Tom Barton Award 2024 winner announced

Pedro Carvalho Costa from WSP has won the 2024 Tom Barton Award at the ICE Awards. An associate and structural engineer working on the HS2 Old Oak Common project, Pedro won the award for his work on the development of WSP’s Changes and Clarifications Register, a smart excel spreadsheet that uses VBA language to record all the information related to a change or clarification to every drawing in the project to ensure the correct information is used.

The challenge

The Old Oak Common transport superhub in West London is one of the largest construction sites in London. When complete, it will have 14 platforms with a capacity to link an estimated 250,000 daily commuters to the Midlands via high-speed rail services, the West Country via the Great Western Main Line, and central London and Heathrow Airport via the Elizabeth line. There are numerous stakeholders, and multiple sub-contractors and design teams. WSP is the lead designer on the project.

Pedro explains that on a project of such scale, with numerous work packages progressing at different speeds, it was challenging to record and effectively communicate every design change or clarification. “This became increasingly important once elements of the design started on site, while other aspects were still undergoing design changes. With a robust assurance process and most drawings assigned to multiple work packages, it isn’t possible to change a drawing for one work package while it is going through the assurance process for another. So we started issuing Design Development Notes (DDNs) to enable contractors to progress with construction.”

The challenge, therefore, was ensuring that everyone knew what was current between the drawings and DDNs. “For example, WSP might develop a design for wall reinforcement, then the contractor does the detailing, which is reviewed and commented on by WSP. But the people doing the designing, reviewing, and responding to requests for information (RFIs) are all different, and on a project this size it is hard for individual team members to keep track of what everyone is doing.”  

Compounding this were multiple spreadsheets for RFIs and DDNs, which were lengthy to fill in and did not require information to be entered in a standardised format. Team members also had to speak to various people to get the full picture of their current piece of work, slowing down the RIBA5 workflows and increasing the risk of error.

The solution

As WSP’s RFI lead, Pedro led an effort to streamline the process of recording changes and clarifications, as well as communicating these to the relevant people, via a Changes and Clarifications Register (CCR). “We knew that once site activity increased, we could face issues,” says Pedro. “Karsten, my team leader, asked me to take a look at the Excel documents, and I started playing around with the spreadsheets and macros to see what I could do to improve the situation.” 

Working in collaboration with team members, Pedro developed the Changes and Clarifications Register. Its main purpose is to link drawings with any RFIs and site queries and sketches in one place and provide clarity as to which piece of information contains the correct and most up-to-date design.

“Each line of information in the CCR contains the origin of the change/clarification (EWN, RFI, instructed change, etc), the design area, work package, drawings affected, intended recipient, etc. For example, any team member issuing pieces of information externally must now log all the affected drawings and their status, while another team member reviewing a package can use the CCR to understand which sketches/DDN/RFI responses affect this package.”

To minimise the chance of human error, the CCR has been built in such a way that it requires people to populate every required field in a standardised format rather than partially filling in information. “For example, each of our DDNs requires a unique number. With the previous spreadsheet, if people were in a hurry they would just take the next number without inputting the required information, which could cause duplication. The CCR uses macros to require that you follow certain procedures when entering information, and we can be100% certain that all the information is there and correct.”

In addition, any sketches shared with external parties require a unique number that can only be obtained once full registration in the CCR is completed.

The impact

It's a change that has made a big impact, says Pedro, and the advantages of the streamlined system have become more apparent as work has progressed and more packages have gone to site. “We realised early on that the process was not as robust as it could be, and once the project became more complex, it would have been very tricky to keep track of everything. Now communication of information is more efficient, traceable, and standardised, significantly decreasing the possibility of confusion arising from misinformation, which could ultimately lead to unintended errors in construction.”

The register is also regularly distributed to the sub-contractors, increasing transparency and advising on the up-to-date/superseded status of drawings and sketches.

That’s not to say there wasn’t some initial pushback, as there always is to change, and Pedro and his team had to explain the advantages of the CCR and why it is was important to use it. Winning the Tom Barton award has certainly helped highlight the benefits of the CCR within WSP. In fact, the CCR has been such a success that it is already being used by other disciplines at Old Oak Common, and it is ready to be used on WSP’s other new large-scale projects.

“We are also working on an internal project to move the tool from an Excel spreadsheet to a web-based tool, which would make it even easier to deploy in future large-scale projects.”

It was Karsten Kramer, WSP’s RIBA5 structures team lead at the time at the HS2 Old Oak Common project, who nominated Pedro for the award and was involved in guiding the development of the tool. He says: “It is crucial for the team and other stakeholders to be able to link drawings, sketches and RFIs to each other and to understand what is current at every point in time. This is especially important when there is a need to communicate changes while parts of the project are still undergoing design and drawings are locked. Pedro’s creation is a big step towards making everyone’s work easier, faster, and ultimately safer.”

Read about the 2023 Tom Barton Award winner

Read about the 2022 Tom Barton Award winner