Construction sector maturing official

Global leader in managing construction risk, Hill International, says the scale and ambition of construction project in Qatar and around the Gulf is unique anywhere in the world.

In an interview with Gulf Times, US-based Hill International’s strategic development senior vice president Timothy Judge said that nobody every anticipated what has happened here in five years. “Whatever happened in Doha over the course of five years, I don’t think anybody really anticipated this magnitude of change.

And in reality the Middle East, whether you talk about Qatar, Dubai or Saudi, they are all going through mammoth progress and I don’t think that’s being replicated anywhere in the world at the moment,” Judge, based in the UAE, said.

Hill International provides programme, project, construction managements and construction claims and consulting services through 2,400 employees in 80 worldwide offices.

According to Judge, with the boom, also came the maturity, despite some challenges such as the global financial recession.

“Because of this huge boom in construction, the natural resources in the region just didn’t provide the level of resource necessary so it had to come from somewhere,” he said, adding: “One of the things that has come out of the last 18 months of consolidation is that clients are now looking at much harder at what they want to do and how they want to do it and they are looking at the risk portfolios in much more detail and that’s where Hill International comes in.

We can help them do just that and get the right mix.” The challenges, according to Judge, have been the hunt for good project managers, be it construction or commercial or other sectors, in the region.

“What happens is when a market grows, such as the one we are seeing here, all your talent is soaked up. What you have got to do then is, draw resources from somewhere else.” Hill International has just been awarded a RasGas project, after the oil and gas company decided to make one of the two completed Palm Towers in West Bay their headquarters.

“We have been with Palm since the beginning. The building was finished and now they are doing fi t-outs and going after the LEEDs certification,” Hill International’s Doha-based vice-president Bassem Merchi said.

Other local works include Hamad Medical City, Silhouette Intercontinental, Twin Towers (Al Sadd), Navigation Tower, Al Bida Tower, Lagoon Towers and at least five towers in Viva Bahriya of The Pearl.

“The Intercontinental project has been delayed because the client changed the function of the building as well as the contractor. It was an office building and now it’s been turned into a hotel.

So, there was new tendering,” Merchi said while adding that project delays are not unique to the region and happen all the time across the world.

According to Judge, project managers have a pivotal role in managing clients’ expectation.