prefer to think that good planning and anticipation of what is required, what is going to happen and what is expected is all part of the service – the basic service.
As the Chief Executive of the Chartered Institute of Building said in Construction Manager this month – “There is no reason why best value and lowest price cannot be one and the same.”
Let’s consider nursing or education for a moment. Caring for people, anticipating their needs and making them feel special is all part of the job yet we don’t consider these services as a luxury. Going beyond obligation in these professions is considered commonplace – that’s part of the definition of “vocation” I suppose and maybe luxury has a different definition for a vocation.
I am not sure that I would go so far as to call Project Management a calling but there is something magnetic about the building process. I love this quote from “The Existential Pleasures of Engineering” who in turn are quoting a New York Times reporter Ada Huxtable – “nothing comes off with quite validity, reality and necessity of the structural arts. Other art forms seem pretty piddling next to dams that span mountains, roads that leap chasms and domes that span miles. The kicks here are for real.”
Building is hard work and building sites can be pretty miserable places when its wet and cold, the plastering makes the site feel claustrophobic, the pressure is on to finish and the budget’s tight, but the opportunity to have a hand in building something real and tangible is compelling and the desire to then deliver that experience to the client as well as we can, is intuitive not obligatory.
Don’t get me wrong, we recognise that we are an overhead but we would argue strongly that we are an overhead that adds value and saves money. We are not aesthetic police and taste is not something we express an opinion on. We see our role as protecting our client’s interests and ensuring that what they get is good value whether they are spending £100 000 or £1 000 000.
That’s not luxury, that’s common sense.
