Not good

[sussexlogs]

Not good.not my job

Edited July 21, 2018 by sussexlogs

[Nickfromwales]

Jesus.

Time for a chat or a 12 pack of LE foam. 

[Jeremy Harris]

That sort of crap workmanship is, I'm afraid to say, pretty typical. 

 

Paul Buckingham wrote a paper a while ago that highlighted how widespread work like this is: Paul Buckingham paper and followed that up with another paper a while later: https://www.aecb.net/still-taking-disgraceful-approach-build-quality-waving-goodbye-energy-savings/

[newhome]

5 minutes ago, JSHarris said:

That sort of crap workmanship is, I'm afraid to say, pretty typical. 

 

 

Yes, goes hand in hand with most mainstream house building too as you mentioned in another post. Unfortunately trades who work on mainstream stuff seem to think they can get away with that standard of work when it's a private job too and someone's pride and joy. 

 

 

26 minutes ago, sussexlogs said:

Not good

 

Tell them to come back and sort it or you'll post photos of their work on all the local Facebook sites . 

 

 

[ToughButterCup]

29 minutes ago, Nickfromwales said:

Jesus.

[...]

 

Even I, working on my own, can do better than that.   And that's saying something.....

Have you paid for it yet? Hope not.

 

[epsilonGreedy]

24 minutes ago, JSHarris said:

Paul Buckingham wrote a paper a while ago that highlighted how widespread work like this is: Paul Buckingham paper and followed that up with another paper a while later: https://www.aecb.net/still-taking-disgraceful-approach-build-quality-waving-goodbye-energy-savings/

 

 

If the AECB wants to be effective why do they undermine their cause with puerile rabble rousing leftie language?
 

Quote

 

Paul Buckingham argues that profit driven construction is having detrimental effects on quality and energy efficiency.

 

 

The problem is not profit. Domestic gas boilers are built for profit and so are cars. Both have delivered steady advances in energy efficiency under the dark cloud of capitalist incentive.

 

There is a problem with British house building but it is not capitalism.

[ProDave]

I remember wiring a house many years ago where the owner was keen to tell me how he had two layers of 50mm kingspan insulation in the upstands like that.  I then pointed out to him the gap between them allowing cold air in between the two, meaning the outside one was doing nothing.

[Jeremy Harris]

18 minutes ago, epsilonGreedy said:

 

If the AECB wants to be effective why do they undermine their cause with puerile rabble rousing leftie language?
 

 

The problem is not profit. Domestic gas boilers are built for profit and so are cars. Both have delivered steady advances in energy efficiency under the dark cloud of capitalist incentive.

 

There is a problem with British house building but it is not capitalism.

 

 

With respect, Paul Buckingham's view are not those of the AECB, they are just his personal views, much like my views, or your views, expressed on this forum are not the views of Builhub.org.uk

 

Personally I can just ignore any political element of a rant like this and focus on the technical points being made, and I think both his papers have merit for highlighting what is an endemic problem within the UK house building industry.

 

I have no idea why big developers build to such low standards.  Poor regulation is clearly an issue, as is a lack of pride in their workmanship by those they employ.  I strongly suspect that time pressure to get houses to market quickly is a factor, and that there is a cost saving element that drives such crappy standards.  Whether that is directly of indirectly linked to profit I'm not so sure about.  I can't help thinking that having to repeatedly come back to completed houses to undertake major snagging and warranty work must hit the bottom line harder than just building the damned things properly in the first place.

 

There's a quality policy I remember from a week I spent up at Nissan in Sunderland, seeing how their quality systems worked.  They costed every second of a line stop due to a quality issue and charged the supplier of the defective part that caused the line stop.  I can't remember what the line stop costs were, but they were well into the hundreds of pounds a second.  Whilst there I saw a defective window operating mechanism that stopped a line and the manufacturers of all the components of that mechanism literally ran to the car on the line that had created the stop, and rushed to determine the cause and rectify it.  I remember talking to the window motor manufacturers rep as he walked back, relieved that it wasn't a part his company had supplied that was out of spec. 

 

If house builders adopted a similar "quality first" approach, where they aimed to have zero snags on every new house built, things could be a lot better.  Right now I've been told that if they get a snag list that's "only" got 50 problems on it they reckon they are doing OK, and only really start to see if they can improve when snagging lists get up to around 200 items per house.

[Dreadnaught]

13 minutes ago, JSHarris said:

There's a quality policy I remember from a week I spent up at Nissan in Sunderland, seeing how their quality systems worked.

 

Adding to this, the original innovator was Toyota and the Toyota Production System (TPS) in the 1960s. For those interested, this Wikipedia page lists the principles that emerged, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_Production_System, the main headings for which are:

1. Continuous improvement
2. Respect for people
3. Long-term philosophy
4. The right process will produce the right results
5. Add value to the organisation by developing your people and partners
6. Continuously solving root problems drives organisational learning

Of these six, I suspect that the UK building culture follows none of them. Culture in organisations and industries is a fascinating subject. Culture is hard to change. Jeffery Liker's classic book called The Toyota Way does the whole subject justice. 

 

(Out of interest, the TPS directly led to the advent of both the agile software-development approach and the lean (just-in-time) production approach, both of which are now widely adopted across many fields. I am part of a company that follows the agile software-development approach.)

[sussexlogs]

1 hour ago, newhome said:

 

Yes, goes hand in hand with most mainstream house building too as you mentioned in another post. Unfortunately trades who work on mainstream stuff seem to think they can get away with that standard of work when it's a private job too and someone's pride and joy. 

 

 

 

Tell them to come back and sort it or you'll post photos of their work on all the local Facebook sites . 

 

 

Not my job

[newhome]

1 minute ago, sussexlogs said:

Not my job

 

Well that’s a relief for sure! 

[MikeSharp01]

35 minutes ago, Dreadnaught said:

a company that follows the agile software-development approach.)

Most do now, or variants of it.

1 hour ago, epsilonGreedy said:

 

There is a problem with British house building but it is not capitalism.

By definition the problem must stem from capitalism as it's the system we follow  It's just that in the construction industry the core model is broken because of the sub contactor model which takes a capitalistic road at both ends and allows the quality to suffer in the middle. So the main contractor makes a profit by driving down the costs in their supply chain and the tier 1 and lower sub contactors drive down their cost - so as to max out profit, by skimping on everything from training through to quality of materials.  As you get further from the main contractor your margins are further squeezed by risk factors arising from any one in the chain above you hitting cash flow problems.  

[epsilonGreedy]

1 hour ago, JSHarris said:

I have no idea why big developers build to such low standards.

 

 

Standard human behaviour which is to find the optimum point between effort and reward. We should not be surprised.

 

1 hour ago, JSHarris said:

Poor regulation is clearly an issue

 

 

I used to think this but not any longer. It is said a nation gets the newspapers it deserves and I would extend this concept to say a nation gets the houses it wants. The light touch regulation of poor building practice is just a reflection of the prevailing national political desire of the people.

 

At the end of the day we the house buying people of the UK are to blame.

[epsilonGreedy]

6 minutes ago, MikeSharp01 said:

Most do now, or variants of it.

By definition the problem must stem from capitalism as it's the system we follow  It's just that in the construction industry the core model is broken because of the sub contactor model which takes a capitalistic road at both ends and allows the quality to suffer in the middle. So the main contractor makes a profit by driving down the costs in their supply chain and the tier 1 and lower sub contactors drive down their cost - so as to max out profit, by skimping on everything from training through to quality of materials.  As you get further from the main contractor your margins are further squeezed by risk factors arising from any one in the chain above you hitting cash flow problems.  

 

Sorry no, this is not the core problem. Car manufacturing and aircraft manufacturing have the same complex supply chains comprised of sub contractors.

 

Poor housing building in this country is a peculiarly British thing when compared with our near neighbours. We need to identify where this nation specifically malfunctions before the problem can be resolved.

[newhome]

 

48 minutes ago, Dreadnaught said:

I am part of a company that follows the agile software-development approach

 

3 minutes ago, MikeSharp01 said:

Most do now, or variants of it.

 

My company is finally being dragged into the modern age and are moving to agile development having spend years going down the offshoring route and leaving us with very few subject matter experts and those that are left were pushed to be hands off overseers who really only got in the sharp end if there was an issue. Now we are transforming ourselves and are about to recruit permanent staff to cover deep technical roles again and even the management are being asked to step back into tech land. Agile is hard in my organisation though where in my area alone we have over 500 live applications to support and maintain. A tweak to one can mean changes needed to multiple apps. We will get there I'm sure but it's not nearly as easy as for the SMEs / new startups. 

 

 

 

 

 

[epsilonGreedy]

23 hours ago, Dreadnaught said:

(Out of interest, the TPS directly led to the advent of both the agile software-development approach and the lean (just-in-time) production approach, both of which are now widely adopted across many fields. I am part of a company that follows the agile software-development approach.)

 

 

This is interesting and not a version of Scrum history I heard before. I can see the historical timeline and how ideas percolated through from auto manufacturing to software but in reality the sudden uptake of Scrum/Agile around 2010 had a different timeline and motive forces.

 

Scrum grew out of the extreme programming fraternity and new technologies for test driven development. The agile manifesto was a anti-management rebellious movement that was a reaction to prevailing project management methodologies that had underpinned many software project failures. Later the Agile consultancy and training industry grew of this movement which necessitated a degree of historical revisionism because (1) the agile manifesto is too simple to support a training industry (2) the psychological traits of incumbent management do not like change or rebellion so claiming association with Toyota makes rebellion more palatable.

Edited July 22, 2018 by epsilonGreedy

[epsilonGreedy]

34 minutes ago, newhome said:

My company is finally being dragged into the modern age and are moving to agile development having spend years going down the offshoring route

 

 

The scrum methodology can work with offshoring though it is more difficult partly because those driving offshoring are not prepared to offshore their own function to create truly autonomous offshore teams. Most offshoring is actually disguised virtual onshoring with remote management retained in the UK.

 

Agile emphasizes the role small self sufficient teams and I say agile adoption should be reflected in office desk topology. It works best when you can swivel your chair around and say "hey you what do you think". Unfortunately those organizations who need it most corrupt agile out of the starting gate, the test manager wants 10 testers located outside her office and the chief database administrator wants to sit within of cluster of fellow database experts.

 

Agile is team centric and this can upset traditional organizational hierarchies.

[billt]

50 minutes ago, epsilonGreedy said:

At the end of the day we the house buying people of the UK are to blame.

 

On the basis that very few people have a clue, or interest, in how things work and how they are made, I have considerable difficulty with that statement. They also, by and large, have a very limited choice of houses, which makes selecting a well built house even more of a challenge.

 

Of course, all the developers will crow about how Eco-friendly and low energy their houses are so, even if house purchaser have an interest in the subject, they will be misled by the promotional material. Simply not reasonable to blame the house buying public

[epsilonGreedy]

2 minutes ago, billt said:

On the basis that very few people have a clue, or interest, in how things work and how they are made, I have considerable difficulty with that statement. They also, by and large, have a very limited choice of houses, which makes selecting a well built house even more of a challenge.

 

 

Very few people understand how their car works even so they own a phenomenally power efficient and reliable manufactured product.

 

Capitalism supplies what people desire and can afford. The first useful step towards decent quality houses would be to reduce plot costs in this country to french levels but that would necessitate scrapping the town and country planning act of 1947 and saying goodbye to this green and pleasant land. Such a change would also crash the financial system because it would put millions into negative equity overnight. 

[newhome]

1 minute ago, epsilonGreedy said:

 

The scrum methodology can work with offshoring though it is more difficult partly because those driving offshoring are not prepared to offshore their own function to create truly autonomous offshore teams. Most offshoring is actually disguised virtual onshoring with remote management retained in the UK.

 

Agile emphasizes the role small self sufficient teams and I say agile adoption should be reflected in office desk topology. It works best when you can swivel your chair around and say "hey you what do you think". Unfortunately those organizations who need it most corrupt agile out of the starting gate, the test manager wants 10 testers located outside her office and the chief database administrator wants to sit within of cluster of fellow database experts.

 

Agile is team centric and this can upset traditional organizational hierarchies.

 

Yes we're using scrum. We've started off creating feature teams where we can but there are many challenges to overcome so we have many component teams that we intend to move into feature teams as we progress. We won't be offshoring the whole lot because frankly we haven't seen the capability within the offshore teams in traditional waterfall projects and from what we've seen so far they aren't exactly stepping up to the plate to help us shape our agile transformation. 

 

One of the biggest challenges is co location as we have teams spread not just across India but spread across the UK too, and the company has long made a commitment to flexible / agile working that means that even those in the same base location either don't work every day or work a fair bit from home. I haven't noticed too many people being resistant to 'their' teams being assigned to labs and working in a team centric fashion. Certainly doesn't bother me anyway, I am pleased to see how motivated and enthusiastic the approach has made many of them. And the ones that aren't? Well they were never going to be and will likely get managed out I suspect. 

 

 

 

[MikeSharp01]

1 hour ago, epsilonGreedy said:

 

Sorry no, this is not the core problem. Car manufacturing and aircraft manufacturing have the same complex supply chains comprised of sub contractors.

I think there may be an issue with this approach thinking as the structures might be similar but the cultures are miles apart. Dreadnaught said what the Toyota model  (quality) was based upon. 

 

2 hours ago, Dreadnaught said:

• The right process will produce the right results
• Add value to the organisation by developing your people and partners

This is precisely what does not happen in the construction sector while it is writ large across the car sector. All of the communications across the whole car supply chain have the quality process built it and everybody signs up to it if you want to be part of it. I am convinced that house building could be more like car making if the mind set could be changed to accommodate it. 

 

That said the idea that we get the houses we demand seems about right.

Edited July 21, 2018 by MikeSharp01

[ToughButterCup]

1 hour ago, MikeSharp01 said:

Most do now, or variants of it.

By definition the problem must stem from capitalism as it's the system we follow  [...]

 

Your analysis is optimistic. 

Some of the worst building and engineering practice I witnessed was when I worked in East Germany in the 1980s. 

 

"Concrete isn't delivered in the afternoons because ...."   

" We are completely disinterested in customer feedback because that is not part of  our planned approach to sales "

" That is how we have always made Trabants. If you are dissatisfied, we will allocate it to the next citizen  the list "

 

Those statements were either made directly to me or made in my presence.

 

[MikeSharp01]

56 minutes ago, recoveringacademic said:

 

Your analysis is optimistic

Sorry didn't realise it was analysis tought it was fact - must be the heat. I suppose there is a chance that the 'system' we use is in reality just an output from another higher order system about which we know nothing but I thought we lived and breathed as a western capitalist democracy. Perhaps, now I reflect, Enver Hoxha had the right idea - try a few systems and see which works  best, shame he didnt try capitaliam.  Of course they did go that way after he died. 

[Jeremy Harris]

It seems clear that there just isn't any sort of coherent quality process within the domestic construction sector.

 

During the week I spent at Nissan, it became clear that right down to their Tier 3 suppliers Nissan imposed their own quality process, and made every supplier responsible for adhering to it.  The result was that every part that arrived on the line was not only manufactured and checked to Nissan's own standards, but the contracts with the suppliers made them liable for any costs Nissan incurred as a consequence of any quality failing.  Hence the line stop costs being charged to the supplier whose component had been shown to cause the problem that stopped the line.  The discipline applied to quality had to be seen to be believed, right down to every single person in every team actively monitoring and visually reporting on boards adjacent to their workstation every single issue, no matter how minor.

 

AFAICS, there is just no real accountability for quality in the domestic construction industry.  It's just accepted that there will be snags, that stuff won't be built as designed, and that there will be a lot of remedial work at the end of every build.  The concept of "build it once, build it right" just doesn't apply to house construction as far as I can see, plus there seems little willingness to apply any form of total quality approach.

 

I don't think this has anything at all to do with consumers, as over the past few years, with the growing influence of social media, we have seen more and more cases raised to the level of the mainstream media where big developers have built really bad houses, with dozens, if not hundreds, of failings.  Despite this they don't seem to be getting any better - it seems that the industry as a whole just isn't positively reacting to the problem.

 

The contrast with commercial construction seems marked.  As a part of my last job I programme managed a £96M new lab and office construction project, to house 900 scientists and support staff and provide 42 new laboratories.  The quality regime of the main contractor (Sir Robert McAlpine) was very like that I'd seen at Nissan.  Quality was "built-in" at every stage, from design through to ensuring that absolutely everything that arrived on site was exactly to spec.  If the same approach was applied to building houses then I'm certain that the majority of the problems we regularly hear about just would never arise.  FWIW, SRM were working to a "cost plus incentive fee" contract, with a 50/50 split on any cost savings made during the build between the customer and the main contractor, so they had a strong incentive to reduce costs wherever they could.  They saved over £4m, IIRC, by the end of the contract, and that's after some quality upgrades were made during construction, like opting to use Corian for all the toilet work surfaces, switching to Dyson Airblade driers and upgrading the wooden flooring in the common areas.  We even upgraded all the hundreds of office chairs to Herman Miller ones at around £800 each, out of the contract savings.

[MikeSharp01]

7 hours ago, sussexlogs said:

Not good.not my job

You know it struck me, as it may have others, that had they mustered the sense to put the pieces in the other way around it would have looked better at least. Given this one is inevitably drawn to the conclusion that these work people were not the brightest.