Project manager, London.

Triangles office development in London, Docklands.

During the late eighties at the height of the boom, I worked on two eight storey office blocks in the heart of the docklands, just across the road from Canary wharf.

It was based on two traingular developments, hence the name! and had a curved facade to the road side, with all elevations being completely glazed, which at its time was totally new concept.

The company was Elliott Construction Ltd, which was a realy good family run buisiness, which at the time had a turnover of over 70M pounds, which then was a big figure. Our job was valued at £14M which is almost funny money now for such a project. It was my second contract with them and I had just graduated from University and was under the wing of senior contract managers who guided me in the big world of construction.

The site itself was totally occupied by the buildings, we had a small slither of land to one side where the offices were stacked up to two, three levels then on top of some the offices we had a landing stage which we could use as a temporary store for materials. Two tower cranes, one for each block, and sometimes two or three mobiles were going at any one time.

I dont know if its time, but building sites seemed to have a bit more characters about them, then. Or maybe its just that then I was out and about the site for most of my day running the project on the site. Now being more senior quite often you fly in, quick walk about then in a meeting room for the rest of the day, finally emerging late at night and then back to the airport to catch a plane, or a hotel room for another project the next day.

Having reminised, I also rememeber the arrival of the fax machine, which really did revolutionise site. Now we were instructed instead of writing letters and waiting for over a week for a reply we could send them immediately! Contractually this made and changed the project manager role over night. Before, you used the telephone (not mobile) at the end of each day to phone round all your trades and agrees scheduling of cranes and materials etc, now meeting mins could be sent out at the end of the day and contractual obligations confirmed in an instant.

Really when you look at this this really was a major time frame where project management then changed into a paper chasing flurry, of who could get out their fax of agreed times, numbers, materials, men etc confirmed the fastest. Before although meeting mins were taken as you did not see them until several days after you would work of your own notes taken in the meeting that were relevant to you, and then get on with it. Now you had this pile of faxs each time you came back to your desk. Which you had to read normally before you got on the phonbe because you wanted to see if anything had changed and you could discuss that as well.

Before long more and more time is spent on the paper work, and not on the site, and hence now the use of more people being involved just with documentation on site. Especially when you start adding the H&S, room data sheets, sign offs, checking mens documentation before they are allowed on site. Its amazing anything gets done at all.