You don't hear much about Sir John Egan these days. Integrated teams, lean construction, innovation ... all the great doctrines he set out in Rethinking Construction back in 1998 have faded with the years. It's not hard to see why. The industry has spent the intervening decade scrambling to mobilise resources to cope with the sheer volume of work. The problems of getting hold of skilled people - and at the same time responding to the sustainability agenda - have overshadowed everything else. So, as we report this week, it's no surprise that the targets Egan set down have not been met (page 30). Does that matter? Well, some of them were a little fanciful: a 10% cut in time and cost year on year? Not likely, even if construction inflation wasn't running at about 50% over the 10 years. In fact the industry only hit two targets: it recruited 300,000 workers by 2006 and increased its annual turnover and profit 10%. In 2000, the industry's average margin was 4.4%; in 2007 it was 8.2%. Unfortunately, those results owed everything to a boom in demand and absolutely nothing to a revolution in productivity.
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