Home made is best

Phil Holden’s Diary

As we are in the throes of a worldwide recession it is no surprise to find that the outsourcing agencies that many architectural practices are intent on using nowadays are also marketing themselves.  Once or twice a week I receive an unsolicited e-mail extolling the virtues of placing my hard won work with companies in Vietnam, India, Egypt, or China. 
Don’t recruit, they urge in their opening email.  Of course we want to recruit, I understand that there may be 50% of the graduate workforce unemployed in the UK. Most of these have more qualifications than their outsource counterparts. 

Reduce your costs, they proclaim in their follow up marketing drive.  Yes, they do appear to be cheaper than a Western team, but do they have the same skills?  Of course they will protest that they do – they have international credibility after all.  But if the reality proves that they can’t match the skills it could prove inordinately expensive in the long run.
Have you told your client that you intend to outsource to make your fee bid more competitive? 

I cannot believe that the firms who do it have declared their intentions to their client.  When you tender for a project now you have to submit detailed descriptions of the experience of the key people, they want to interview your project leader and meet the team.  It doesn’t make sense that they would be happy to see their project being run by someone they had never met in a far flung corner of the world.

In response to one recent offer I asked to see the credentials of those who would be working on my project.  The hypothetical project, an international airport, was to be worked on by an architect who had done a couple of residential buildings, one with experience of small commercial buildings and a third who had recently qualified.  The calibre of these staff wouldn’t have got to interview stage in our practice in Putney.

Manufacturing displaced itself to these countries in the 80s and 90s in order to survive, I don’t believe it is practical or necessary to do the same thing with professional services, and particularly not with design skills.  The UK has an enviable reputation for design, detailing and delivery.  Let’s keep it that way and train our young architects to detail.  It may mean sacrificing some short term profit but in the long term we will have a stronger profession.

Phil Holden is managing director of Pascall+Watson