Text
May 08, 2013

The Imminent Self-Build Revolution: Free talk at RCKa with Ted Stevens of NaSBA

image

RCKa is hosting a discussion tomorrow evening as part of the inaugural National Self-Build Week organised by the National Self-Build Association (NaSBA).

NaSBA chairman Ted Stevens will be speaking about how self-build could make a contribution to solving the current housing crisis, and opportunities for community or co-housing projects in the current economic landscape.

The event is free to attend, although places are limited, and tickets can be obtained from our Eventbrite page here.

Photo
May 08, 2013
Walter Menteth and I travelled to Nottingham last week to give a presentation to the RIBA’s East Midlands region last week as part of the Procurement Reform Group’s roadshow events. We presented a little background information on the state of public sector procurement in the UK, followed by some of the initiatives the PRG are pushing forward in an attempt to combat these inefficiencies. Joining us on stage were Councillor Nick McDonald from Nottingham City Council, who outlined the city’s emerging procurement strategy, and George Cowcher, Chief Executive of the Derbyshire and Nottingham Chamber of Commerce, who provided delegates with some sound advice on preparing and submitting tenders to public bodies. The event was ably chaired by Paul Collins of Nottingham Trent University’s School of Architecture Design and the Built Environment.

Walter Menteth and I travelled to Nottingham last week to give a presentation to the RIBA’s East Midlands region last week as part of the Procurement Reform Group’s roadshow events. We presented a little background information on the state of public sector procurement in the UK, followed by some of the initiatives the PRG are pushing forward in an attempt to combat these inefficiencies.

Joining us on stage were Councillor Nick McDonald from Nottingham City Council, who outlined the city’s emerging procurement strategy, and George Cowcher, Chief Executive of the Derbyshire and Nottingham Chamber of Commerce, who provided delegates with some sound advice on preparing and submitting tenders to public bodies.

The event was ably chaired by Paul Collins of Nottingham Trent University’s School of Architecture Design and the Built Environment.

Photo
April 27, 2013
Our TNG Youth & Community Centre has recently handed over to Lewisham Council, and yesterday afternoon we took the office for a look round. This photo shows the main triple-height cafe space and stair leading up to the main reception.

Our TNG Youth & Community Centre has recently handed over to Lewisham Council, and yesterday afternoon we took the office for a look round. This photo shows the main triple-height cafe space and stair leading up to the main reception.

Tags: Lewisham

Text
March 27, 2013

Presentation to Constructing Excellence Berkshire

Collaboration & Knowledge Management in Small Practice

Last night I spoke to the Constructing Excellence Berkshire group about RCKa’s use of social media and collaboration tools.

I described how, as a small practice, RCKa is able to leverage the power of emerging technologies such as Evernote and social media to make ourselves competitive with larger organisations, and to enable a seamless flow of information around the office.

Tags: evernote collaboration

Link
March 25, 2013
Government Mystery Shopper results

For those who aren’t aware of the Government’s Mystery Shopper scheme, here’s a direct link to their results page. (It’s a pity that this isn’t available in a more useful format, but it’s a start). The last results document seems to have been October 2012, so here’s hoping that this great initiative has not been abandoned or jettisoned as part of a departmental cost saving exercise.

Text
March 25, 2013

Islington Council pull small projects framework before it’s even begun

We received an email from Islington Council last week regarding their decision to pull their small projects framework following submission of PQQs in the middle of February:

Thank you for your interest in working with Islington Council.

I write to confirm that the Council has decided to decommission this proposed framework agreement owing to the current financial climate.It has just been announced that the council must implement additional savings totalling over £50 million up to 2016/17. Due to the current economic uncertainty, we are no longer in a position to be able to commission these services until we are clearer on the extent to which the framework agreement may or may not be affected.

We do appreciate the time and effort that goes in to preparing an application and apologise for the inconvenience caused.

It would be interesting to find out how much time has been wasted by tendering organisations (and it’s likely to be SMEs and micro businesses most affected, as this framework was specifically targeted at small businesses).

It’s not as if the economic situation has been rosy for some time, in fact we’ve gone through an entire framework cycle since the downturn began, so Islington really should have considered this before embarking upon a lengthy procurement process, wasting both our time and theirs.

Tags: Procurement

Link
March 18, 2013
Tender Feed for UK Architectural Services

I’ve been working on a system to aggregate public architectural tenders and competitions from a series of sources into a single RSS feed, which I’ve posted to collected.info.

Unfortunately, public tenders get posted in a variety of formats to a wide number of different websites, so I’ll try to add to this list when I can.

Too many public tenders are published on private sector websites which are inaccessible without complicated registration processes, and it is unreasonable to expect practices to subscribe to endless proprietary portals to obtain this information. I’m hoping that this will, in a small way, make access to these tenders far easier.

(For those who are interested, this collection has been assembled using Yahoo! Pipes, and output as a single RSS feed which is formatted using Collected.info.)

Sources for the feed currently include:

  • Contracts Finder feed
  • OJEU notices feed
  • Construction Index feed
  • Architects’ Journal competitions feed
  • Building Design competitions feed
  • Warwickshire County Council*

Obviously, given that some of these website simply republish notices from other sites, there may be some duplication in the resulting list.

*Update 25 March 2013

Tags: Procurement

Photo
March 16, 2013
2 notes
I gave a talk to the Evernote Business London Meetup on Thursday evening on RCKa’s use of Evernote. Here’s a photo from the event taken by Christina Reisen of Evernote Europe. I discussed how RCKa has moved from a series of shared notebooks and sponsored accounts to a full implementation of Evernote Business, and how this had addressed a number of concerns regarding the issues of ownership of intellectual property we had with the previous arrangement. I also described a number of ways in which Evernote has dramatically improved our productivity as well as streamlining a number of company-specific tasks, including building snagging and management of our in-house precedent library. The event was also an opportunity to launch the latest Evernote Business case study which illustrates the ways in which we have integrated Evernote into our practice.

I gave a talk to the Evernote Business London Meetup on Thursday evening on RCKa’s use of Evernote. Here’s a photo from the event taken by Christina Reisen of Evernote Europe.

I discussed how RCKa has moved from a series of shared notebooks and sponsored accounts to a full implementation of Evernote Business, and how this had addressed a number of concerns regarding the issues of ownership of intellectual property we had with the previous arrangement. I also described a number of ways in which Evernote has dramatically improved our productivity as well as streamlining a number of company-specific tasks, including building snagging and management of our in-house precedent library.

The event was also an opportunity to launch the latest Evernote Business case study which illustrates the ways in which we have integrated Evernote into our practice.

Tags: Evernote

Photoset
February 25, 2013

Progress photos of our TNG Youth Centre for Lewisham Council, nearing completion

Photo
February 11, 2013
Interior of TNG (at TNG Wells Park Youth Venue)

Interior of TNG (at TNG Wells Park Youth Venue)