When Mike Hanson moved to New Zealand from South Africa in 1987 to start a job as a Quantity Surveyor at RDT Pacific, the former premier league cricketer soon discovered how much team sport would help him transition to the Kiwi way of life.

It has been a long innings for Mike, who is not out yet. Mike is a Technical Director at RDT Pacific with 37 years’ experience in the Aotearoa New Zealand built environment. Here he shares some highlights and learnings, and why we need leadership and collaboration in the construction industry.

 

What did you encounter when you arrived in New Zealand and joined RDT Pacific?

When I arrived in New Zealand with my family in 1987, there were very few South African immigrants and quantity surveying wasn’t established here in the same way it was in South Africa.

There were different ways of doing things, at work and outside of work, and while I had good skills to share, I recognised I needed to start by building relationships and understanding the culture.

From playing cricket with Kiwis in South Africa, I had a taste of what I was in for. I had experienced that New Zealanders, like South Africans, had a great love of sport and the outdoor life. Playing cricket and squash helped my transition into the Kiwi way of life.

 

What were your career hopes in 1987?

I really just wanted to get my foot in the door and work my way back up the career ladder to where I was when I left South Africa. I was a profit sharing associate in a big company.

It was a big move for our family, but we wanted to get away from the political situation and bring our kids up here. It didn’t take me long to get back to that sort of role, but I wasn’t counting on how my expectations would change the way I wanted to work.

 

 

What was a defining moment for your career?

I have changed and grown with RDT Pacific. RDT was a traditional quantity surveying firm when I joined, but then we started to move into project management, capital intelligence (property advisory and strategy) and sustainability advisory which now sits across everything we do. Because I have grown with the company through those changes, it feels like a different company now with the same good values.

I joined at a great time. We were just starting to get into some project management work and one of the big projects that I worked on alongside David Prentice was Te Papa. That opened my eyes to how we could work in better ways.

As the Quantity Surveyor for the project, it was a bit frustrating, but we were given a bit of freedom to bring in new ideas. We introduced a system for better management of documentation, based on the Common Arrangement of Work Sections (CAWS), a construction working convention used in the UK. It required quite a collaborative approach. We changed the traditional trades to work section (sub trade packages) and achieved a more coordinated system. I worked closely on that system with the late John Sutherland, a director of Jasmax, and this work formed the basis of Masterspec specification systems.

We introduced value management workshops – a structured set of processes in partnership with Dr. Roy Barton, a facilitator from Australia. These processes contributed to the project being completed on time and on budget.

That was a turning point. I realised then I needed to make the transition to project management to grow my experience and to be more influential on projects. It was the difference between working on a part when you could have more contribution to the whole.

 

What are some of the big challenges the built industry is facing right now?

In New Zealand, Kiwi ingenuity rules and we can be highly innovative and do amazing things. I’ll never forget witnessing the five-storey concrete and brick Museum Hotel being moved 120 metres back from the Wellington waterfront on wheels to make way for Te Papa in 1993.

We are innovators and we often have a great vision, but we risk not building on what has already been proven overseas.

Working in the construction industry is challenging because it is fragmented, highly specialised, and can be adversarial. We can be reluctant to embrace standardisation, which can lead to wastage and issues when coordinating documentation, and ultimately, disputes.

Our industry has lurched from massively innovative, wonderful stuff to the most dreadful leaky buildings and untenable amounts of waste. There is also an astonishing amount of rework that happens due to a lack of coordination and professionalism.

If we focus only on one part of the system, it can be to the detriment of our whole system, and this is a problem in the industry.

 

What needs to change?

The New Zealand building industry hasn’t been great at self-regulation and needs leadership. The Government plays a large part in this, accounting for around 20% of the spend in the building industry, supported by the private sector.

There are some positive signs. In 2019, MBIE [Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment] started to define the various procurement methods to put some standardisation in place.

Government agencies are now reviewing the necessity of sometimes hundreds of special conditions in the New Zealand Standard 3910 [Conditions of contract for building and civil engineering construction], to bring it back to what it is meant to be, a standard. The Construction Sector Accord Transformation Plan 2022-2025 is committed to drive greater standardisation and consistency across construction projects, to deliver fairer risk allocation and improve productivity.

We have tools in place now to improve the coordination of design information and beyond, for manufacturing and assembly. This means that building information modelling informs design, and this same model can be used by the contractor to sort out construction documentation before facilities managers can use it to run the building for the next 30 years.

We have these tools, but we need people to use them in a coordinated way.

If we can maintain a system to capture all the information for a building project in one place, we can eliminate a lot of frustration. Somebody has got to pull it all together.

 

If you could go back and have your career all over again, what advice would you give your 20-year-old self?

You are only as good as the last job. Keep focused, do your best to understand the changing industry, and ensure you add value to the process and not act as a post box.

When we work collaboratively, we don’t just move information from one point to the next. I was told by a client recently this is one of the reasons they keep coming back.

Looking back, I think I might have tried to have got more involved and help pull our fragmented industry together earlier. Earlier in my career, I wasn’t focused on the bigger picture, I ignored the wider industry, but the industry needs some help and I know that now. I’m going to devote more time to try and get stuck in and make some change for the better.

For example, I have committed to a three-year pilot panel for the Engineer to the Contract. I have also assisted the NZIQS [New Zealand Institute of Quantity Surveyors] with their review of the NZS 3910 standard contract and volunteered to assist with the update of the NZ CIC [Construction Industry Council] Guidelines.

It’s never too late to get involved.

 

 

Image: Mike Hanson (front left) believes strongly in teamwork and collaboration. He is pictured here in 1983 with members of the Durban Harlequins cricket team including well known cricket commentator Mark Nicholas (back row, third from left). Image supplied.