The New Conference Centre

Marcia Williams had been hired as the conference

manager, for the newly established conference
centre, attached to a resort hotel on the north coast
of New South Wales.
The actual conference facilities were in the final
stages of construction when she was hired, and she
immediately expressed some doubt about a number
of aspects of the layout and equipment. The resort
manager, Peter Ferguson, seemed a little put out by
her comments but he had reassured her that the
conference centre had been carefully planned under
the design and construct contract he had arranged
with a local builder. The advantage of this contract
had been that the resort only had to deal with one
party, the builder, who was responsible for engaging
architects, engineers and other consultants to do the
planning and design, as well as being responsible for
the usual tasks of engaging subcontractors to carry
out the actual building work. Under this arrangement
the project had been completed on schedule, and
within the agreed budget. In other words, it had been
a successful project.
Marcia was not so sure. The first thing she noticed in
the main auditorium was the echo. She soon found
out that there had been no acoustic consultant; the
builder had assured Peter that the architect could
handle any acoustic problem, and "anyway, acoustic
problems could be easily fixed with extra acoustic
absorbent material". When Marcia had raised the
matter, the builder denied there was any problem and
Peter agreed.
However after some heated
discussion, they finally agreed to call in an acoustic
consultant, just to prove to Marcia that there was no
problem.
The acoustics consultant's report was worse than
Marcia had expected. It listed the acoustic response
times and other technical details and then went on to
explain that the auditorium was actually the wrong
shape! Fixing absorbent material on the side and
rear walls would improve the acoustics to a workable
standard, but not really up to the standard of a fivestar conference centre. That would require the
building of false walls to change the internal shape of
the auditorium. Obviously it would also reduce the
seating capacity. Further enquiries showed that the
architects were young and enthusiastic, but they had
never worked on a conference centre before and
were not really familiar with the requirements of such
a specialised project. The builder had previously
engaged them to design alterations to houses and
small shops in the locality.
The other layout problem was the size of the smaller
rooms. These were to be used for either small
discussion groups (4 to 6 people) or for training
sessions (15 to 25 people), but they were all
designed for about 10 to 12 people, too small for
training, but wastefully large for small discussion
groups. To make matters worse, there were no
folding wall systems to open up large rooms or divide
them into small rooms. However Marcia thought
there might be scope to actually remove or rearrange
some walls, but she would need to speak to the
architect or the builder about this.

The next problem Marcia found was the audio-visual

system. It had been shown proudly as the best "state of
the art" system, with a computer controlled array of CD
players, video players, slide projectors and other gadgetry,
all linked to impressive speakers and a video projector.
When the contractor who designed and installed the
system was called in to provide a demonstration, he
couldn't get it to work properly and went away promising to
check the control program. Marcia had seen similar
problems before, and realising that most presentations
only required relatively simple equipment, she was
convinced the best way to deal with the audio-visual
equipment was to "go low-tech", simplifying the system
and using direct manual control instead of computer
control. However she had seen a reliable touchscreen
system at conference she had attended in Sydney the
previous year. That might also be a possibility, but would
probably be rather expensive.
At first Peter would not accept that there were any
problems, except a few teething problems, and
eventually he started to avoid Marcia, apparently not
wanting to hear about them.
Marcia was seriously
considering resigning. She could not see a way around
the problems, and even if she could find a way, she had no
idea how to get Peter to approve any remedial work. Then
Peter left abruptly. Marcia never found out why he left, but
she immediately approached his replacement and
explained the problems she faced.
The new resort manager, Michael Chan, seemed eager to
help overcome the problems. He listened to the problems
sympathetically and then suggested Marcia should start
planning the remedial work as a project, simply scheduling
the work around the constraints imposed by the known
bookings. Obviously he wanted to know the probable cost,
but he seemed to think the cost was less important than
getting it right. Marcia knew about project scheduling in
theory, but she had never actually used it on a real
application before. She also wondered about the mistakes
in the original design and construction. She wanted to get
it right this time, but she was not sure that she had all the
answers. She knew how to run a successful conference,
but building (or doing remedial work on) a conference
centre was quite a different matter.
On top of the problems with the facilities, Marcia now
found out that the opening of the conference centre, to be
done by the local member of parliament, had been
scheduled just three weeks from now, with a small
conference to follow immediately. Then there was a break
of three months, with only some small training sessions
being run, before the main conference season started in
October.
1.
2.

What caused the problems with the original design

and construction?
How should Marcia organise the remedial work?

Case prepared by George Rosier, 2005.

Revised 2008.