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TML ORGANISATION
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Of course there are difficulties, but nothing insurmountable. There is of course the language difference, but they are very talented in this respect, whereas we're just abysmal. There is also the way they think - I can't explain what it is, but our minds seem to work differently. It must be a national characteristic - one thing for sure, its not bloody-mindedness! We can sit around a table with our opposite numbers and within minutes reach an absolute agreement on any objective, and then in as many minutes both sides will arrive at precisely the opposite means of achieving it (John Reeve, Directeur-Général TML. Cited Hunt p 220).
Senior management were seconded from the consortium mother companies. Despite this the complexity of the project effectively gave TML "un certain degré de liberté par rapport à ses entreprises commanditaires. Des principes de direction, des règles d'organisation et des procédures particulières communes ont mis en place" (Lemoine 1994 p 128), and one informant argued that the Directeurs Généraux operated with "very little supervision from TML as a whole". In this period, TML was staffed mainly with secondees from the mother companies, and there was a suspicion that they were not the best staff available - these were retained by the mother companies for getting new work (interview 5/9/95).
Until the Royal Assent was received for the bill that enabled the project in November 1987, the engineering effort was, effectively, starved of cash. As John Reeve argued,
This lack of attention to the fixed equipment design was to cost the project dear. The human resource management policies for the tunnelling workers were very different on the two sides of the Channel. The British recruited their labour widely. Over 50% of the workforce were "travelling men" (Lemley 1992), housed in a temporary camp which presented considerable problems of recruitment and retention. Tensions with the local community were also generated by this implantation. Many came from the depressed mining regions of the country. Unlike on the French side, there was little attempt to favour local workers. 95% of the operatives on the French side, however, were recruited in the Nord Pas de Calais region (Revue Français Hebdomaire 22/11/94), itself a depressed region. These workers were seen as part of an employment generation and retraining effort for the region (Mativat 1991), and offered comprehensive help in finding jobs as their time on the tunnel came to an end. Due to space constraints on the British side, many of the operatives were based at the factory for tunnel lining segment production on the Isle of Grain, some 100 km away from the main Cheriton site, and the segments were transported by rail. The French segment factory was on the site at Sangatte.The British side of the tunnelling operations, despite an apparently easier task, experienced many management problems during 1988 when it hit unexpectedly bad ground. This compounded the existing organisational problems and prompted outbursts of frustration from Eurotunnel. The essence of the problem was that the senior managers seconded from the UK members of TML had great difficulty in working together. An ex-Mowlem manager was appointed to resolve this problems as someone from outside the consortium member companies. As he put it, "I diluted the cliques and and made us more a team. Before that we were bunches of Taywood people, bunches of Costain people and so on" (cited Byrd 1994 p80), and the management of the tunnelling operations and the site transport system were integrated. These weaknesses in construction management were also responsible for the relatively poor safety record of the UK tunnelling operations (Byrd 1994 p145). Under pressure from Eurotunnel, it was decided to strengthen the Supervisory Board which was placed under the eye of the Members' Assembly which consisted of the Chief Executives of the member companies. A unified management structure to reflect the shift from the tunnelling phase of the project to the fitting out was developed, which is illustrated, as it was in December 1989, in figure 4. The most notable feature is the reinforced role of Chief Executive, and the grouping of operations responsibilities under the Construction Managing Director. The new structure disbanded the Engineering Directorate and devolved its civils responsibilities to the Construction Groups, which now reported to the common Construction Director. Transportation system engineering became the responsibility of the Transportation Systems and Engineering Group (TSEG). TML's headquarters were also moved from Sutton to Folkestone to improve liaison between the engineering functions and site operations. Over this period almost all of TML's senior management were eased out or quit (Anderson 1992 ; Kakoullis 1991). The two Directeurs Généraux - John Reeve and François Jolivet - resigned in June 1989. They followed the Chairman and Chief Executive of TML, Andrew McDowall who was demoted to Deputy Chairman in the February and replaced by Philippe Essig of SNCF as Chairman. Many of those who left during this period were the secondees, and together with the growing size of the establishment, those secondees left were increasingly diluted. Towards the end of the project, staff were overwhelmingly (97%) British or French nationals, with the balance coming largely from Ireland. Most (72%) were recruited especially for the project, but the majority (55%) were employed by the mother companies rather than either of TML's two constituents.The logic was explained by TML's new Chairman, thus:
The tunnelling operations could be separately managed from each side of the Channel, but once the fitting out started, they had to be treated as a common operation. Similarly, the integration of the Transport Sytems and Engineering Directorates followed the shift of emphasis from civil to mechanical and electrical engineering. While these developments followed the overall evolution of the project, it is also clear from the level of staff turnover that a more fundamental transformation of TML's senior management was also taking place in response to the demands of Eurotunnel. Staff increasingly came from organisations such as SNCF, Morrison Knudsen and the British Department of Transport. Following the 1989 accord, Jack Lemley, who had been a Morrison Knudsen vice president before working in his own consultancy practice, was appointed chief executive of TML in July 1989 to complement Philippe Essig as chair. As the project moved to the fitting out phase, TML increasingly subcontracted the bulk of the work, placing subcontracts in the name of either Transmanche GIE or Translink JV. Many of these subcontracts were, however, with other divisions of the mother companies. For instance, Tarmac Construction, in consortium with Montcocol and other French companies won the contract for installing the railway tracks, while Balfour Beatty Power in consortium with Spie Batignolles installed the catenary systems. By July 1992, this consortium was in dispute with TML (Contract Journal 16/7/92). Many subcontractors were encouraged to form a consortium with an opposite number from the other side of the channel. For instance, due to a desire for a commonality of image through the system, BDP came together with Groupe 6 to work on the design of the two terminal buildings at Sangatte and Cheriton. TML was reorganised again during early 1991 as the project moved fully into the fitting out phase in a move towards greater centralisation. The immediate problem was the coordination of the mechanical and electrical installations, but these reflected deeper cultural problems between "office" and "site". TSEG were responsible for design, with all the uncertainties thereby entailed. They also had to cope with delays caused by Eurotunnel's slow approval of designs and lack of clear definition of requirements. The Construction Groups, on the other hand, complained of lack of design information and the pressure of programme constraints. TSEG had a flatter matrix organisation with a longer term perspective, while the Construction Groups were more hierarchically organised with short term goals. Initially, TSEG had retained overall responsibility for the M&E installations in terms of programming and commercial control, while the supervision of installation was carried out by M&E departments within the Construction Groups. This led to coordination problems between both the Transport Systems and Construction Groups, and within the Construction Groups between the Civils and M&E departments. The M&E departments were disbanded, and the Construction Groups took direct overall responsibility for the M&E installations from Transport Systems (Anderson 1992), however the pressures on the M&E programme had led to the departure of the Director of TSEG in September 1991 and his replacement by Keith Price, a Morrison Knudsen main board director, shortly after the resignation of Essig (Hunt p 239). As the project moved fully into the commissioning stage at the beginning of 1992, a further reorganisation took place, and the organisation became much flatter. The Groups were abolished, and all the operational aspects were brought under a single Director of Operations. Many of the remaining Directors were responsible for financial, legal, and commercial matters - a reflection of the level of dispute with Eurotunnel. This structure, as of March 1993, is shown in figure 5. This type of structure was retained by TML for the rest of the life of the organisation, although it was continually adjusted as TML wound down during 1993.At the end of 1988, TML employed some 8000 people - 2200 on the French side, 4900 on the British, and 847 in design offices - and reached a peak of 11700 by late 1989. Lemoine (1994 p 128) argues that this disparity between the British and French sides can be explained by the less sophisticated technology used on the British side, lower UK labour costs, and the poorer adaptation of the British contractors to international competition due to lower productivity. However, these comments ignore that fact that the French had only 5 tunnelliers to the British 6, and that the British had approximately twice as far to tunnel as the French. This is due to the fact that the British landward drives are much longer than the French, and that the breakthrough points were much closer to France than Britain. For instance the service tunnel broke through 22km from the British coast and only 16km from the French. In addition, the TML Liaison Office - effectively the head office was located in Folkestone. The British operations were also split between Folkestone and the Isle of Grain with inevitable implications for overheads and transport (Contract Journal 20/11/86). Although the formal staus of the two languages was equal, the project worked largely in English for the bi-national coordination. Success "owed much to the readiness of the French to accept English as the working language. As a general rule neither the French nor the English pride themselves on their knowledge of foreign languages; but I have to confess that in the world of the tunnel the French far outstripped us in linguistic ability" (Henderson 1987 p 44). There was certainly inter-cultural rivalry on the project. Pierre Matheron, the director of TML's French operations, describes the rivalry between the teams to cross each other's frontiers (Les Echos 10/12/90). A French informant saw the project as dominated by the British (interview 6/1/93), while his British opposite number saw it as dominated by the French (interview 9/7/93). What differed was the basis of the domination - the British dominated through their expertise in financial matters, while the French dominated through their expertise in technical matters. Another informant regarded the refusal of the French to buy British tunnelliers at this point as a sign of the nationalistic tendencies within the project. However, the same informant explained that, "where it mattered it wasn't a problem - professionals get on because they respect each other's competence", and that perhaps the main cultural problem was trying to explain to the French what a quantity surveyor did that an engineer could not do (interview 5/9/95). More of a problem was integrating management systems. For instance, with regard to health and safety, smoking and the drinking of alcohol were completely forbidden on the British side, but cigarettes and wine were tolerated in moderation on the French. As the risks of loosing money on the project became a reality for the consortium members during 1990, differences in policy towards taking provisions in their accounts emerged between the British and French sides. These differences may be explained by the different accounting policies in the two countries where reported profits tend to be maximised in Britain in order to please shareholders, and minimised in France in order to reduce tax liabilities, and the much weaker balance sheets of the British companies whose domestic market was then already in recession (Contract Journal 19/9/91). By the end of the project, a total of around £200m had been taken in provisions by all of the consortium members, and they did not expect to recover all of these following the final settlement (Contract Journal 2/6/94).
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TML
is an integrated consortium of two consortia - Transmanche GIE and Translink JV
- with a common capital, and distribution of the profits in equal shares; its
overall structure is illustrated in figure 2. Initially, it operated with a
nationally based twin structure with British and French Directeurs Généraux
reporting to a chief executive. In the early stages, the organisation was highly
centralised, and each Directeur Général could keep control of most activities
on his side of the Channel. Once the project went on site in the summer of 1987,
the organisation grew rapidly and decentralised to five main Directorates
(Anderson 1992). This structure, as it was in February 1988, is illustrated in
figure 3. While engineering functions were integrated in the Engineering
Directorate and Transport System Directorate, construction functions were
completely separated on national lines. Within this structure, each area of
operations was treated as a profit centre, or sub-project. For instance,
Transmanche's Construction Directorate was divided into sub-projects for
tunnelling, terminals, and concrete lining prefabrication. These sub-projects
were supported by an engineering capability, and administrative, commercial,
quality assurance, human resources, and project management functions. Each sub-project
director was responsible for establishment, client relations, choice of
construction techniques, choice of subcontractors, safety, and the achievement
of sub-project objectives (Mativat 1991).
Engineering
design was located in a joint office in Sutton under the Engineering Director
where the anglo-french Engineering Group coordinated the engineering design
process (Brown 1989). The provenance of engineering expertise reflected
structural differences between the two national construction industries. On the
UK side, TML relied heavily upon engineering consultants such as Mott Macdonald,
BDP, and Kennedy Henderson. On the French side, in contrast, integrated teams
drawn from the in-house bureau d'études of the TML member companies did
much of the engineering work. For the civils works, the Engineering Group
carried out all design work; for the fixed equipment, which was subcontracted,
they took the process up to definitive design before handing it over to the
Transport Systems Group (TSG) who managed the tendering process and detailed
design by the sub-contractors. For the procurement items, TSG took over after
the preparation of performance specifications by the Engineering Group.