our ‘values’ are fundamental ideas that guide the way sureside operates. our ‘philosophy‘ to the way we work is governed by our values. we also review our philosophy to ensure that it successfully results in our values being adhered to.

our people are our greatest asset

the services that sureside provides… are provided by our people for the benefit of our clients and in most cases the broader community. everything that we do needs to revolve around ensuring that our people are prioritised, supported, professionally developed and are cared for. the work sureside does is always secondary to our people and it is management’s responsibility to ensure that it demonstrates leadership and resilence to support the broader team.

our clients and community are important too… but we can best serve them by ensuring the wellbeing of our greatest assets.

authenticity

this is the part that truly separates individuals and organisations respectively from each other. authenticity is incredibly important in effectively communicating values and philosophy.

it is confounding to read organisational websites… whilst understanding that the organisation falsely represents itself. organisations also do this quite a bit in proposals, quotations and tenders such is the desperation to score points in the vendor’s assessment. the problem is however that clients and staff alike see the false claims amount to nought and they’re less likely to pay too much further attention.

when an organisation like sureside claims to adhere to values and claims a particular philosophy, it needs to practice authenticity for these claims to matter at all, otherwise our claims and our reasons for existing at all, would amount to nought.

fulfillment

personal fulfillment is as critical to career as it is to life. as generations become more concientious of this over time, the question of fulfillment becomes more and more applicable.

young engineers in particular want to have exposure to major projects. this definitely has value. major projects bring scale and diversity that smaller projects cannot achieve. it’s almost more likely that your community outside of the workplace will be familiar with a major project going on in your capital city or perhaps even internationally.

major projects however are a little, to draw an analogy, like walking into a large department store. They’re large and expansive… they’re stocked with all sorts of goods that can be stimulating… but at the end of the day they can all start to look a little bit the same. sure… you’ll come across things that are amazing opportunities, but the reality is that most of the time it is just a lot of “number crunching”. smaller projects are a bit like coming across a specialty store that is being run by a person that is enthusiastic about their store. they have accepted lower revenue and profits and find fulfillment in participating in a community and an industry that is passionate and genuinely connected to what they do.

diversity over your career is a good thing. this is all part of the perfect recipe for a career, which will be different for everyone. but utlimately we are of the belief that an individual’s fulfillment is a high priority and sureside offers a recipe that we know will align for a good number of talented engineers.

awareness and broad skill base

client awareness is critical to success in smaller projects. sureside advocates for broad skills in its staff which leads to better results, designs and risk mitigation.

maritime engineers need to be ‘all-rounders’ that have skills that extend across fields and into matters such as planning, politics, stakeholder engagement and communication.

technical capability

we’re fortunate to operate in an industry that features some outstanding local talent.

this means to be able to provide value to our clients. true value. as distinct from apparent value, there is an impetus to meet a standard just to remain relevant and competitive. technical capability must be high.

This is just as well… as it’s our view that executing and contributing a high technical capability to our community brings with it a very authentic source of satisfaction and sense of purpose.

in addition to this we’re seeking to earn the trust of our community that we foster high technical capability. to do this we must not only achieve this high level… but sustain it… foster it and do so with great consistency and recognition of its importance and intergality to the organisation’s identity.

value proposition

what is our client paying for?

as a consultant, this is an easy question to answer. you have awareness of exactly what your clients are paying for. this varies drastically among different business structures.

front and centre is ‘overheads’. that includes costs such as technical software, business systems, auditing, front desk, utilities, downtime, training, administration, offices, vehicles, compliance, business development, corporate management structures and human resources.

a few key points relevant to maritime engineering is that technical software that we regularly use is not particularly expensive. some tools that are rarely used are very expensive. we believe in being cognisant of this balance for the benefit of our clients.

maritime engineers need to be ‘all-rounders’ that have skills that extend across fields and into matters such as planning, politics, stakeholder engagement and communication..

business sustainability

business sustainability is of significant importance. it is not appropriate for our values to dictate business practices that do not set the foundation for a sustainable business model.

business sustainability requires appropriate financial controls and value propositions.

sureside monitor business sustainability using quarterly reporting measures on a project by project basis. In the meantime, realtime measures are used to monitor project performance on a week-to-week basis.

Good design and advice is challenging

design remains a challengiing task. maritime design is particularly challenging given projects that designers participate in vary markedly from project to project. This makes developing tools to assist in project execution more challenging.

sureside believes in developing risk-based tools to improve design outcomes and efficiency. This is something our founding director had a desire to do for some years prior to sureside. some of these tools are now emerging for select design tasks and are progressively being integrated into sureside’s integrated management system.

engineers are amazing

we genuinely think our peers are amazing and that we achieve amazing outcomes for our clients.

our clients may well just expect great outcomes or great standards from their engineers. they may conversely also expect the exact opposite based upon their particular previous experience. it might surprise our clients however that great outcomes and successful projects just cannot be taken for granted.

as consultants ourselves, we have witnessed and in some cases been a part of the horrific. that is designs and reporting that are so startlingly terrible and incompetent, it makes you question how such things can occur. for goodness sake, we rely upon these organisations to facilitate delivery of infrastructure that provides for our community’s livelihoods and safety. it is a frustrating reality that mistakes can flow through without being intervened.

our clients tend to just assume that ‘everything is ok’, it will be fine and we can rely on these professonals to meet their obligations.

from a consultant’s perspective, our client’s should feel confident in the outcomes from their engineers But this is not something that is automatic.

it is importantto take into account as well that things do go wrong, even with the best team and the best systems in place. however, the likelihood of something going wrong escalates very quickly depending upon an organisation’s committment to quality and technical excellence.

while that can all sound a bit pessimistic, we’d describe it just as providing a bit of a realistic perspective. in fact, we are regularly amazed at the outcomes we achieve as talented and capable engineers. we achieve great outcomes by making the impressive looking ordinary. in the background we create tools that facilitate improvements and provide sysems that facilitate ever improving design practice. we also admire engineers that approach projects with great problem solving skills, using a breadth of technical knowledge and having a great capacity to implement these measures and enable their peers to deliver incredible outcomes.

we love what we do!

accessibility

we believe in making our best and most talented professionals accessible to all. we see it often… a high calibre engineer comes onto a project and they immediately make a difference to a facility… just by immediately seeing a better way.

transparency of contract risk

sureside believes that transparency of contract risk is conducive to positive project outcomes. it’s common for clients to have one view of risk and the consultant to have another. this applies to the broad range of risks as well as individual specific risks.

a common misconception of clients is that once a designer is engaged, that the risk is now ‘controlled.

conversely, the consultant is in a position of having insufficient data and budget to finalise a deliverable.

these are two extremes on a spectrum that is seemingly repeated in different configurations again and again. the solution are systems that facilitate clear communication of risk and which track this risk through project execution. this way, both parties improve their understanding of risk position in a project and responsibility for control.

sureside shall develop and adopt systems that continuall speak to risk and track its management throughout its projects.

agile and responsive

the ability to be agile and responsive to client needs is an important component of a positive experience between consultant and client.

the reality is, this is not easy. there are consistently issues that arise that need to be prioritised. a consultancy cannot be agile and responsive without a concerted effort to position itself to achieve that capacity.

we’re still working on it, even though we’re doing this very well to date. we’ve had ideas and numerous have not worked as well as what we’d hoped. what has worked is filtering roles that we cannot service adequately given our forward work projections. another is that we’ve waived involvement in time critical engagements such as design & construct delivery method.

something that we have noticed is responsiveness of consultancies continues to be an issue. we have experienced the frustration of waiting on consultants ourselves and we share the frustration. what we can say we have achieved is that we are not causing that same level of frustration for our clients. however, we’re still not satisfied and have plans to provide enhanced certainty for our clients with responsiveness.

culture

organisational culture is perhaps the most important aspect of growing and nuturing a successful consultancy. why? it’s influences are numerous and its consequences are similarly diverse. it is also extremely difficult to change once a culture or a divergence in an existing culture has established.

matthew, our founding director has stated:

“culture is something that constantly amazed me. witnessing environments within consultancies and their long term staff you could recognise the culture manfiesting itself throughout the organisation, through the individuals, in multiple and powerful ways. It always just seemed to prove indelible. sometimes it would take a while to really recognise it… but once apparent it could be observed as having always indelibly and pervasively been there.

taking staff on from a poor culture, I once had a staff member boast to me that they obtained a huge variation from the client. i was in disbelief as this was in direct contradiction to everything we had communicated and impressed about the way we did business. you could see the staff member still didn’t seem to grasp why additional revenue was something that was unacceptable.

further to that, i can recognise the culture of my past organisations within myself. i’m forever thankful that the culture that I found myself in upon leaving university was nurturing of developing technical excellence. as the first 10 years of my career were dedicated to advancing my technical skills rather than my career, we turned out to be more compatible than I realised at the time.

culture is something that we should be concious of passing on to other engineers. We need to ensure that culture we convey is sound and valuable. it is in that passing of culture that we can witness the foundations we lay down for future generations. it is literally the thing i think of first when part of a team, or the example i am setting and the culture that example furnishes.”

Consideration of culture is considered critical when reflecting on growth and team environments. It is also critical when working with subconsultants who do not benefit from sureside’s own organisational culture and which may have a culture that can be incompatible with sureside’s.

dedication

traditional large multi-disciplinary businesses are there to provide a return for investors. but how do they do this? well this differs dramatically according to organisational structure. how a listed company does this is very different to how a privately held company would do this. the implications of underperforming are different, vary dramatically in volatility and the profit margins are dramatically different

large multi-disciplinary consultancies can be over-simplified as follows…

1. their profits and revenue are dictated predomnatly by major projects

2. their size and capability facilitates their consideration in major projects (reduced competition)

3. they need smaller projects to fill in the troughs between major projects in order to maintain capability for the next major project

4. return on smaller projects should be controlled, but its unlikely to ‘make or break’ the bottom line.

so the above is not all bad news for any client other than the largest clients with the most expansive infrastructure. it means that sureside’s most valued clients, those being smaller in nature, receive services from the large consultancies at reduced rates. the capability of the large consultancy is much enhanced given the diversity of projects, work and reach. they also attract very talented and capable people, the most capable of which can be highly valued by those organisations.

the downsides are…

those organisation’s priority is major projects. when major projects require resources, the major projects receive those resources. this is entirely understandable given the risks and opportunities that major projects entail.

Major projects are also a lot to do with bodies at desks it can almost get to the point of… it doesn’t matter how the seat is filled… just fill it. this can lead to lower skills and this can in turn critically affect the capability that is committed to your project. for a small project, this can be disastrous. the project involves just one or two resources that have lower skill and do not have the capability to deliver a project holistically. in these cases, clients are highly dependent upon the organisation’s systems to address deficiencies. but remember you’re dealing with an organisation set up for major projects… is it really going to work for you as a client?

there is also the downside that the design process in a major project is very very different to a small project. conducting a small project requires holistic and broad skills, not narrow skills that can more readily find application in a major project. there is also the need to interact and understand the client…. major project skills are not directly translatable to smaller projects.

accordingly a fundamental value of sureside is a commitment to service our clients with appropriate priority. this is not easily acheived but it is our fundamental belief that leading major projects is not compatible with propviding appropriate prioritisation for our valued clients.

a similar reality applies to being a designer in d&c projects, which introduces higher demands upon the responsivenss of designers and which takes away from the committment to our valued clients.

further, we believe in forward-thinking about appropriately servicing our clients. this means planning on project commitments going forward and formulating strategies to supplement our resources.

conservation

sureside operates as a social enterprise, intending to contribute at least 50% of profit distributions to shareholders to conservation organisations that undertake conservation efforts in areas connected to our projects. refer to Social Contributions for details.

best for project

sureside assesses its approach to project execution on a ‘best for project’ basis. ‘Best for project’ means identifying the needs of the project and the client and appropriately assigning resources with the appropriate capability to deliver each component of a project. refer to our capability section for a representation of sureside’s capability.

not every project requires ‘expert’ capability in order for a project to meet its objectives. all projects require ‘competency’ capability level in order to develop any project or component of a project. however, some projects are of higher risk due to value, infratructure function, difficulty of design, precedence and unknowns. sureside has developed tools to optimise design delivery and advice that takes into account the roles that risk and capability play in successfully meeting project objectives.

risk

sureside seeks to base its design practices, advice, reporting and design almost entirely around the concept of ‘risk’. this is done with the intent of optimising decision-making of sureside and its clients using risk assessment as the principal tool to measure the drive to undertake certain actions and decisions.

resource sharing

sureside recognises the role that competition plays in providing a competitive consulting industry that acts to control pricing for the community. it also drives continual improvement in consultancy conduct and practices and encourages investment in same.

the downside is that the industry has not found consistency in practice in numerous areas and investment in improving resources is siloed, which is naturally quite inefficient.

In accordance with our values, sureside plans to develop guidelines and checklists and to make these available through our website to the broader industry.

systemisation

sureside is committed to the development of systems that optimise delivery of design and advice. This includes development of tools and guidelines to guide staff through the design process from start to finish.

sureside has also developed supplements and checklists that clients shall have visibility of. these tools shall assist the client to understand considerations that have been taken into account during design.

staff fulfillment

staff fulfillment is contributed to by:

1. ethical conduct of business and its management including communication of values
2. ethics of projects
3. ethical conduct, behaviour and quality of clients
4. support of staff for technical and career progression
5. investment in staff development
6. work-life balance
7. management that communicates and is receptive to staff needs
8. interesting and diverse projects, roles and opportunities
9. appropriate stress management and support
10. a balanced focus on business performance and sustainability for staff security
11. prioritisation of outcomes and performance before profit
12. Identification of community responsibilities and advocacy for positive community outcomes
13. commitment to ethics, values and courage to collectively advocate for positive community outcomes
14. contribution to industry and recognition
15. selfless drivers for performance.
16. commensurate remuneration
17. transparency.

community

sureside’s philosophy often refers to ‘community’ and its importance.

Community has a number of meanings and contexts to sureside. by community we mean among the following:

• direct public stakeholders, being beach goers, promenaders, boaters, holidayers and locals etc. we recognise that direct public stakeholders hold a very high value in the assets that we design, inspect and advise on. this value may be an emotional connection as well as dependence upon infrastructure for enjoyment and recreation. sureside sees itself very much as professionals who exercise responsibility for community safety and enhancement of enjoyment of coastal and riparian environments.
• indirect public stakeholders being community represented by ‘the crown’, the federal government and local councils plus stakeholders that are dependent upon functional ports for their livelihood.
• the maritime industry is a close-knit community that benefits from the performance and progression of its professionals in advancing the quality of its infrastruction and investment.