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BUSINESS NEWS ARUP EXPANDS BAY AREA PRESENCE IN DOWNTOWN OAKLAND Arup , a global design and consulting firm, announces the opening of its newest office at 1330 Broadway in Oakland. The office – covering 16,000 square feet – will house a team of 50 engineers and consultants with expansion space for 100 staff. “Arup is excited to grow our Bay Area presence to better serve our East Bay clients and to be part of the Oakland community,” said Aidan Hughes, principal and group leader of Arup’s San Francisco office. Arup Oakland will open as a multidisciplinary office, providing professional services including building and infrastructure engineering and consulting services. The office leadership team
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will consist of John Worley, Joseph Collins, Jacob Wood, and Sara Paul. John Worley, principal and office leader in Oakland, said, “We wanted to expand our footprint across the bay for a while. We currently have 300 people in San Francisco. Expanding to Oakland provides growth opportunities for our team and better service for our East Bay clients. Looking ahead, the Oakland office will continue to grow as part of the city’s dynamic growth.” Arup’s Oakland office expansion was a collaboration with TMG Partners, Gensler, Skyline Construction, and Cushman Wakefield, and highlights the firm’s collaborative culture and history of innovation.
MARK ZWEIG, from page 1
on the project know what the client expects. Most AEC firms do a horrible job at this. The principal and maybe the PM know what the client wants but everyone else working on the job operates from assumptions. This KILLS quality! 3)Assign the “right” people to the project. Again, more easily said than done. But it takes some thought and some common sense, and maybe even some reshuffling of responsibilities across all of your projects to match up the people on your project team with the client they will be working for. It’s critical to the clients’ perception of your ser- vice quality to do so. 4)Make sure you hire the right people in the first place so you have them there when you need them. If you don’t have the right kinds of people on staff there’s no chance you will get them on your project. Be picky! Insist on hiring people who not only have the requisite technical skills but also the soft skills needed for success in this busi- ness. Those include responsiveness, the ability to communicate successfully verbally and in-writing, and a track record of working well as a part of a team. These things are extremely crucial to get high marks on quality of service from a client. 5)Develop “appropriate” standards and then make sure they are applied. I say “ap- propriate” because one standard doesn’t apply to all clients and all project types and trying to do that when it can’t be done is the undoing of many QA/QC processes. People realize the standard isn’t appropriate and just give up on the entire process (bad). You also have to be sure – just from a liability perspective – that whatever standards you say you will follow you follow every time. 6)Specialize! Specialization leads to higher quality because everyone can anticipate typi- cal problems and has experience in overcoming them. Many design and technical pro- fessionals still fight specialization – particularly smaller firms – but it is to their detri- ment in terms of both profitability and quality. 7)Celebrate quality successes. There’s data to show what a great project you did. Real evidence of success. The client has called or written gushing about the service you provided. Publicize these things! Share them throughout the firm. And include your subconsultants, too, if they deserve some of the credit. Feel good and enjoy your quality victories. 8)Learn from quality failures. I have never been a big believer in the mantra of “fail early, fail often.” I would hope we can learn from our previous mistakes as well as those of others and not have to learn every single thing ourselves from scratch. I also think some quality errors (think Jack Gillum and the Kansas City Hyatt Regency disaster) can kill people. Mistakes are bad and to be avoided if possible – but if we can’t always be a success we do need to ask “what went wrong” and “how can we avoid that in the future.” It seems like there are a million “issues” that can lead to quality problems. Conversely, there are many small things you can do to improve the quality of your firm’s offerings if you really want to! MARK ZWEIG is Zweig Group’s chairman and founder. Contact him at mzweig@zweiggroup.com.
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THE ZWEIG LETTER February 12, 2018, ISSUE 1235
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