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Regional Focus | North West

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MBA-style advice on a unique selling position might not be needed by AEW, which has found its niche delivering technical expertise – as at the Museum of Liverpool where it worked with 3XN’s concept design.

MANAGEMENT

Is a lack of management nous holding up your business? An MBA could be just the job

SIMPLY THE BIZ

Words Eleanor Young

ARCHITECTS HAVE a reputation for being a creative profession uninterested in business. Loss of influence, control and work to project managers, cost consultants and even subcontractors are all put down to this focus on conceptual thinking. But if you want to improve a practice’s business strategies or develop your own management skills, where do you go? The MBA is an established route for corporate high fliers but doesn’t always address the issues of creative, small businesses. However, a few architects including Peter

Morris of AHMM and Malcolm Reading of Malcolm Reading Consultants have gone on the £10,000 Business Growth and Development Programme at Cranfield School of Management. Earlier this year Madrid-based IE University set out its stall in London with an MBA focusing on design management. And this month an architectural and construction management MBA will be launched at the north’s top-rated school of management at Bradford University. The RIBA MBA at Bradford replaces standard

MBA modules with ones on project and practice management in architecture and construction. It is the initiative of RIBA North West and Mark van Hoorebeek, who lectures on law on the region’s well-respected Part 3 course and has taught at Bradford University for five years. He is particularly proud of the management project which will be based in practice and draw on the expertise of two supervisors, one architectural and one management. As a correspondence course with two residential blocks of three days each, it is flexible to take. ‘Students will be people looking to move up a level in their career,’ says van Hoorebeek. Chair of the north-west education committee, Dominic Wilkinson, previously

RIBA JOURNAL : SEPTEMBER 2011

‘ An MBA could give you the skills to allow you to be hard headed. That would be good when you are up against project and contract managers’

tackled by the education system,’ he says. ‘Or risk-taking in marketing. And an MBA could teach you how to be hard headed. That would be good,’ he adds with feeling, ‘for dealing with project and contract managers.’ A mini-MBA being developed by the RIBA and London Metropolitan University could appeal to him. Those who run larger practices may

at Austin-Smith:Lord and now teaching at Liverpool John Moores, says the special thing about this course is how it deals with the ‘peculiarities’ of architecture, particularly marketing and cash flow. The course is aimed at those with some experience beyond part 3, perhaps at associate level or whose practices want to invest in some management expertise. Is that likely? Like all MBAs the one at Bradford is fairly pricey. £17,000 is the headline figure but that could come down to £13,500 with credits for Part 3 and CPD – or £2,250 a year spread over six years. Looking at the headline figure Mark Percival of practice architecture:m poses the obvious question: ‘Who on earth can afford it?’ He points out that to him it is the wage of a Part 1 student. However, Percival admits there is a lot

about managing a practice he would like to know more about. ‘Contact with clients isn’t

be more likely to have come up against a lack of management knowledge. Ewen Miller, managing director of Altrincham- based practice Calderpeel, says emerging students have a reasonable grasp on project management. And after nearly 20 years the practice has workable systems in place. ‘But there is certainly a gap in people being trained to run a business,’ he says. For him the strain comes from managing personnel.

Lessons learnt the hard way? AEW has carved out a niche as a delivery architect in the 19 years since it was founded. It has recently completed the Museum of Liverpool and is also working on some of the biggest projects of retail behemoths Tesco and McDonald’s. Its reputation stems from a strategic decision to remaster an area of construction where architects had been losing ground, explains founding director Chris Wewer. ‘We recognised early on that architects had got a bad name because they were not adequately technically equipped. So we employed a lot of experienced technicians,

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