End users should contribute to the design process. This allows specialist requirements to be incorporated and improves end user ownership of the completed building. However, end users are not building experts, so the architect should take the lead on this process.
Emergency repairs need to happen quickly, before strategic decisions have been made about the future of existing buildings. They will often involve a significant investment of effort and money and so may become a permanent fixture of eventual brownfields projects.
Good University Councils run successful academic institutions, not major capital works programmes. But, during disaster recovery, they are suddenly asked to behave like a property owner, managing a construction portfolio well beyond the dollar value of many commercial operations.
This might be the ultimate crystal ball question. Based on our experience, we would certainly advise not to do large-scale repairs without a very thorough understanding of the costs and issues involved.
It’s far from a clean slate, but a major natural disaster can be a motivator for change on a scale that is rarely seen in universities.
We successfully operated a major construction programme within a live campus. At the height of the rebuild, more than 45% of campus was under construction with five sites managed by different contractors, and all the usual work of a university going on around them. This required innovative health and safety management strategies.
A broken market can require engagement and tendering processes than are quite different to what is expected during normal operations. But this may not be obvious to programme overseers located outside the disaster area, where business as usual conditions largely prevail.
You will almost certainly need to invest in additional skills to deliver a significant capital works programme. Appropriately skilled people will be in demand, and everyone will be dealing with their own personal disaster recovery experience.
Our relationship with Central Government was critical to our success, but it took time for them to become confident that we could manage the magnitude of the task ahead. A stronger pre-existing support network might have allowed us to move forward more quickly.
Business cases were prepared for each of the UC Futures projects, using the Better Business Case model adopted by the NZ Government. They were a prerequisite for Government funding, and this had the potential to drive a focus on up-front costs. But business cases can’t be just about getting the build budget approved. They need to be a reliable foundation for project delivery, and that requires an accurate reflection of scope.