UK Construction Manager of the Year, Frank Connolly of Mace Group, chooses project management software, Powerproject by Elecosoft to run his award-winning programmes
Frank clinched the 2020 Chartered Institute of Building (CIOB) title for his team’s innovative work with the London School of Economics (LSE). They delivered a 12-storey block to a tight schedule and budget, despite major logistics challenges and unavoidable setbacks – an achievement made possible in part by the capabilities of project management software, Powerproject.
Pushing the boundaries with Powerproject software
Mace is an international consultancy and construction company, founded and built on exceptional people, a commitment to excellence and an entrepreneurial spirit.
For the past eight years, Frank Connolly has been the company’s operations director, spearheading many of Mace’s most ambitious projects. And he relies on Powerproject to deliver consistently high standards.
“I joined Mace to push the boundaries, and right from the start my team has been using Powerproject,” he said. “It’s the backbone of our delivery, from tender through to construction.”
The devil is in the detail
A flexible, adaptable approach is key to Mace’s planning capabilities.
“If you let things ‘just happen’ then you set yourself up for failure,” Frank said. “The devil is in the detail; highlighting where things are likely to go wrong and keeping close control.”
Frank and his team produce multiple timelines looking at different stages of each project, including a two-week plan for immediate logistics and an eight-week schedule for planning further ahead.
“We like to plan projects in two directions; producing a roadmap from start to finish and then working back through the programme to identify potential roadblocks. We always want to finish in style and Powerproject allows us to map progress up-to-the-minute.”
Collaboration is also critical to Mace’s success. Powerproject schedules are overseen by project leads across each discipline and shared with subcontractors, to integrate external requirements with overall delivery timelines.
Driving success through daily resource mapping
For Frank’s award-winning LSE construction project, his team relied on Powerproject’s project management software to coordinate a complex set of logistics.
The land-locked site could only be accessed down a single-file line and the busy road leading up to it was an access route for three other local construction sites.
“We created a forum with the other constructors to document high vehicle movement times and identify potential pinch points,” Frank explained. “Powerproject enabled us to map resources daily around these issues and it worked really well.”
With site access a challenge, Mace decided to prefabricate around 65% of the project offsite, including the steel frame, precast planks, brise soleil, reception, café pods and the UK’s first fully prefabricated sprinkler system. Frank and his team then used Powerproject to coordinate the delivery and installation of preconstructed materials.
“Success isn’t just down to what you do on site; it’s how you manage offsite activities as well,” Frank observed. “With Powerproject, we could track all our prefabricated assets and put resource against them.”
Continuing progress in challenging circumstances
As with any project, the LSE development faced several challenges during construction and Powerproject enabled Mace to mitigate the impact of these issues on the overall delivery schedule.
For example, part of the build coincided with LSE’s exam and graduation season and Frank’s team did not want to interrupt such a critical time with loud construction noises.
“Planning activities hour-by-hour using Powerproject meant we could carry on working without disturbing students – for example, we introduced acoustic barriers to reduce the noise level of plant machinery,” Frank said. “We saved more disruptive tasks for less sensitive moments.”
The team also faced a major setback when an offsite water main ruptured, flooding the building’s basement just as the slab pours got underway. As the water main served the nearby Royal Courts of Justice, it couldn’t be turned off – so Frank used Powerproject to develop an innovative solution to the flooding problem.
“While large pours are usually better, we could only continue if we focused on containing the flood while doing smaller pours,” he said.
“With Powerproject, we could see the effect this would have on our timeline, and very quickly resequence our programme to keep pushing forward while maintaining waterproofing and structural integrity. In the end we only finished five days behind schedule.”
Realising savings within the spirit of design
By combining ambition and vision with a strategic, technology-powered approach, Mace provided a masterclass in design-led value engineering for their customer.
When crowning Frank as Construction Manager of the Year, the CIOB said “his deployment of alternative methodologies, products and sequences realised savings while maintaining the spirit of the design”.
More importantly, the LSE was impressed with the end result, commissioning Mace to run the next phase of construction work off the back of this success.
“The client was delighted with the project and their estates director was even part of our support team throughout the CIOB Construction Manager of the Year process,” Frank said. “Winning the next phase of work is testimony to how well things went. We had a great team, a great supply chain and great software pulling everyone together in the right direction.”
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