SMART BUSINESS
WHAT DO COMIC BOOKS
AND COMPLIANCE HAVE IN COMMON? With the amount of ‘red tape’ involved in securing approvals for construction projects – and in turn ensuring that proponents are in compliance – John Callaghan asks if it would be simpler if all contracts were translated into pictures, not words.
Y
ou’ve won the bid to design a piece of infrastructure set to change how quickly commuters get to work. It’s a major project and your designs are heralded as extraordinary. You can’t wait to see the end product come to life – but wait you’ll have to, and so will the city! The design development and approval procedures, with its changes, recommendations and further compliance reviews, changes and recommendations, is a “spaghetti bowl” of processes that, despite the project’s purpose, is everything but quick. Sound familiar? We want to ensure excellence and accountability, yet all these checkpoints, wrapped up in complex and challenging contractual and commercial frameworks can end up making one big rabbit hole – complicated and congested at best. In today’s complex world of procurement, it seems at times we can build a bridge quicker than we can design one. On the flip side, given our species’ track record of environmental flagrancy and the ever increasing loss of business trust, someone has to be the gatekeeper and assure the voiceless are spoken for. Somewhere economic growth has to be filtered through the sieve of environmental and social impact. Somehow we have to ensure history doesn’t repeat itself, and the essential checks and balances hold business at bay. After all, it’s not much use closing the gate after the horse has bolted. But what if there was another way? Rather than overhauling the current systems, how about redesigning them? Take contracts as an example. Imagine if they were reduced to their core principles and read like comic strips, rather than telephone books. Imagine if they were written to encourage the behaviours we so desperately need to get our economies moving (such as innovation and creativity) instead of a litany of punitive actions that will befall those who dare suggest a change to their terms for the better. 76
Quarry October 2019
Would it be much simpler if contracts were in picture form rather than the written word?
Think of what could be unleashed if contracts balanced our efforts and didn’t bottleneck them. We may end up proving that, even in the complex world of projects, less is still more.
PROCESS NIGHTMARE Procurement and design processes can often feel like the Encyclopaedia Britannica of rules and roadblocks – smothered in fingerprints, with far too many fingers in the pie. They are typically a convoluted approval process of multiple gatekeepers that cause delays – in part from lack of clarity of roles and responsibilities, but more around multiple hurdles to jump for multiple gatekeepers. In a world where the common vernacular is “move fast”, the time taken to realise a project or initiative often means it runs the risk of being out of date by the time it hits the starting blocks. Being first to get a foothold and stake your claim on the “next big thing” is essential for success – yet project approvals and complex procurement processes work in the opposite way. This not only raises the
cost for delivering the infrastructure but it raises the risk of running late and putting a dampener on the very economic activity that revenue-strapped governments are so desperately needing to stimulate. Too often, agreements for major projects are too complicated for their own good. Those who develop the agreement often lose sight of the original purpose and intent of the project and when it’s written to focus on penalties for lack of compliance, the appetite for innovating quickly becomes zero.
NEVER TOO OLD … Alternatively, imagine if contracts could be understood in intimate detail, including their intent. Imagine if your four-year-old son or daughter could make sense of one and actually enjoyed reading it. Imagine if the contract encouraged innovative behaviour and ideas to save time and money and that those ideas could come from anyone on the project? Believe it or not, it may be possible to take 300 pages of penalties and liabilities, of
