Quantity Surveyors as the key advisers

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The QS transformation

01 March 2006

Ross Davies

http://www.rics.org/Builtenvironment/Quantitysurveying/Quantitysurveyors/biz_qs0306.html

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Recent years have seen quantity surveyors become the key advisers on construction and development strategy; but they must continue to reinvent themselves to remain at the top, says Ross Davies in RICS Business.

Quantity surveying? It’s a great life," enthuses Chimwemwe Lungu. "If I had to sum up in one word why I think it’s a great life, then that word would be ‘opportunity’ – opportunity to travel, opportunity to earn good money and, above all, opportunity to be involved in a great variety of projects."

Lungu is a Senior Cost Manager at Turner & Townsend. Although only 26, she has had a successful start to her career, having been named Young Achiever of the Year at December’s QS News awards. And she is already putting something back into the profession through her mentoring of APC candidates.

Quantity surveying is on a roll – a big hitter in virtually every aspect of construction management and strategic property consultancy. But this was not always the case: the profession has had to work hard over the last 30 years to achieve the elevated status that it now enjoys.

So what caused this rise in the profile and importance of the profession?

Ed Badke, Director for Construction and the Built Environment at RICS, provides a summary: "QSs were once involved mostly with the measuring and valuing of construction work being carried out under a building contract," he says.

"They were handed the architect’s drawings, advised on likely costs, drew up tender documents itemising the work to be carried out, helped to let the construction contacts, valued work as it proceeded and prepared final accounts.

"Two large changes then came about that shook up this situation," continues Badke. "Firstly, in the early 1980s, QS firms found themselves facing severe fee competition.

Secondly, their clients began looking for new ways of managing contracts." It even began to look as if the QS might no longer be needed at all.

However, quantity surveying firms set out to tackle these changes using a very proactive approach. Many chased new business overseas, for example during the construction boom in the Middle East.

And, importantly, they began to extend the range of services that they offered to clients.

At first this meant developing project management services, followed by the provision of development appraisals, lifecycle costing, facilities management and other services.

Also required was a more collaborative approach to construction and an end to the contractor’s traditional game of treating the contract sum as his starting-point and then squeezing additional money out of the work.

At the same time, clients were looking for designs that already reflected the limits of the budget, rather than waiting for the QS to point out likely cost overruns later.

The result was that the QS stepped forward, and today provides complex, solution-based services on a scale that few could have imagined.

Although QSs do still provide traditional services, this is now throughout the world, and today they service new industries and offer a wider spread of services to a wider spread of clients. This is opening up new commercial possibilities for QSs, whether working for companies, client groups, contractors or other advisory and consulting firms.

Client relations

Ronan Champion, a partner at EC Harris who has carried out an in-depth study of change in the quantity surveying profession, says that the relationship between QSs and clients has also changed dramatically.

"Thirty years ago or less, clients used to select a quantity surveyor like they used to hire a carpenter," he says. "QSs were selling their trade."

And now? According to Simon Birchall, Managing Director of Bucknall Austin: "Today we work in a world in which our customers, both in the public and private sectors, are being challenged to do more for less, and supporting them to do that is our opportunity."

Birchall explains how the QSs of today are providing clients with strategic advice at a much higher level than was previously the case: "Twenty years ago, we might be employed to advise on the cost of a single building.

"Today, the major QS firms are also being called in higher up the corporate agenda to help the client do more for less.

"That can be by advising on how best to manage the entire estate or, at the strategic level, to advise the client on how its property portfolio might be better aligned with customer objectives. Strategic advice at entire capital programme level will entail issues such as prioritising spending, whether to outsource and whether to develop buildings or to let somebody else do it and lease them."

And it is not just in providing over-arching strategic advice that quantity surveyors have developed – they have also made a number of specialised areas of practice very much their own.

Ronan Champion’s own specialism of dispute resolution is one such area. "Nowadays, QSs act for parties in adjudication and litigation support, as expert witnesses, as mediators and as court-appointed experts or arbitrators," he says.

"And they have had to up their game, too, as the courts are now concerned to see that professionals enter the market with a thorough understanding of the relevant rules and procedures, as well as sound competence in their primary profession."

Technologically minded

Joe Martin, Executive Director of RICS’ Building Cost Information Service (BCIS) has witnessed the changes to the profession first-hand. "When I came into quantity surveying", he recalls, "the architect was the kingpin, the adviser on a project, and the QS took the crumbs from his table."

But as clients’ needs grew more complex, the QS moved up the food chain to become the lead consultant. This was partly due to the fact that many architects preferred to remain as the designer rather than become the project manager, says Martin.

The QS’s principal tools have also moved on from a scale rule and the architect’s drawings to ever more sophisticated electronic information management systems.

"As a practitioner, what you are selling these days is your skill in interpreting all the new data that is available and applying it for your client," says Martin. Practitioners certainly need to keep abreast of information and IT developments in today’s world where vast amounts of information are available at the press of a button.

He says that BCIS, with its huge database of costs covering more and more areas of practice, is often there with the data before surveyors realise how useful it can be.

"A few years ago, we were pushing whole-life costing data," says Martin, "but it took the Private Finance Initiative to interest some quantity surveyors in questions like how much it will cost to clean a building in 25 years’ time."

Protecting the profession

Although he is at the leading edge of IT himself, Joe Martin counsels QSs against getting so sharp that they cut themselves.

He advises surveyors to be careful not to chase the high-end services at the cost of parting company with the procurement work that was the basis of the profession’s fortunes. "Lose that function," he says, "and it may lead to losing your foothold entirely with some clients."

And there are other sectors who also have a foothold with clients who would be only too happy to move into areas of advice that are currently the domain of quantity surveyors.

Joe Martin cites as an example the purchasing professionals who belong to the Chartered Institute of Purchasing and Supply: "They can say ‘OK, if we’re buying the plastic cups and the paper, then buying a building is just part of the same procurement process – we’ll just write a specification and send it out’.

"Any QS worth his or her salt, however, will say that, like buying an IT system, one of the biggest causes of trouble in construction is the specification, particularly if the client is unsure of what he or she wants.

"Nobody is better placed than a QS in advising a client on his or her needs, but other kinds of purchasing professionals have powerful positions in the organisations of some customers."

Other professions also represent a threat to the work of QSs, for example accountants and management consultants who offer quantity surveying services. They may employqualified surveyors, of course, but dedicated QS firms will have to compete with them for staff.

RICS’ Ed Badke also observes the threat posed by the encroachment of other professions, and says that although quantity surveyors are currently seen as being indispensable construction and strategic advisers, they will have to keep on reinventing themselves if it is to be they, and not other disciplines, who continue to find high-value services to meet the evolving needs of clients.

"QSs may have to change as much over the next 10 years as they have over the last 30 if they are to exploit the opportunities and deal with the challenges that are already taking shape," he says.

"The profession managed such a transformation when demand for the old-style quantity surveyor slackened, and they may have to manage it again."

Recruitment timebomb?

Another challenge is ensuring that sufficient numbers of high-quality new recruits continue to enter the profession. "The situation is a bomb that’s already ticking," says Rob Tovey, RICS Director of Education.

"Although from 2001 onwards the number of people taking QS and construction management courses increased dramatically, the number of graduates coming forward has yet to do more than replace the baby-boomers – those born after the Second World War who are retiring now."

With huge projects such as Heathrow’s Terminal 5, London’s Crossrail link and the Olympics in Beijing and London, the opportunities for QSs, both in the UK and overseas, are piling up.

But there is a danger that there will not be enough QSs available to exploit these. The recession of the early 1990s reduced the number of jobs and traineeships offered, and interest in degree courses faltered.

While applications for quantity surveying courses have recently shot up by more than two-thirds, and there’s more interest in RICS-accredited courses, it all takes time to feed through into a ready supply of recruits.

This could have a range of effects, from employers paying for school-leavers to graduate as surveyors to ‘offshoring’, whereby cheaper, overseas qualified staff are hired and remain based overseas rather than in the UK.

Unless and until more students qualify in construction subjects, employers will have to plug the gaps in the ranks with young graduates who did not choose such courses when they went to university.

"The way I see it, the current skills gap must make quantity surveying a very attractive career option to any school-leaver looking to go to university or graduate who could undertake a Masters conversion course," says Rob Tovey.

Turner & Townsend’s Chimwemwe Lungu feels that employers should work more closely with schools and universities to help attract more young people into the industry, including offering placements to students as part of their course.

She cites her own firm as an example: "Turner & Townsend actively works with education institutions," she says. "The firm helps to review university course content and bring a much-needed employer’s perspective.

"It is also embarking on a series of presentations to schools to promote careers in the industry to school-leavers and their careers advisers."

Quantity surveyors have come a long way in the past 30 years. Where will they be in another 30 years?

Well, if employers, universities and RICS pull together to attract sufficient numbers of new entrants, and if today’s professionals work hard to stave off competition from other sectors and continue to adapt to changing client needs then there is no reason why the profession cannot still be top of the tree in construction and development advice in the future.

It will certainly be interesting to see where the profession goes next.

This article appeared in RICS Business, March 2006.

Wassalam.