Conversation with CQS (From the Horse’s Mouth)

Adam Walker (AW) of Conduit Recruitment talks to Nick Neeks (ND) of WT Partnership, Sydney about some important issues that face the QS industry today. You can read this transcript.

 AW: Today we are talking to Nick Deeks who is a Director at WT Partnership in Sydney. I’m going to ask Nick some questions on issues that effect QS’s in the industry today. A big question that directors are always talking about is the quality of candidates that come out of universities and courses and their basic abilities as Quantity Surveyors, for example measurement skills. Nick, who is going to do all the measurement when nobody knows how to measure anymore?

ND: Well that’s a very good question. Whether the measurements are still going to be needed, I think is part of the problem, as well with lack of measurement training and education in universities. Also the fact that measurement is done in a different way now. It is being taught in a different way. You’ve got Cost-X, you’ve got on-screen take off systems, architects have got building information management in BMI Systems. So students aren’t taught how you and I were taught when we were in university - how to do it, with a scale rule, with a piece of paper and actually measure. That is one of the issues we find when people come out of university. Universities are applying to us to teach people how to measure and we have to send them away on a separate course !!! They want the employer to be training students in how to measure. The university course doesn’t actually teach the same measurement anymore.

AW: So are you saying the universities are not teaching people how to measure in a way that industry needs it?

ND: The subject matter of the university course doesn’t have the measurement content that it used to have. When I did my degree, there was Measurement 1, 2, 3, 4 etc. There was measurement every semester, every year. Now I think measurement takes up one semester of one year and that’s it. There’s hardly any measurement training any more.

AW: So you need people to be able to measure in a certain way, but the university course is not teaching them how to do that.

ND: No, they are not teaching them how to do it full stop, not even in a certain way, because the course has become amalgamated into a Project Manager, Construction Manager, Development Management course. It all becomes as one. It becomes a construction management degree. So the QS component is only one component of the degree, whereas the degree used to be a degree in Quantity Surveying.

AW: Yes, a big issue indeed. As far as solutions to that, and maybe solutions can come from institutions like the AIQS and the RICS, what do you think are the main goals or should be the main goals and focuses of institutions like the AIQS and the RICS today?

ND: Well the AIQS do run a course once every year- a long weekend or a 4 day course of intensive measurement. I think this year the RICS have joined with the AIQS to produce that course. As far as what the institutions should be doing, they should be promoting Quantity Surveying in the universities and in the schools, which is the subject we have been talking about for years, of trying to get people into the profession and trying to promote the whole profession. It is not as well known here as it is in the UK. When we have sat on the committee before with the RICS, we have talked about them going into schools and talking to students then. Once they’re in the universities it’s generally too late. They’ve already decided what they’re doing. They’re already on a course. So its getting earlier and earlier and the RICS do have those “meet and greet” evenings with students, which maybe they may not be as successful as they used to be. Its difficult trying to get people to come along. Maybe there is a sense of apathy from students that don’t want to attend. Maybe they just don't know in the first place.

AW: On that, would you recommend a career in quantity surveying to your children?

ND: Well having just damned the whole thing, actually I would. I would say it is a good career. I was at the University of NSW several months ago giving a presentation to some first year students on this subject and talking about overall Quantity Surveying and just the interest factor in it . It is a good, solid, well-respected profession and there is always something to learn. It keeps you on your toes and it’s something you’re never going to get totally bored of. You may get bored of the particular subject matter of the industry that you work in - it may be commercial, it may be residential - but that just ebbs and flows depending on the government stimulus, as an example at the moment. Most don’t want to work on residential or schools, but you just have to go where the market is. But it’s a long term profession. You can get a good grounding, there’s a good career path there, and you can travel the world. It’s a qualification that you can take you anywhere in the world.

AW: Is the QS service provided in Australia different to that provided in the UK?

ND: I think it is different but I have been here for 15 years, so I can’t talk about the services provided in the UK at the moment. However I think the role here in Australia is a lot more pre-contract.

 AW: What does that mean?

ND: A lot more cost planning. All of the smarts and intellectual input is provided getting the project up and running and getting the project up to appointment of a contract. The post contract period generally is not quite so important as involved as the pre contract. In the UK its different, I was just chatting with a couple of guys last week and their experience was nearly all post contract. So there are obviously bigger jobs, more involvement on a post contract role, and people would be out on site. These guys have worked 4 or 5 years on terminal 5 and all they have done is contract letting and variations and post contract work - never been anywhere near a cost plan. In Australia its quite different – in the UK they have an in depth post contract role, whereas the post contract involvement here is not so in-depth.

AW:But what would you also say about even before the cost planning starts? I think about when I used to be a QS in the UK and the QS’s used to get involved with the appointment of other consultants etc.

ND: Oh certainly. I think the position of the QS in the overall design team is different here. You used to be the first point of contact for the client. So you were the lead consultant. You would be involved in procurement and appointment of the architect and the engineers and the design team and you were the clients’ representative in a lot of ways. We get that with some of our clients- some of them worldwide clients, some of them from Asia, prefer us to be the main contact point. But generally it’s the Project Manager. It used to be the Architect, probably now more so the Project Manager. The QS just gets pulled in depending on how strong the Project Manager is and what he’s trying to achieve. But more often that not, you’re brought in to try and mop up the cost issues or resolve a problem as apposed to provide the smarts before we get a problem.

AW: When I used to be QS in Australia, a value engineering exercise or a value engineering workshop was often just cost cutting exercise because a project had gone over budget.

ND: Yes, you don’t have them so much now. You have them with RTA projects, government projects will still go through that role, but generally value engineering is a cost cutting exercise. It’s probably a mis-term. They call it value engineering, but where is the engineering? Its just value. Value reduction!




AW: Exactly. But that sort of stuff should be done at the beginning surely when you’ve got a sketch design.

ND: As long as some detailed and rigorous cost planning is done and options are looked at, then you shouldn’t get to the point of needing to do value engineering.

AW: OK. You’re an expert at building services and infrastructure. Just on the building services side, in Australia, when will building services costs be subject to the same cost planning rigor as building structure and fabric costs?

ND: I don’t know that it ever will. I’ve been here for nearly 15 years and in the UK engineering services was a major component of any QS role. QS firms would always offer engineering services and they were a fee earning service. I came here with the objective of trying to raise that profile. It’s a role that engineers undertake. It’s a value role and its one that we do and its not one that many QS firms actually provide. But it becomes more of an add on or an added value. And now it’s nearly 15 years and it hasn’t ever become so rigorous as structures or architectural cost planning. Clients like it, but I’m not sure that engineers are totally accepting of QS taking that component of their service away from them.

AW: But do engineers have detailed estimates or is it mainly just a cost plan rate based on the last similar job they did?

ND: Oh most of the jobs are just cost plan rates. We just did a job and there’s tens of millions of dollars in engineered services in there and the consultant had a rate per square meter for mechanical and that was it. This was on primitive design and we worked our way through the various stages of estimates and there was nothing there. It was just a rate and there was nothing behind it.

AW: So if you have a $50 million job, and $25 million of that are services, and you were talking about doing cost plan analyses of various options, and let’s say you can save 10%, why wouldn’t you do that to the services?

ND: Well you should do that. It’s just that there aren’t that many engineering services QS’s in Australia and its hard to try and promote it as a fee earning service on its own. It becomes an extra service. So you can put a submission in and offer engineering services as an extra. You’re not necessarily getting any more fees from it.

AW: It just seems odd. Why don’t the clients see value in inspecting the engineering services?

ND: I’m sure they do see the value but they don’t want to pay for it. They don’t like to pay for the extra service. So we have engineering services QS’s at WT Partnersip and they are full time employed. We service every office in Australia out of our Sydney office. In our Hong Kong office we have a team of 10 engineering guys up there, but it’s more of a UK model up in Asia.

AW: When you are interviewing a prospective QS for your business, what do you look for?

ND: If it’s a face to face interview, first impressions count for so much. Presentation and communication skills - because the role of the QS is very client facing. We want everyone to be in the initial stages, in the pre-contract stage working with the client. They have to attend more meetings. As well as having a solid ground in quantity surveying and reasonable education, they need to be presentable. They need to be able to write a decent report and put themselves across. So presentation has got to be one of the major factors. A solid education is the second. And experience.


AW: It sounds like you need experience in cost planning though?
ND: Experience in cost planning for us is definitely essential but it doesn’t matter if they haven’t done it necessarily in Australia, because it’s a transportable skill that you can take anywhere. That just becomes understanding rates and pricing, but the principles are to be able to put a cost plan together.

AW: How do you think climate change will affect the QS service that you deliver to your clients in the future?

ND: Well that’s a good question. We’ve just recently had our AGM and I had to put a paper together on carbon and ESD and carbon trading. I don’t doubt that there’s going to be a change in the service that’s provided. The more that the clients become aware of the emission trading scheme or pollution reduction schemes, of monitoring their energy usage and the green house emissions, then there’s a role there for a QS. The RICS has produced the best practice paper on managing carbon management of real estate. It’s not clear where there is a definite role for QS. There is a role for a surveyor somewhere in the whole picture. We are currently exploring those possibilities and looking at where it is but we still need to get the emission trading scheme through Parliament. Its going to be people like big shopping centre owners and they become first order point of obligation, which then they are legally bound to do an emission reduction and someone needs to monitor that. Someone needs to calculate the embodied carbon energy in each building, which we need to offset over a period of 10 or 15 years of operating life, of what that cost is. It comes into the whole ESD, with trigeneration, black water, recycling. They all become issues that we have to become aware of not just the initial cost, but the ongoing cost and maintenance and life cycle.

AW: If part of measuring a building’s carbon footprint has to do with how much energy it took to make the materials etc then surely a QS is going to be the only one who can quantify it?

ND: There are parts of it that QS can do, and parts that QS can’t do. It becomes very technical. I was speaking to a guy in New Zealand a couple of weeks ago about it and they were talking about a project in Auckland and they were going to get the materials from Wellington but it actually ended up on the life cycle as a carbon calculation, cheaper to bring it over from Perth. The capital cost was obviously more, but the ongoing cost of the embodied energy was less because of the way the manufacturing process of the material in Perth produced less carbon than the manufacturing process in Wellington. From Wellington to Auckland is relatively close; from Perth to Auckland is a huge distance. But it picks up all things- its fuel, its transportation.

AW: But surely QS’s are pretty much in the box seat to run that and manage that and be able to work it out and put it on paper and present it.

ND: I think the QS would need to work hand in hand with some other suitably qualified people. There are certain things that QS’s can do and you are putting statements in front of clients about potential costs over an 8-10 year period and you are making a definitive statement. There are liability issues involved. There are certain components of it that a QS can do but to be honest I haven’t really got to the bottom of it. The RICS is looking at it and it’s at the forefront of everyone’s mind but we haven’t pinpointed exactly where it’s at. But there is something there so it’s something we have all got to be aware of. The more you read about it, the more it’s just an issue that everyone’s going to be across.