Benjamin Wootton

21 August 2018

[Video Case Study] Contino and Turner & Townsend: Disruptive Innovation in the Construction Industry

VIDEO CASE STUDY: Contino and Turner & Townsend

How Contino helped Turner & Townsend to disrupt the construction industry by building a state-of-the-art cloud platform and upskilling their teams in DevOps best practice.

Turner and Townsend now have an end-to-end digital capability that enables them to rapidly develop innovation software, digitise their service offerings and leapfrog the competition.

TRANSCRIPT:

Patricia Moore, Managing Director (UK): Turner and Townsend are a British business, founded over 70 years ago. We provide professional management consultancy to built asset clients. The company is over 5,000 people strong, we operate out of 104 offices across the globe.

We’re undergoing a digital transformation because we see that it's absolutely critical to our future success.

Tom Deacon, Global Head of Digital: We’ve recognized the need to invest in our digital capability in order to really disrupt ourselves, before we’re disrupted by others.

Neil Bullen, Global Managing Director - Real Estate: We needed world-class capability to really help us with disruption. And after some intensive market search, we brought in Contino. We felt they were an organisation that could help us not just with the technical skills and the digital knowledge and expertise they’ve got with many clients, but actually could work with us and align with our culture and really help us along the journey of disruption.

Tom Deacon: I heard about Contino from a colleague and I was very impressed. I liked the fact that they were clearly bringing together best practice in DevOps. Contino make it one of their main objectives to do the skills transfer and capability build so that my team is left to be self-sufficient after they’re gone.

So the platform that we built with Contino, I’m very impressed, actually. We’ve built, from the ground up, on a greenfield site, so from scratch, in 16 weeks, a state-of-the-art cloud-based platform that is scalable, secure and gives us a foundation to support our growth as a business.

Paul Connolly, MD - UK Real Estate Cost Management: We’ve now got an end-to-end digital capability that allows us to develop our own applications which will enable us to disrupt the marketplace.

Tom Deacon: It’s fully-managed using best practice DevOps principles which means that the operational costs are significantly lower than we would otherwise spend for an organisation of this size.

So because this is a cloud-based platform we’ve been able to massively shorten procurement cycles and compress the software development lifecycle so that we’ve been able not only to create the platform but also to build two major products and upskill our team just within 16 weeks.

Paul Connolly: There’s three big benefits for Turner and Townsend. The first thing is that we’re removing a lot of the routine operations that our people are currently running through.

The second element is that we’re providing more relevant information to our clients which means that we can directly influence the outcomes of their projects and business cases.

But the the third thing and probably most important thing is it’s enabling us to leapfrog the competition and to lead the industry into a new era.

Tom Deacon: Contino supported our transformation really by trusted delivery. We gave them a product definition that our product owners and business analysts had put together and they were able to own that delivery of the software end to end. We have now what I think are world-class products at the end of it.

Contino have clearly brought together a very talented team. They actually genuinely like to spend time with our new recruits as we grow our team and do the upskilling and skills transfer of the product and platform that they’ve built.

Patricia Moore: The results so far have been that we’ve started to generate a real appetite for digital transformation across the business. So we’ve contained it to one part of our service at the moment. Already I’m getting lots of different petitions from different parts of the business about how we can digitally transform how we do most of our services.

Contino have helped us get there faster. I think, had we set out to do it all ourselves, we probably wouldn't have been able to get the results that we wanted to get as quickly and in such an assured way.

Neil Bullen: What’s next is really exciting. We’re getting close now to a successful phase one. And the next stage is about acceleration. It’s about taking it across the world to all of our clients and all of our teams around the world.

We look forward to working with Contino in the future as part of that journey.