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As 'PM KIDS' from Atkins China move to first place, 'A team with no name' from Atkins India move to second, while 'CEG' drop from first to third and 'That team' from Atkins India stay at fourth. 'STH in Atkins' from Atkins China enter the top places at fifth place and 'INNOGRADS' from Atkins GDC round up the top six. Dropping out of the top spots are 'Waterman is coming' from Waterman Aspen dropping to eighth and 'Ova achievers' from Arup dropping to seventh. But it is very tight with less than 100 points between the top six and those immediately behind.
The head office staffing is important for company capability. Have you enough marketing effort to secure bid invites? Have you enough measurement staff to recover all you're due from each contract? Have you enough quality, health and safety staff to run efficiently? Have you enough estimators to prepare accurate bids? Are your project managers' experiences well suited to the jobs they are managing? Is your own labour or subcontractor staffing optimum?
These are all construction management issues.
But it is not only the construction side of marketing, estimating, running and completing projects that determine a successful company. The financial side is equally important.
The ratio of turnover to company capital is an important indicator and at a level of 9 times the company capital the questions start to be raised as to whether your company have enough assets to support its work load. If your work load is growing you may need more capital to support the bigger company. More capital comes from retained profits or borrowing. High levels of turnover to capital indicates that the company capital is working hard, as it should be. If the ratio is much lower, it indicates that the company capital is not working hard and your Finance Director needs to consider how to respond. Grow the company's turnover, invest the capital outside the company or reduce the capital. Your Finance Director is just as key a contributor to company success as the construction directors.
The market will tighten, teams that have won jobs with low bids will see the effects ripple through their accounts and their score will not rise as before and might even fall. So we expect some changes. MERIT 2017 is far from settled. There are four more rounds left, and it's still all to play for.
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Teams are rising in the rankings, teams are falling in the rankings, with the range of improvement still large. This suggests that not all teams are as disciplined as they could be.
The tutorial helps guide teams on their decisions and deals with the mechanics and the calculations and the relationships between the various factors. These must be understood. Too many for each team member to understand them all, but with tasks allocated amongst each team member, they should have clearly defined responsibilities. The players must be an expert in their area of responsibility. In other words the team member is an individual specialist. The individual team member needs to understand all aspects of the input to the decisions for which they are responsible.
At the Board meeting, when taking decisions, the players need to present clear proposals with good sound reasoning, which the Board needs to synthesise. The CEO and Board should interrogate each player to test that their recommendations are soundly based and have not been arrived at on a casual basis. In this way, the quality of each suggested decision is tested.
The eventual decisions may well be compromises. The test is the common good not an individual's own position. This is teamwork in action. This all requires leadership. The question raised before is whether your leadership is strong enough to ensure that each team member is making a good contribution, is teamwork actually happening, is each decision interrogated and tested, are the final decisions sound and well understood. These are the key lessons from the MERIT experience: disciplined decision making; teamwork and leadership, they all go together. Anything less will not succeed, and could make it a rocky road ahead.
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At this stage of MERIT 2017 we expect turbulence with a great range in the percentage improvement. Teams are still learning and still considering their strategy. Don't take too long some may get there quicker.
There are a great number of interdependent decisions to be made each round. Making good decisions for each of them, or for most of them, is what will improve performance. Virtually all decisions require balance, there is always a down side. Balanced decision making takes judgement. Judgement requires data and information from each team member and teamwork to make the right compromises. This will take organisation. Each team member is a director, and should have an individual responsibility. Each director should come to the decision-making meeting, whether real or virtual, well informed. One director not doing their homework is letting the company down. We do know of sackings in the past. Once at the meeting each director should act for the common good not just their individual section, this is teamwork. Organisation, discipline, teamwork requires leadership. Make sure yours is strong enough.
For the finance director watch the turnover to capital ratio if your capital isn't working hard enough you should find better things to do with it.
The ranking isn't stable, and there will be more turbulence to come, but getting the decisions balanced will improve ranking. Maybe the rising teams demonstrate this.