The Design Consortium was launched in July 2016 at the Imperial War Museum. The Design Consortium is a Willmott Dixon consultants supply chain. It consists 20 consultants across a variety of design disciplines. The successful consultants are viewed as “Design Consortium Partners”.
When we developed the Design Consortium it was accepted that our people (a term we use for our employees) have their own preferred relationships they like to utilise, however this behaviour was seen by our business as affecting our ability to drive efficiency, learn from our mistakes and create real relationships based on performance and values. This led to the setting up of the Design Consortium, as a platform, to objectively allow design teams to gel, to allow lessons to be learnt and shared, to ensure prompt payment and that early engagement was made possible for every project.
The selection process of the Partners was put in place to ensure we surrounded our business with practices who shared those values and beliefs and as part of being a partner they would have a managed pipeline and be in consideration for projects that we have the ability to influence the selection off.
There is a team of Design Consortium Managers (Shaun & Eoin) tasked with driving the Design Consortium forward and this team had to organise road shows with all of the teams within our business to sell the benefits of the Design Consortium and that it could lead to genuine collaboration & a more sustainable way of working.
