Why Collaboration Is The Key To Faster Delivery Of New School Builds

Faced with an urgent task to deliver, a natural reaction is to narrow your focus: concentrate on what you need to do and avoid distractions. When it comes to delivering education building programmes faster, that’s exactly the wrong approach.

Knowing how to work effectively with a range of organisations is the key to producing better outcomes and delivering projects faster.

Stakeholder Engagement

It starts with effective stakeholder engagement to ensure that requirements and expectations are clearly defined. This avoids late design changes caused by incorrect assumptions or miscommunication.

Effective engagement at an early stage of the project also creates opportunities to unearth great ideas and ‘nice to have’ deliverables that people don’t always get the chance to put on the table until it’s too late.

Delivery Partnerships

The demands of modern educational building projects make delivery models such as Design, Bid, Build redundant. That type of process is too cumbersome for today’s projects.

Agile and responsive approaches are built through delivery partnerships that have shared values and a common commitment to achieving project outcomes. Partnerships also bring shared knowledge and experience that can refine processes, eliminate risk and waste, and deliver time and cost savings that multiply from project to project.

Supply Chain Management

The partnership approach extends to selecting and nurturing supply chain partners. It’s a priority for Osborne to engage local SME companies to deliver social value and investment in local communities.

On the one hand, this calls for strict entry criteria based on track record and quality assurance. This is balanced by widening access to opportunities through local meet the buyer events that are intended to help SME and micro businesses understand and negotiate the process of becoming a preferred supplier.

At Greenford School in Ealing, Osborne delivered 74% of the spend through SME’s and 47% through subcontractors within 10 miles of the site. Early engagement with locally-based supply chains is an effective way to improve responsiveness and speed up project delivery.

Tools and Processes

Effective working with other organisations is underpinned by technology. We use our BIM 360 platform to collaboratively share data along with the Revit BIM model. We also manage project communications through a shared cloud-based project management tool.

Osborne has applied this collaborative delivery model to multiple educational projects.

For more information take look at our resource centre or contact Richard King ([email protected]).