Buildings & Estates Forum

Collaborative Working Centre

Objectives

To provide training, mentoring and other consultancy services to support the development and implementation of collaborative working in the UK construction industry over a five-year period.

Description

Conceived following the MoD's Building Down barriers project CWC is as a vehicle for rolling out the learning to the wider industry through a partnership between the (then) Design Build Foundation and a number of bodies involved in the project: Warwick Manufacturing Group, Tavistock Institute and CIRIA. CWC secured 'pump-priming' support from the DETR in 2000, as a PII project. This project concludes in March 2004, having supported a series of 'confirmation projects' and subsequent dissemination activity. CWC Ltd was established as a not-for-profit company in late 2001 and is now positioned as the training and consultancy arm of Be. The directors of CWC Ltd are now Neil Jarrett and Joe Dowling, non-executive directors are Mark Smalley, Don Ward and Hugh Rogers of Slough Estates. The non-executive chairman is Sir Michael Latham.

Participating members

Partners

Timetable

Nov 2001 - Company limited-by-guarantee established Quarterly Board meetings

Outputs

A programme of training events from autumn 2002
Delivery of various in-house training or mentoring programmes for clients including Welsh Water, Portsmouth City Council, Warwickshire County Council and others
A project part-funded by DTI to deliver ‘confirmation projects’ Five free training events for Be members Rethinking Construction training toolkit.

Resources

In October 2002 CWC Ltd had orders from clients and contractors, the DTI and CITB worth over £0.5m, by 2005 this had grown to over £2m per year.