Listen, collaborate and innovate
7 March 2022 - Patrick Watson, Project Manager from 3PM, discusses the importance of a shared vision and collaborative mindset.
With any challenging brief it is important to agree upfront what success actually looks like. To ensure a positive start on The Entopia Building a Project Charter was established highlighting the agreed vision behind the project, which the whole team bought into at the outset of the project. As project managers we clearly set out this success criteria and defined the desired values and outcomes for the whole project team.
The following project values were adopted by the team and will be key to the successful delivery of this project throughout its lifecycle:
- Achieving the highest design quality
- Recognising the potential of the project to be a global sustainable retrofit exemplar
- Collaborative design process that both embodies CISL’s values and exhibits their work
- Working ethically, honestly and fairly, valuing the contributions of all
- Being open to challenging the design and having the design challenged with freedom to innovate
- Celebrating success and the input of the whole team
- Leading by example, strive for consistency of behaviour in upholding the project values
Continuity of leadership is key to creating trust in a complex collaboration. With innovation, consistency of design process and design team ownership are all necessary to carry values through into technical solutions. Strong visionary leaders require equal strength in their facilitators to translate and direct the requisite results.
On the Entopia project we were fortunate to be able to assemble a strong, collaborative core team which included client representative, project manager, architect, and services designer all of whom had worked together on low carbon schemes in the past. This facilitated a quick ramp-up due to the ingrained trust inherent between the individuals. As project challenges emerged each party was able to focus on their areas of expertise, trusting that the rest would be delivered, whilst tailoring to the specific requirements and collaborating for mutual success. For those parties outside of this established knowledge base it was necessary to build the trust and awareness of the issues and to engrain them as part of the team.
Our role as project manager is to keep the team focused on priorities and productivity. As with most projects it is the behavioural dynamics that generally dictate the outcome and when technical challenges occur this is when the project manager must step in to lead the team to the right solutions and ensure open communications are maintained.
As part of our commitment to the project we constantly challenge the assumption that sustainability and quality cost more and take longer. That’s the easy route. We play a role in balancing the design ethos and the drive for innovation with the commercial realities.
There is an inbuilt human behavioural trait that can steer us all to over optimistic reporting and the burying of risk. With enlightened client professional bodies drawing out these risks this flips to risk aversion which in turn can lead to a tendency to adopt the easy route and constrain innovation. We ensured these risks were identified and discussed at the beginning of the process, providing reassurance to all involved that we had prepared well for the challenges ahead.
Ultimately what we have learnt to date is that maintaining true collaboration requires:
- Establishment of a charter at the outset, putting collaboration at the heart of the brief
- Strong well- rounded leadership
- Maintaining a collaborative culture amongst all team members – especially at times of stress
- A culture built on openness & trust
- Use the ‘no surprises’ approach’ – encourage open and early sharing of concerns
- Challenging of status quo thinking – seeking solutions not issues.
- Continually work at reducing the uncertainty not just seeking to mitigate by risk transfer
- Motivate over blame – focus on the individuals and employ alternative dispute avoidance practices.