How to save over € 50.000,-/year in just one hour in a Best Value project?

Well to be honest it is more how I managed with a simple advice a € 50.000,- /year saving and an increased performance. It all started, for me at least, in Oslo in the summer of 2016. I was at a presentation explaining the Best Value approach and after my presentation the head of procurement of Nye Veier explained that this is the approach Nye Veier was going to use. “There is a sense of urgency to change the way we do business in road construction in Norway. If we want to build roads faster, cheaper and with higher quality, we need to change.” My Norwegian wasn’t all that well, so he might have said it slightly different, but in a nutshell I am sure this is what his message was. “And the first project we are going to adopt this change is at the E18 Rugtvedt – D?rdal project” was his final remark.

One of the entrepren?r in that audience thought: “If this ‘Best Value approach’ is the new way of thinking, which we just heard an expert explaining, we better hire that expert”. That is how I got involved at the first Best Value project in Norway. One of the first things I did was to take Norwegian class and the second thing was reading the request for procurement that H?hre entrepren?r had send me. Just the parts that are interesting for the selection phase. Basically to check on how Nye Veier was going to run the selection phase of the Best Value approach. A few minor changes, but relatively close to the original method, so to me it sounded like a ‘walk in a Norwegian park’. At one of the meeting with H?hre, after I had been ‘reading’ (reading = scan the content) of Kapittel C2 I had noticed chapter 5 to be about ‘m?ter’. I asked the sales manager what it was all about. “It means meetings, there are a lot of meetings in Norwegian road projects” was the answer. Whenever someone says ‘many’ I want to know how many ‘many’ actually is. So we checked chapter 5 and it turned out ‘many’ is on average 2 management meetings each week. In my world: 6 meetings to many per month, so I agreed that there are ‘many’ meetings to attend. Actually this was just an observation and needless information for me during the selection phase. It is important for H?hre, as they have to calculate a price for the project and need to calculate ‘meeting costs’ as well.

We submitted, as it turned out, the winning bid. In the Best Value approach this means that we where invited to the clarification phase. I had a meeting with the project manager to talk about what was required to do. I know that figuring out how to measure the performance on the project is rather new for most people who run their first Best Value project. Since it was not my first Best Value project, I knew how to set up a measurement system. For some reason, during a coffee brake, meetings popped up. “There are going to be many meetings and they will last like forever” was what the complaining was about. By than I knew how many ‘many’ was, I had found that out already. In my ears complaining sounds like there is a risk. I took a sip of coffee had my brain running overtime and said: “I think we should measure the meetings”. Although measuring meetings isn't the first KPI that people think about, but in this situation it was, in my humble opinion, needed. So we did, we ended up with a KPI on meeting time with the ‘target value’ of under 2 hours.

Take a sip of coffee, have brains running overtime, 'read' chapter 5 and conclude that we are going to measure meetings took me an hour. The next question is how did it end up saving € 50.000,- / year. Well during the first management meetings, after 1 hour and 45 minutes, the project manager of H?hre looked at the time, in such a way the chairman of the meeting noticed. The later rushed through the remaining points of the agenda and finished to meeting just in time. The chairman of the meetings must have concluded that this was not a good way to run meetings and did make some changes. One thing he did was whenever discussions turned into a one-on-one he asked them to continue the discussion after the meeting, just a brilliant move. Another thing that happened over time, and it wasn’t just the KPI that did it but I am sure it helped, is that the content of the agenda changed. It went from operational reactive meetings to tactical pro-active meetings. The project manager of H?hre told me that his conclusion, after 2 years, is that due to this ‘fun’ KPI they save 1 day per week on meeting time. This is 50 days per year (hence, the side is closed for 2 weeks on X-mas). Though I don't know the day rate for management, if I take € 1.000,- it is a saving of € 50.000,-/year. Not a bad for an hour of work.