Learning point for everyone:

One of the problems in life is egos. People have them and placing them to the side to do business is often something that doesn’t happen. In this scenario two things seemed to be at the root of the issue, one being the ego of the sales and bid teams not wanting to be subservient to another organisation, the other being cost. In review, someone else was going to be principal contractor but the costs shot up and became somewhat unattractive to the client.

In retrospect, we can see why this was the case. Cutting corners by saying you will do something that you don’t typically do is a risky thing. Sometimes it’s a great thing to expand into new business areas, other times it’s an ill-conceived idea.

Something such as principal contractor is quite onerous for large scale works, there is risk in small works but in large that risk multiplies considerably. If I tell you now that we were undertaking works across 100s of sites, it is a fairly simple conclusion to draw that the likelihood of an issue was high.

Sometimes to achieve quality results, the specialist elements need to be passed to other parties. We need to be grown up when this happens and not land grab for the sake of it. As the IT world evolves and companies hone in on their core offerings and discard some of the offshoots they have gathered over years, the collaborative and alliance models will likely become more pervasive in order to achieve the greater result. Companies that fail to embrace this will lose market share and ultimately hurt themselves.