As a business, Trident Building Consultancy has built its reputation as a dedicated and experienced team of building surveyors, offering expert advice to clients on new builds and refurbs across all construction sectors.
However, another area in which we have extensive experience is Project Management. It is a skillset we have across all of our offices, but with a dedicated team in London.
Our Project Managers deliver a multitude of schemes of varying size and complexity on all types of properties and development sites, starting out at the project inception stage and leading the development through procurement and construction to handover and review.
According to Executive Director, Darron Owen, Project Management is a key service Trident provides to a large range of clients nationally.
Darron describes himself as a building surveyor with 30 years’ experience and a specialism in Project Management.
“We’re building surveyors who project manage,” Darron said.
“Although we do have a dedicated Project Management team in London due to the amount of development going on there.
“I believe this mix of skills gives us a unique perspective on a project. Having a great depth of surveying knowledge, built up by working on a huge variety of buildings and developments, means we have a deep insight into the things that need to happen to complete a project, be that a new build or a refurb.
“We bring that level of understanding to the developments we project manage, which tends to result in a greater efficiencies and less problems for clients.”
Director David Juniper leads our dedicated project management team in London and has managed a large number of schemes across a range of sectors, including new build residential and industrial, laboratories, offices, and office refurbs.
He said developments of between £10m and £30m sit in the ‘sweet spot’ for Trident Building Consultancy.
One such project recently completed by Darron and his team was the conversation of a former recycling centre in North London to create a facility for storing trailers for the film industry.
The £8m project required significant civil works to enable its new use, which Darron and his team led on.
He said: “The project was really interesting. The site needed a lot of work to make it suitable for HGVs and we had to rebuild an embankment to make the site bigger, which was a significant civil project.
“As well as this, we had to strip and refurbish two buildings and build a new headquarters office to meet the occupier’s business requirements.
“It was a complicated project because there were a lot of moving parts but as the PM, when you see it coming together and everything moving in the direction it needs to, it’s very satisfying.”
Our team can get involved with schemes at different stages, depending on the client’s requirements.
Some clients take a project through the initial pre-application stage before handing it over to us to develop the brief and pull the team together.
Others achieve full planning consent before recruiting us to join the delivery team to take it through technical design and construction. It all depends on what the client wants, and the resources they have available within their business.
One fascinating project that David delivered is the conversion of former ice factory near Victoria coaching station to a retail, office, and restaurant development.
We were brought on to the project at end of RIBA stage two (Concept Design), leading it through stages three and four (Technical Design) and managing the tendering process and construction.
It now comprises of a gym on the ground floor, three floors of offices, and a restaurant on the fourth floor.
A huge focus for the development was sustainability and the circular economy, which sat at the heart of our PM approach.
“We were very heavily involved in the full design and sustainability aspect,” David said.
“The client wanted the development to be best in class in terms of sustainability which meant reusing many of the materials in the original building.
“The old ice lifting gear is now the reception desk, for example, and the original weighbridge steel plate was refurbished and now forms a key feature within the external entrance walkway.
“The work demonstrates the different requirements of project managers. This development wasn’t just about creating a fantastic facility, it was about doing that with the utmost concern for the environment, and that is what we helped to deliver.”
Darron Owen added that a major element of the Project Management service Trident offers is finding the right team of consultants for each project we’re involved in.
As a business, we provide advice on who we feel will fit the project best, and then start to pull the delivery team together.
“This is a process we can manage from start to finish,” Darron said.
“We go out to the people we feel will be best for the job, get quotes from them and put all of that together until we have the entire project team. This is often a huge weight off the client’s mind because finding the right people can be a challenge.
“Luckly, we have people we like to work with who know how we work and we know how they work, so that makes the process much easier.”
David said that on the Project Management side of the business, Trident had built a reputation in being able to deliver on sites where others might struggle.
He said: “We’ve created a name for ourselves for working on tricky, tight sites and adding value to existing properties.
“That’s our niche and over the years we’ve amassed a large amount of experience in delivering projects of all types and complexity, particularly in central London locations.
“We feel this suits the direction of travel of the industry. As developers seek the best utilisation of space for both residential and commercial developments, or repurposing buildings post-COVID, particularly in busy cities like London and Birmingham, the ability to manage projects successfully on challenging sites is in demand.
“We’ve honed our skills on those types of sites for many years so have learnt how to get the best from them.”
To find out more about our project management services, click here.
