Rob Manning, the president of CIBSE, talks to Paul Braithwaite about Collaborate and Deliver, the theme of his term of office, how he believes in Soft Landings, low carbon emisssions, how everyone is important in the building process and why each part of construction needs to work together.
Collaborate and Deliver is the focus of the CIBSE presidential address for this year and it is clear Rob Manning speaks straight from the heart.

The current CIBSE president and health sector leader, AECOM Building Engineering Europe, has no pretensions. He has been, he admits, around for a long time - 40 years - and not a lot has changed.

Times are hard, as might be expected in a recession, and could become tougher if some of the policies attributed to the new government come to fruition.

But it could be good for construction if it makes firms change their ways. That said, he knows that when times are tough then often firms revert to type.

'There are examples of companies which are trying to do the right thing. But without that culture permeating throughout the whole firm - and industry- nothing will really change.'

And he means everyone! 'We are all guilty - from top to bottom - in the whole of construction.'

But he says if you want to deliver buildings which are of a certain quality, aspirational, safe to be in, and meet our environmental objectives, everyone has to do their bit. Everyone is important.

A common objective of the building process is to maintain value throughout, he insists. But these higher aspirations are lost as time and costs click in so it is easy to lose the delivery of this low carbon economy.

So where would he make the first change in the Collaborate and Deliver process?

'The recognition of the importance of everyone in the chain.

'I believe controls designers and commissioning engineers have, for instance, been overlooked.

'Everyone talks about the designer and the contractor, and they are important, but these specialists are key to making the building work as it was designed to work.'

Manning is a believer in Soft Landings, the process where those who deliver a building are responsible for making it work as it was designed to do. However he admits to being 'one of a few crying in the wilderness'.

'Soft Landings is fundamental. It means that planning the hand-over should come at the beginning of the process.'

And contracts should reflect this! But it costs money to have contractors and consultants going back to check that the building is working as it should and will developers be willing to pay for it?

Manning's immediate response is that it costs money not to!

'This way, there is a period after the hand-over where the designer and contractor go back to the building and measure the performance and advise the client on what is going wrong. And should there be an anomaly in energy consumption, then they will look to find out what is wrong and bring consumption back in line with predictions.'

The extra cost of Soft Landings on the contract is nothing compared with the cost of the energy wasted if the building is not working correctly, he believes.

'I was called out to a building recently where a face and bypass damper were not set properly and, under the PFI contract, the contractor was facing fines as rooms were not cooling to the correct temperature.'

Manning says previously the consulting engineer was involved at all stages but now this does not happen as the contractor often has an independent certifier to witness the performance of commissioning and controls. So he went to the building not having been involved in anything but the design.

Consultant involved

If he were writing the contracts he would want the consultant to be involved in the whole process as well as in a post-occupancy evaluation process.

'Contractors are the most important people in the chain but they are not usually incentivised to deliver low carbon, low emission buildings.'

Manning insists that because there is usually no post-occupancy evaluation, there is no feedback and, often, the designers do not know whether they did wrong or, indeed, what they did wrong.

'You have to have the skills to assess an Energy Performance at the front end to design the building. Ideally, the people who design and build the building should be the ones to make sure it runs correctly.'

Soft Landing should be written into the contract. It may cost money but it will save many times that in energy efficiency.

'It will happen when enough people believe in it but that will not happen during my presidency.'

Which brings us neatly back to Collaborate and Deliver.

Egan and Latham had the time and the vision to step back and look at construction but most of us have a day job and get caught up in the day-to-day work of designing and engineering buildings, Manning maintains.

'There have been some spectacular instances of collaboration. It is the quality of the people in the team which makes collaboration happen. These people have proved it works but nobody really explains why and how.'

He believes the industry needs to stop and find out how it works.

'The only way I can see of changing the current method of delivery is to incentivise at every level, the profit pot.'

He asks: 'Can we find the forms of contract that incentivise collaboration and, from CIBSE's point of view, can we promote that and would RIBA and RICS promote it as well and would the contractors be happy with that too?'

What should be the incentives?

'Delivering on time, on budget, build quality and environmental objectives.'

Everything comes back to environmental objectives! The young engineers who are joining consultancies today are different.

'They are a cross between environmental activist, architect and engineer and many of them are coming into those early stages of concept design. They set the aspirations of the buildings.'

But he adds that what the industry also needs - and there are not enough of them - are engineers in three other disciplines such as the production designer who is the person who knows how high to put the light switches on the wall or how to select a grille or where to put a luminaire.

'This is not always seen as exciting but it is rewarding as you are dealing with people from every sector - contractors, suppliers and specialists - of the industry.'

He adds that construction also needs more technicians, the people who are capable of installing, for instance, a biomass boiler, or a district heating scheme.

'I wish we knew how many people we will need. That would help with the skills shortages.'

Dumbing down

He mourns the dumbing down of building services engineering courses at colleges such as his own alma mater, the South Bank Polytechnic, where he learned about the whole of building services engineering.

'The course was quite visionary in its approach but it is not happening now. Building services engineering is not sexy enough to attract enough students.'

In addition to supporting Building Engineering Physics as a university subject, CIBSE and the Royal Academy of Engineering are, hopefully, going to conduct an employer survey and Manning is pushing this.

I put forward my theory that building services engineers enjoy their jobs so much that few of them left the profession to go to other jobs and virtually none went into teaching so few schoolchildren learned about the profession.

'The people who are leaving the industry are just not being replaced.' And, yes, he admitted he and most of the engineers he knew loved the job and could not think of doing anything else.

So how would he stop the rot?

He is quite enthusiastic about Building Physics, one college's way of attracting building services engineers to the early design stage of the business. However, while this is pulling students in, to deliver the low carbon environment, Manning agrees the industry needs people to do what he called hard engineering.

'Building services must speak with one voice to government and to anyone who will listen.'

He believes construction czar Paul Morrell could be that voice and the dialogue with building services engineering about the opportunities for members to help deliver the low carbon buildings we need to produce. But there are other collaboration opportunities for building services and the wider construction industry.

For instance, there should be a form of contract where, if there is a dispute between two contractors on the same job, then this is settled without the project suffering.

'What we need to say is that 'we got it wrong' but now let's get on with the job and argue about whose fault it is later.'

There are so many people who all work for different companies there are bound to be problems. Again, Manning wants to, perhaps, include project insurance as well as a profit pot.

The frustration is these forms of contract will not come quickly but if CIBSE, RIBA, IME, and others can start to discuss and come up with contracts like this the door will be opened for the future.

Last point which Manning wished to discuss is 3-D modelling.

'Building Information modelling has been around for years but fewer than 50% of projects are using it. More work has to be done on this, even if the whole project is not in 3-D then some parts should be.'

He insists it should be used for plantrooms and risers.

'What the system does is intelligent modelling.

'For instance, a piece of ductwork would know it is 1600 mm long and 500 x 400 mm deep. It knows it can carry 1m³/s of air at 7 l/s and it knows its pressure drop.'

But it can also be used for maintenance parameters. 'For instance, that duct has to be cleaned once a year or that fan coil unit has to have the filter changed every six months.'

Manning realises this information does not help the designer but it could aid the contractor who has to prepare the operating and maintenance manual for the developer. But one or two m&e contractors are using this tool. They want to know the costs as soon as possible to see where, for instance, they can use off-site prefabrication to save money.

That is where the other advantages such as the cost of each unit and the time and cost of installation come to the fore. All these elements can be factored in.

Manning knows all this is done but at different stages. Here it can be done using one tool.

'But this means all the relevant staff must come together at the beginning which promotes collaboration in the long term'

Which is where we came in!

The full text of Rob Manning's presidential speech can be downloaded at www.cibse.org/content/documents/about/CIBSEPresidentialAddress2010.pdf