FIRST PROJECT MANAGEMENT MOVES OF A/S STOREBÆLTSFORBINDELSEN

If as indicated the state’s considerations concerning the control of its client representative were in some respects contradictory the same can not be said about the Storebælt company’s operations once it was established. Its first employee, Managing Director Construction H.-H.Gotfredsen, took up his position in April 1987 - a month before the Parliament adopted the Act on the fixed link! As an experienced project manager in bridge building and having the previously failed fixed link run-ups in fresh mind his immediate strategy was to have the project materialise quickly as possible in order to prevent new political setbacks. It was considered crucial to pass the point of no return or - as it was phrased in the words of the classic goal oriented construction manager - "... we had to have concrete on the table in a hurry ... "! From his previous job as head of the Road Directorate’s bridge department Gotfredsen took with him a technocratic approach to project management which, however, due to the fact that the construction organisation did not exist, could only partly be applied. As virtually no facilities were installed, whether physical or routines of work, the launch of the project was not comparable with that of an "ordinary construction project" Consequently at the same time Godtfredsen had to cast the roles for the staff, implement a modus vivendi for his organisation, and to produce the design and planning outputs necessary to his strategy. Obviously, this situation lead to a strong dependence on the large Danish engineering consulting firms - firstly as suppliers of personnel to his staff, secondly because a substantial conceptual design work straight away from the start had to be contracted with these firms. Not surprisingly Munch’s (1997) interviews with the consulting firms expose a generic relationship between the two parties which soon brought along a new mutual sharing of their professional perspectives (i.e. the client’s more political and the engineer’s more technical perspective). COWIconsult, the predominant consulting firm of the project, is experiencing a conspicuous problem trying to define the characteristics of the job. On one side "a good consulting engineer" cannot interfere with the political basis of a project ("politics is not a rational process"). On the other side " the Scandinavian art of engineering" highlights the capability of adaptation, i.e. integrating the "soft aspects" of the projects in the design. And indeed, COWIconsult’s first commission in 1987, given by Storebælt’s Managing Director Construction Gotfredsen, was to re-examine the politically institutionalised key elements of the project (and not least the degrees of freedom) which could be deduced from the political agreement and the Act of Parliament.