Managing the Professional Practice: In the Built Environment

The emphasis here is to explore the key issues influencing the culture, strategies and management operations of professional practices. The focus is upon established practices from growing ones to large international firms in the built environment. A key aim of the book is to promote aspects of management by function and activities, with discipline acting as context rather than the primary focus. The book is structured into sections around 3 main themes: managing the organisation; and managing specific issues that affect operations, and a third section reflects upon management from practitioner experience. Section I: 'Managing the organisation' looks at how the history of the firm creates both opportunities and rigidities for developing the practice, in terms of culture and market position, strategies and implementation, financial, marketing and HR management. Section II: 'Managing specific strategic and tactical issues' looks at how these affect approaches a discipline and operational processes in practices. These issues compliment those covered in Section I. Section III: 'Reflecting on practice' covers experience of those in practice and top practitioners detail how they are addressing key issues in their practice and for their discipline. Each chapter by a practitioner has a postscript from academic authors to make links back to research on theory and application.