how to win more work

Speaking at the webinar on technology in practice, held on 8 June, James Yeomans, director of digital innovation at Glenn Howells Architects said architecture had lagged behind other industries but was now ‘a technology magnet’ with many vendors seeking to offer and improve on products.

Technology is now pervasive in the industry, said Bret Tushaus, VP of product management at Deltek, covering every aspect from IT infrastructure and client management to design and project management.

But he added that, while emerging technologies such as data science, artificial intelligence and the internet of things were ‘certainly coming of age’, that did not mean companies should buy every shiny piece of software they see.

‘There’s a lot of great marketing material for certain pieces of technology that draw people in,’ said Yeomans. ‘But unless it can support the ideas and processes that you already have in place or that best support your business, it can perhaps draw you down a path that won’t suit you best.’

Yeomans recommends undertaking a SWOT analysis for companies to assess their technological needs. ‘If you can be really critical of yourselves, that will perhaps give you greater visibility of where opportunities lie and then the means to approach vendors to see how they can best support those opportunities,’ he said.

The right technology can help firms differentiate themselves from their competitors and win business, said Tushaus. According to the latest Deltek Clarity industry study, 63 per cent of UK architecture and engineering firms have lost potential business to competitors with more advanced technologies and 85 per cent believe investing in technology to improve operations will help them win more business.

It is also key to attracting and retaining talented staff, he said. ‘Good people are attracted to good technology and today’s workforce [is] accustomed to expect good accessible technology within the places they want to work.’

Teri Okoro, founder and director of north London practice Toca, said companies should reflect on their position in the technology adoption cycle. ‘You don’t want to be in the late majority,’ she said, ‘because that way other people have adapted and moved on and by the time you catch up you find that you’re losing out in terms of winning new work.’

As an ‘ideas-led practice’, Glenn Howells prioritised technology that would help its design studio work with its team of visualisers and modellers. ‘You want to make sure that what you’re looking into responds really well to your USP as a business,’ said Yeomans.

External collaboration followed closely behind. ‘Our ideas have greater value if they’re well tested both internally and externally and this  really helps people win work,’ said Yeomans. ‘If you can present ideas that look well founded and well tested, the chances are they’ll carry further and they’re the ideas and designs which hopefully clients buy into and want to take forward.’

High-quality design and modelling tools are invaluable, said John Storry, associate director responsible for technology at ORMS, in part because they enable collaboration and make the project more accessible and transparent for clients.

But technology also enables the company to generate fee proposals easily, analyse and learn from previous projects, allocate resources and manage its workforce.

And it has allowed ORMS to widen its offer and exploit new revenue streams. After getting BRE accreditation last year, the practice bought a suite of BIM services that it now offers to clients, contractors and even other practices as a sub-consultant. ‘It allows us to create all the documentation we need and helps with any outputs,’ said Storry.

Toca’s recently audited quality management system forced it to consider what it wanted to digitise and it decided to focus on a new customer and relationship management system. Okoro said this was vital ‘because you start to build up information about the way you interact with your clients, the way you are winning new business from them; everything is in a single place’.

Digitising elements of bidding and reporting was also beneficial. As well as enabling the company to monitor key performance indicators, data on project profitability and planning application success rates is being used to decide which bids to pursue, to make those that are pursued stronger and to learn from failures.

‘Increasingly on bids, we find that clients are asking us what technology we use,’ said Okoro. ‘So it’s important to be able to give them that confidence that yes you do have the technology to be able to deliver, particularly in the project management area. We also use technology to indicate how we can communicate with clients.’

Okoro said that, while technology can differentiate her company from its competitors, it is also keen to learn from others and share the knowledge it has gleaned. ‘We’re part of consortiums where we’ve been successful so we’ve had to work smartly in how we collaborate,’ she said. ‘We’re all benefiting by improving.’

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