Tuesday
Peer Learning
12:30pm Online
Open to All, Peer Works
This session will highlight the challenges in defining and measuring productivity, and how different definitions can lead to different conclusions
Speakers: Doug Forbes Director Whole Life Consultants and Malcolm Horner, Chairman and Emeritus Professor Whole Life Consultants
This session will highlight the challenges in defining and measuring productivity, and how different definitions can lead to different conclusions. Drawing on more than fifty years’ experience of the construction industry, it will share lessons that can be applied to other industries. Crucially, it will demonstrate how widely used productivity metrics may lead to erroneous conclusions and as a result, the development of strategies that do not produce the desired outcomes.
Doug Forbes is a Chartered Engineer and a member of the Institution of Civil Engineers. He is a Director of Whole Life Consultants Ltd with over 15 years’ professional and research experience. He has a concurrent honorary appointment as a Research Fellow at the University of Dundee. Since 2008, Doug has been responsible for developing the CITB Labour Forecasting Tool (LFT) which has been used to estimate the labour demand for more than 25 LEPs, local areas and major projects. Furthermore, he has delivered training on behalf of CITB to users of the LFT. He has also successfully developed a demand-supply forecasting model for ECITB to underpin their workforce planning and led research for HS2 labour and skills demand and supply forecasting. He has been Deputy Chair of the Department for Transport’s TIES Living Lab Analytical Consortium.
Malcolm Horner is a co-founder and Chair of Whole Life Consultants Ltd, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and of the Institution of Civil Engineers, and an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Incorporation of Architects in Scotland. He is Emeritus Professor of Engineering Management at the University of Dundee where he led the Construction Management Research Unit in the Division of Civil Engineering. The Construction Management Research Unit successfully completed research projects to a value in excess of £7.5m and published some 200 academic and professional papers. He has been Chair of the Transport Infrastructure Efficiency Strategy Living Lab’s Analytical Consortium, Vice Chair of the RICS International Cost Management Standards Standard Setting Committee, member of the EPSRC Peer Review College, past Chair of Scottish Enterprise Tayside, past Director of the Scottish Construction Centre, past Member of the CITB’s National Council, and past Chair of CITB’s Technical Reference Group. He has been a non-executive director of a number of public and private sector organisations in a variety of public and private sector organisations. His principal areas of interest are labour productivity and forecasting, benchmarking, whole life costing, cost modelling, management and control.
