Why the right local partner matters when you're delivering workplaces from thousands of miles away

Akamai is a global company operating across more than 130 countries, and I oversee our global office real estate projects from Cambridge, Massachusetts. In any given year, this could mean overseeing projects in Tokyo, India, Paris or Madrid, often with the wider Akamai team distributed across different locations as well.

Managing projects in this way brings a particular set of challenges. Every market operates differently, from the construction process and local requirements through to the way project teams work and communicate. I don't have the time or bandwidth to understand every rule, process or local practice in every country, so finding trusted regional partners who understand their market is essential. At the same time, we don't want to build cookie-cutter offices.

There needs to be consistency with the Akamai brand, but each workplace should also have a local culture and feel. Getting that balance right requires designers and delivery partners who understand what we're trying to achieve globally while having the confidence and local knowledge to interpret that for their own market.Trust matters when you're managing remotelyWhen you'resitting in the Cambridge and the project is happening thousands of miles away,trust and transparency become particularly important.

I need to know what's happening without constantly having to ask, and I need people on the ground who will raise an issue early rather than wait until it has become a problem. That was one of the things that worked particularly well with Woodalls on our London project. They were proactive about identifying and addressing potential issues and were always the first to tell me what was happening. I didn't have to dig for information. The team regularly shared photographs and videos from site, which meant that even though I was in the US, I had visibility of what was happening throughout the project. Woodalls also brought knowledge of the UK market and established relationships with subcontractors. That local understanding made the process much smoother and gave me confidence that if a problem arose, the team would be able to address it without putting the programme at risk.

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Getting involved early

London is an expensive construction market, and the process can be paperwork heavy. If that isn't understood and allowed for from the outset, it can have a significant impact on the schedule. Cost control and anticipating potential changes therefore become particularly important.

On the London project, Woodalls identified infrastructure issues in the building early which could have created much bigger problems further down the line. They addressed those issues proactively and helped us understand the potential cost implications before they became more difficult to manage.

For me, that's one of the benefits of early contractor engagement. Bringing the delivery expertise into the conversation early means potential roadblocks can be identified while there is still time to do something about them. Due diligence and pre-planning matter, particularly when the client is managing the project remotely and relying on its local team to understand what may be coming down the road.

I've seen the consequences when that doesn't happen. On a previous project in Italy, we didn't undertake the site-selection due diligence early enough. The options available to us included older buildings with three-foot concrete walls, which created obvious challenges for the work we wanted to undertake. Experiences like that reinforce why local knowledge needs to be part of the decision-making process as early as possible.

A differentway of working

The design-and-build model is also different from the approach we're more accustomed to in North America, where there can be separate relationships with the architect, general contractor and MEP contractor. Working with a design-and-build contractor such as Woodalls brings that expertise together and, in my experience, can help the project move more quickly while maintaining the necessary controls.

But thestructure itself is only part of it. The relationship between the teams mattersjust as much.

With Woodalls,I felt they understood our feedback and reacted to it immediately as the designevolved. It was an organic partnership rather than a traditional client-vendorrelationship. It wasn't simply a case of us asking for something and the teamresponding. It became much more of a conversation.

That collaboration extended beyond design. What I look for in a partner is someone who is invested in the overall success of the project and the employe eexperience, rather than focusing solely on the nuts and bolts of construction. That was something I felt throughout the relationship with Woodalls, and for someone managing a project remotely, it makes a real difference.

Finding the right team

One of therealities of delivering international workplace projects is that the people youappoint at the beginning may be your team for the next 12 to 18 months. Makingthe right choice early is therefore important.

For me, the best regional partners combine local expertise with trust, transparency and professionalism. They understand the market, anticipate problems and are prepared to tell you what you need to know. They also understand the wider objective behind the project rather than seeing their role simply in terms of construction.

Our London office is an important hub for client interaction and includes a new customer experience centre, so we needed to create a space that would make an immediate impression. It is a customer-facing environment that reflects the global nature of Akamai and the work we do around the world. Delivering that while managing the project from the US meant having a team in London that understood what we were trying to achieve and that I could trust to deliver it.

You can'tmanage an international workplace portfolio by assuming every market will workin the same way. Global standards are important, but so are local culture,local knowledge and the people you choose to work with.

When you find the right partner, the distance becomes much less important.

By Matt Burgess, Director, Global Project Delivery, Akamai