We have a reputation for the leadership of complex and challenging projects but at K2, rather than just ‘what’ we deliver, we are focussed on ‘how’ we deliver for our clients.

Exhibiting the right attitude and behaviours is part of establishing a project culture which sets the project up for success.

In delivering results, by doing what we say we will do and by celebrating these behaviours, we hope not only to inspire our own team, but the entire project team to do the same. For us it starts with viewing projects through the lens of the five capitals model which provides a framework for challenging and testing the project brief before we agree and set the performance baseline. In understanding the client’s value-profile we are then well placed to assemble a high performing team.

In delivering a Cost-Led Design approach to projects K2 take a cost leadership position within the project team to provide the client and design team with confidence in creating clarity, control and certainty of project costs.

Cost-Led Design is a cost management approach that seeks to reverse engineer the development appraisal and cost plan.

Conventional approaches to cost management see the cost manager cost the design at the end of each work stage. Symptoms of such an approach are value engineering which can be product destroying and impact upon the programme.

Instead cost-led design challenges the design team to design to a cost and value by setting out elemental targets and metrics which the design team commit to achieving. A cost-led design approach relies upon a level of design management capability from the cost manager who controls the project cost limit by proactively offsetting any risk of an overspend in one element with a target reduction in another element to deliver the project within the cost limit.

The K2 brand is rooted deep in the history of construction management. We combine traditional project management and quantity surveying services with construction management behaviours – and current and emerging thinking from the world of management consultancy – to make a real difference which moves the needle on our client’s projects. We brand these services as PMX or QSX and these solutions provide the foundation of our delivery partner proposition.

We invite the supply chain to the table from the outset. This approach enables us to deliver projects faster and at lower cost, at the same time as increasing the level of certainty of cost and time throughout the project lifecycle. In addition, this approach increases the visibility of the construction methodology, logistics and programme to help us to mitigate the risk and maximise the opportunity profile of the project.

When considering the procurement and contract strategy for a project we believe that as much as 35p in the pound is attributable to the transactional cost of construction which our scenario-based recommendations will help clients understand and reduce while seeking to optimise the remaining 65p in the pound in residual asset value.

We are confident our approach will enable our clients to execute their commercial strategies, securing the development appraisal without the need to resort to value destroying and time-consuming value engineering processes which all too often fall short of funding agreements or the timeline for disposal.

In understanding the client’s value-profile we capture and define which successful outcomes will result in the project achieving its purpose. We then apply a scientific approach of setting objectives and key results which define our inputs and enable us to measure our performance against outcomes rather than ticking-off a list of actions.

In viewing projects through the lens of the five capitals, we consider how each capital will influence the outcome of a project not only today, but at the stages and interventions in asset life all the way through to 100 years from now and disassembly at the end of asset life.

Understanding our clients value profile has helped us develop a value-based approach that encourages us to think beyond capital costs (CAPEX). Looking through each lens provides a framework to building capital and maximising development returns throughout the project lifecycle – focusing on areas such as Embodied Carbon, Manufacture and Assembly, Operational Cost, Opportunities for Value-Add Revenue, Sustainability and Wellbeing etc.

An extension of our work around outcome-based thinking has been to develop an understanding of how technologies can be used to automate, digitalise and improve processes. Embracing and combining these technologies with service excellence and sector knowledge is creating innovation in and better solutions for our clients. Embracing technology to derive value from our data we have been able to create new products and services, or add new features to existing products and services, which to date have included commercial and programme management platforms, parametric cost models and intelligent and interactive reporting.