Thinking laterally about Mott MacDonald’s traditional approach to engineering and analysing our role as a key player in the Terminal 5 project lifecycle meant crossing boundaries to establish the project needs in terms of a basic process.

– such as architectural planners, service engineers, baggage handling engineers and vertical circulation engineers – to build an understanding of each teams’ needs and how a structural solution could be developed within the envelope of other teams’ constraints.

From these sessions, teams were able to schedule their deliverables and gain a clear awareness of the key drivers behind delivery of the detail design from each team. This resulted in clearer communication of compatible designs across multi-disciplines through the use of one 3D model containing intelligent real-time data where each team took ownership of its component parts.

In order to track all teams’ deliverables in addition to managing our own delivery programme, the initial process map was translated into a live programme available to all teams on the project extranet. All inter-team activities were linked and the multi-disciplinary team leaders were then responsible for managing their activities and programmes in a reporting style similar to traditional meeting minutes, which were automatically downloaded. Weekly review meetings were then held by an independent facilitator to allow for progress feedback. All first and second tier suppliers participated.

Through realising the advantages of co-working, coupled with the multi-disciplinary pulls of Terminal 5, we learned more about ourselves as engineers, our partners and the way the industry is changing.