Investment in quality pays off for Hub North Scotland

A collaborative approach, good communication, and a focus on quality helped Hub North Scotland deliver the Countesswells Primary School project in Aberdeen three weeks ahead of schedule, on budget, and with zero recorded defects at handover, operations director Ewen Fowlie told the joint GIRI/CQIC meeting in Edinburgh in July.

Countesswells is a two-stream primary school for 434 pupils with a 60-place nursery. Hub North Scotland partnered with Aberdeen City Council to procure and deliver the school through its design and build agreement. Morrison Construction was the main contractor.

The project ran from 2019 to 2023 and continued throughout the pandemic with no programme impact and managed to mitigate the impact of worldwide inflation on the budget, despite a significant level of change requests. Key to the project’s success were high levels of collaboration between teams and effective communication, particularly around non-conformance reports (NCRs), said Ewen.

“Non-conformances were raised at the earliest stage possible in line with GIRI’s concept of getting it right from the start. We encouraged the team to report issues rather than hide them and kept clear records of non-conformances, tracking resolution to ensure they were closed out. Project directors also received NCR information monthly. The project was handed over in March 2023 with no current issues and low levels of defects reported since handover. These were signed off in March 2024 and there are no current issues.”

Pre-construction phase

The focus on quality started in the pre-construction phase. “We had clear, strong leadership and chain of escalation. Anyone on the project could raise an issue to the core team for resolution. We also had a clear vision, strategy and key drivers and ensured everyone knew what these were. We returned to these regularly to ensure we were delivering against the drivers.”

Collaborative brief development between the client, Hub North Scotland and the main contractor was another key factor in the project’s success, said Ewen, as was a focus on performance from the outset. “We continually reviewed team performance. When issues were raised, we were able to dig into those performance issues, which were mostly related to resource. We also held regular quality forums and audits. Every month project managers produced a quality report against the CQIC’s 12 ambitions to ensure they were being achieved.”

Team continuity was another big factor, Ewen said. “This was felt to be very important. The team that started the project was the same team that handed it over.” He added that the project made several advance supply chain appointments at the very start to ensure early contractor involvement, including the lead contractor, the steel contractor, and the cladding contractor.

Design errors were reduced through clash detection using BIM and manual review of drawings by the whole team. And time was allowed in the programme schedule to resolve errors and close out defects and snagging. “Feedback across industry is that driving the quickest programme leads to quality issues, so we took that onboard. And it is something we now do on every project. When we receive tender responses, we make sure tier ones have an allowance for getting the quality standard right.”

The project also tried to move away from the ‘lowest price’ contract, with a reasonable market test and affordability caps. “We went for the contractors and sub-contractors that we knew would give us a quality product.”

Construction stage

Ewen said that a positive culture on site contributed to the success of the project. Managers were respected by operators and vice versa, contributing to an open attitude to raising quality issues, and managers were also promoted tradesmen, so operatives were motivated and could see clear career progression. 

“We also engaged with the end user from the outset. The education teams were involved in the design and we created sample rooms so they could understand what these would look like. The aim was to mitigate changes and ensure that when we got to site, the design would produce what the client wanted.”

He added that completion criteria were agreed up front. “Everyone knew what they had to do to sign the building off.” Unified standards were employed across the project, and a lessons-learned review took place at key milestones.

Room for improvement

Despite all these measures, there were still areas for improvement, said Ewen. This includes the use of one aligned quality plan rather than each contractor working to their own, and ensuring a better global understanding of the hub process. And although the completion criteria were agreed up front, the team didn’t go through these during the stage two process to ensure the criteria were achievable. 

He added that more face-to-face meetings will be held in future. Covid-19 meant the project had to resort to online meetings and email for much of the time, and the pandemic also limited the involvement of the education teams. “We ended up with just one person signing off all the drawings. Once the project started on the site and the education teams came back, there were lots of little changes requested, such as the location of sockets.”

The other major issue was around the training of the facility’s janitorial teams. Four different teams were trained, but the team in place after handover was a new team with no training. “As a result, we offered to do an energy-in-use study after six months and levels were through the roof. Air con and heating were left on during the holidays and lights were on 24 hours because no one knew how to switch them off. This resulted in an initial energy cost issue for the client, which has been resolved through more diligent BMS training.”