Quantum Executive Director, Steven Beaumont, continues to look at the game of football and how Qatar’s construction industry may have more in common than the World Cup.
When football is on the television there are always former players who review the game, they explain what went wrong and how the game would have been so much different if they had been playing. Now, I’m not a footballer and I’m not a television presenter either, but this is the final whistle and I do want to reflect on the parallels and comparisons we have established over recent months.
Over the world, fans watched the World Cup in Brazil and it was the issues surrounding the construction of the stadiums and infrastructure in Brazil that inspired us to consider the similarities between football and construction. You will recall I said that football, like buildings and construction really isn’t rocket science, yet for many reasons we don’t seem to manage construction particularly well. This leads to unnecessary disputes marking the end of a period of time I referred to as the ‘honeymoon period’. Remember?
You see the rules of football are defined and fixed, however the rules for each and every building project will vary – there won’t be a single project under construction that is identical to the next and this is why construction is so unique. Unlike production lines in factories, construction projects are never the same and that is why it is so important to record how a project is constructed. I mentioned in the April edition about how the referee has a notebook to record incidents and that contractors should adopt a similar approach so they can demonstrate what happened in the future. Many contractors don’t adopt this approach, but here in Qatar, contractors are learning – which is good.
“Unlike production lines in factories, construction projects are never the same and that is why it is so important to record how a project is constructed”
I say it is good because we considered the construction of a stadium in the May article and compared this to an iconic stadium in the UK which was procured in a similar manner to how contracts are managed here in Qatar. However, the stadium in the UK is remembered and well-known for good games of football, but in the construction world, this stadium is remembered for the wrong reasons. The honeymoon period ended and the issues became disputes, but not just small disputes, huge ones and the stadium became a place for lawyers not football. You see, the risks on this project were all incorrectly managed.
Controlling risks is both an art and a science and we see it in construction and in football. Sometimes the risks are not calculated very well and the game is lost and sometimes the risks are misallocated leading to a much greater impact on a construction project. You see, good risk management is about planning and allowing the person or company best-suited to control the risk to manage it. I do hope the allocation of risks on the new stadiums has been thought through.
Throughout this series we have recognised that there are similarities between football and construction – making sure the teams are selected correctly, records of progress are made and risks are correctly managed. If all these elements are present in both a game of football and on a construction project then it should be a good game and a successful construction project. However, what happens when the construction project goes wrong and there are disputes. Well, do you remember how am I deal with this? After writing many volumes of documents for entitlement and ready for arbitration I make a movie!
The thing is, a picture can tell a thousand words and the brain can process 60,000 times more information from pictures than words. In addition, reading documents for arbitration isn’t the most fascinating subject and let’s be honest, our attention span can only be kept live for a certain amount of time. It is therefore better to make a movie about the dispute. In a similar manner to football, watching and re-watching the game you can see over and over the moments of genius, the moments of sadness and the moments when one player bites another. Writing is a great skill and reading is too, however watching the game of football rather than reading about it is much easier. It’s for this reason I make a movie about the dispute; it’s easier to watch the dispute than it is to read about it.
“Controlling risks are both an art and a science and we see it both in construction and in football”
Having compared football and construction, we have recognised that the principles of both games are very similar. We have seen that incorrect management can make a team lose just as incorrect management will influence the outcome of a construction project.
Now the final whistle is about to be blown and I believe we have learned that if we don’t think about the construction projects thoroughly we could be faced with problems and disputes. We don’t want to experience the issues faced in Brazil, or remember a stadium for the wrong reasons, so let’s manage the construction project like we are a team and want to win. Let’s record events and deal with them effectively, let’s allocate risks correctly and manage the projects well because after all, we don’t want to have to review and discuss the project afterwards just they have to review the game of football on television and explain how they could have played a better game. Let’s get it correct the first time.
Qatar 2022 is now eight years away and I am very much looking forward to being at the final. Equally I am looking forward to 2015 and the new series of articles to write. May I wish you all a happy and constructive 2015.
Steven Beaumont, Executive Director
Steven Beaumont, a Quantum Executive Director, is a member of the Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors and the Chartered Institute of Arbitrators. Steven has over 20 years of experience in both local and international construction project disputes and regularly delivers construction claims classes and lectures to industry professionals throughout the GCC. QGS is acknowledged as one of the leading management consultancies dedicated to serving the interests of national and international construction and engineering organisations.
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This article was previously published in the December 2014 edition of Business@Qatar Magazine published by the Gulf Times Newspaper