Goodbye 2014: Reflections on the year gone by
And there goes another year in the blink of an eye! It seems like I was only sitting down to write reflections on 2013 five minutes ago and here we are in 2015 reflecting on 2014.
I’m always sad to see another year go but I do enjoy taking a few minutes to sit and think of all that Claims Class has achieved in those 12 short months. Of course, not everything was smooth sailing and we experienced our fair share of challenges too but hey, it wouldn’t be as much fun if everything was easy would it?
If you haven’t already guessed, today’s post looks back at 2014 and explores some of the exciting things to watch out for in 2015. So sit back, grab a cup of whatever takes your fancy, and have a read…
New Additions to Intensive Training Portfolio
Claims Class saw its fair share of countries this year and delivered its Construction Claims Intensive Training Course in Qatar, Dubai, South Africa and London.
We achieved new levels of success in Qatar and reached full capacity for the course in January 2014. We put this down to the increase in construction projects surrounding the 2020 World Cup and the issues that many are facing on construction projects.
Based on your feedback, we developed a new one-day course on the Principles of Forensic Delay Analysis towards the end of 2013. We’ve only delivered the course once so far due to the busy schedule of our partners who help us to present this course but we hope to see new course dates set for 2015. We are also developing a two-day version of this course which will be much more technical for those Primavera people out there.
Most exciting, and again based on your feedback, we developed a new course – Understanding Claims Under the FIDIC Contracts towards the end of 2014. We launched earlier this month and received great feedback from the attendees and look forward to setting 2015 course dates. We also tried something new for this course and delivered the course partly over a weekend so it fell on Saturday and Sunday. The feedback on this was good and we’re now considering running more courses over a weekend to accommodate those who struggle to get time off work to attend training courses. What’s your opinion on this? Please tell us.
Distance Learning Course Continues to Draw New Students In
Our Construction Claims Distance Learning Course took on a life of it’s own in 2014. It seems that interest in the course is really building due to referrals from existing students (thank you) and improvements in our marketing / social media activity which has helped us to reach a wider audience.
As a result of this, we now have students of 19 different nationalities working in 21 different countries currently studying the course and that number continues to grow.
We look forward to more students graduating from the course this year and hope to welcome new ones.
Publications
If you’re an avid Claims Class follower then you’ll know by now that the face behind it all is Andy Hewitt. He developed all Claims Class courses and when he’s not doing his day job (consultancy work) he’s presenting our courses and tutoring our students.
Andy likes a challenge and decided that being the author of one book, Construction Claims & Responses, wasn’t enough so he decided to write another one, this time on the FIDIC forms of contract entitled, The FIDIC Contracts: Obligations of the Parties.
The book was published by Wiley Blackwell in May 2014 and is doing well so far. Let’s hope the book sales inspire Andy to write something else worthy for the industry!
Behind the Scenes
We were working on a lot behind the scenes this year and some of our notable successes include:
- Gaining Chartered Building Consultancy status with the Chartered Institute of Building
- Building closer ties with the RICS where we look forward to contributing to RICS CPD events, member webinars and member training. On the agenda so far for this year is a CPD event in Dubai on 19th April and one in Abu Dhabi on the 27th Both events will focus on the use of Dispute Boards so if you’re an RICS member make sure you get yourself registered.
- We have been heavily involved in the set up of a new institute for the construction industry, the Institute of Construction Claims Practitioners (ICCP), which recognises those who specialise in construction claims. This is a great step for the industry and Claims Class is proud to be associated with it.
So there’s our reflections on the year, look out for our next blog post on plans for 2015!