Mike Beeching, Project Manager (Brymor)

Mike has an important role as Project Manager, he oversees the entire build and is responsible for keeping the construction project on time and to budget. It’s no small task! Here he tells us how he got into the industry, what he loves about his career and why healthcare construction appeals to him.

What does your role entail?

I am responsible for the team here which includes a quantity surveyor, a design manager and a site manager, plus the extended team of sub-contractors who come and go as they are required throughout the project. My overall priorities are maintaining safety and ensuring the project runs on time and within the budget.

I’m the bridge between the client, the design team and the sub-contractors, so I make sure everyone has the information they need to do their jobs, and if anyone has a question at any stage I will answer them if I can or speak to the right party to make sure every party is well informed. Because the design team and clients work separately from the sub-contractors it’s important for me to facilitate this information sharing to make sure everything keeps running to plan.

Communication is a big part of my job and I often act as a jargon buster; I need to make sure the information I share is what people need but also that it’s accessible, because it’s easy for a project to stall or fail because of a lack of communication. I really like this communications element, it’s quite a social role because I’m working with so many different people. I need to know what will work best to get a message across and often have to adapt my approach to connect with people in the right way. I might have to go to a client meeting to report on project progress and then go and update the teams working on site, and decide whether a message is best delivered by email, in a report, through a toolbox talk, a poster or anything else.

Tell us about your career and what led you to where you are now?

When I was at school, I wanted to be an architect as I had spent much of my childhood building Lego; I just loved creating entire buildings from a pile of coloured bricks. I had initially dismissed the

idea of working in construction because I assumed, as many people do, that to work in construction you had to be a tradesperson. I did some work experience with an architect firm, but I found they spend much of their time at a desk and this didn’t appeal to me either.

I completed a National Diploma in Construction while at college and that gave me a broad view of the industry which opened my eyes to the different opportunities available and I found that I was interested in engineering, and particularly the setting out engineering where you get involved in activities like setting levels ready for the foundations to be laid. I think it links back to the Lego I played with as a child, because I still love that element of seeing a building take shape and watching the drawing come to life as the foundations and walls start to come up out of the ground.

I started my career working with construction company Morgan Sindall, where I completed the graduate programme after doing some part time construction work while I was university. The programme involved two years working in every department to get an overview of the different parts of the business.

I spent some time working in setting out engineering and I really enjoyed it but I wanted to progress, so I moved on to assistant site manager and site manager, before becoming a project manager eight years ago. There are good opportunities for progression in construction and I love the mix of desk based and on-site work I have in my role as project manager.

What is your favourite part of a construction project?

You go through some big step changes in a building project. For a long period of time, it just looks like it’s a flat piece of ground while all the work goes on underground and the piles are being set up, then you get a burst of activity as the foundations are set out and suddenly you are looking at the outline of the building. I think this is the stage I like best, where I can see the outline of something about to happen. When I can stand in the middle of the site and I can see where the walls and the rooms are going to be, I get a sense of excitement and there’s also a sense of pride in it too.

I’ve been fortunate to work on a number of projects locally and you always remember them, it’s nice to know the area because it gives you a connection to something you’re working on. I worked on a building in Portsmouth dockyard in 2009, it was a £10m project which was a big project for the time.

I still drive past that now and again with my family and I can say ‘I was part of that’. The first one I worked on with Solent NHS Trust was the refurbishment of Block B at St Marys Hospital in Portsmouth and I was born in that building. My mum has to visit now and again for appointments and will always mention it, and I remember every room we built.

What is most challenging part of a project?

Right at the start, when you’re trying to sift through the information you have and work out what you haven’t got. In the very early stages, you still don’t know all the details and you haven’t been able to immerse yourself in the project yet, so the drawings aren’t in your head and you’re trying to work out whether you can start building yet. I need to make sure that not only have we got the technical information we need, but also that the project is buildable and that the building design is going to work in real life on a working site.

It’s takes time to work through all this detail while simultaneously procuring the sub-contactors we need so we can make sure the programme runs smoothly and we can coordinate the different activities and skills we need at the right stage. It’s easy to lose time at the start of the project in getting these things right when in fact it’s the time you want to make strong progress.

Later there comes a tipping point when the project gathers its own momentum and you hit a flow where all of the initial stages have completed and everyone has much more familiarity with a project, but at the beginning it’s still very new for everyone.

I like working on healthcare buildings because you get a higher level of detail and I enjoy how precise the planning is. If you were building a house, for example, you know what rooms need to go where but some elements are flexible; this isn’t the case with healthcare construction. There are room data sheets early in the project and the logistics of each room are specific, so we need to be exact in where we put small details like power sockets so they fit with where the beds and equipment will be when it’s a working unit.

This is different to other industries, although there are still other considerations. We recently worked on a salad factory where contamination control was a big issue and we were planning for measures to avoid bacteria coming into the building because it was used for food preparation.

Brymor projects are not specific to any one sector and I love that because it brings variety to the role I do, I’ve been able to work on a range of buildings from a theatre refurbishment at a private college, a veterinary surgery to a cruise ship terminal and then a beer distilling brewery.

Finally, are you going on holiday this year?

We’re going on a long weekend to Wales this year, we got a dog in 2022 so we’re looking much more at places we can take her along with us. She’s a cockerpoo called Nala; everyone in the family put a name in a hat and my daughter’s choice was picked out, so she’s named after a character from the Lion King.