Working Partners Engagement

DSD understands good partnerships can bring positive synergies and working closely with our partners can enhance work efficiency. Under the new engineering contract model, DSD has boosted the participation between consultants and contractors. At the same time, DSD conducts regular site visits to carry out face-to-face communication with the working partners and to understand the progress of each project. In addition, DSD collaborates with working partners to organize workshops to promote Occupational Safety and Health and deepen exchanges and cooperation between working partners at a regular interval.

Promoting Occupational Safety and Health

To promote Occupational Safety and Health (OSH), we rolled out a number of site safety improvement measures and activities, including experience sharing sessions, site visits and a Construction Sites Safety and Housekeeping Award Scheme for our staff and project partners.

Experience Sharing Sessions and Site Visits

In the third quarter of the reporting year, we organised an experience sharing session to review the recent accident cases, and a session regarding general electrical safety delivered by a specialist from the Electrical and Mechanical Services Department (EMSD) and CLP Power Hong Kong Limited. Both sessions attracted more than 50 staff from DSD, consultants and contractors to attend, exchanging their views and experiences. A visit to the Safety Training Centre of Dragages Hong Kong Ltd was held in August 2018. About 20 DSD's colleagues participated in the visit and actively exchanged their views with the host.

Construction Sites Safety and Housekeeping Award Scheme 2018

The "Construction Sites Housekeeping Award Scheme" was established in January 2004, which aimed to instill a culture of good site management among DSD's contractors, consultants and in-house site supervisory staff. As from 2018-19, the Scheme was renamed and re-launched as the "Construction Sites Safety and Housekeeping Award Scheme". Awards are given to teams with outstanding site management performance to show our appreciation of Construction Site Safety and Housekeeping. More importantly, it encourages DSD's contractors, consultants and in-house site supervisory staff to work as a team in keeping with ever rising public expectations. There were 32 contract teams participating in the Scheme 2018, and 11 of which received either "The Best Construction Sites Safety and Housekeeping Award" or the "Meritorious Award". DSD's senior management gave a speech in the award presentation ceremony, remarking that the accident rate, work efficiency, employees' sense of belonging and the public image of a construction site are largely hinged upon good site safety management and a clean and tidy working environment. Encouragement has also been given to the contract teams for continuous enhancement of site safety, alleviation of the impacts from works to surrounding neighborhoods, shouldering responsibilities of providing quality services and building a better environment.

Launch of New Engineering Contract

Compared with the traditional engineering contract, the New Engineering Contract (NEC) facilitates a closer cooperation among all parties, as well as advocates joint management and risk-sharing. This encourages the project offices to establish amicable working relationships with contractors to avoid disputes, minimise the risk of project delay and improve productivity

In the past 10 years, we have awarded 66 NECs covering civil engineering projects, electrical and mechanical engineering projects, maintenance works and consultancy services. We actively promote NEC to the construction industry and awarded 22 NECs last year, which accounted for about 33% of the total awarded NECs. On the other hard, we have already completed 18 NECs, among which Happy Valley Underground Stormwater Storage Scheme (HKUSSS) demonstrates a very encouraging result; 14-month early completion with around $110 million savings to the total project cost.

As a major NEC user, DSD collaborated with different stakeholders in the construction industry through participating in numerous symposiums and workshops in the past year to promote the improvement in cost effectiveness and risks reduction of the NEC. Among these, Mr. MAK Ka-wai, Deputy Director of Drainage Services, attended the NEC Asia Pacific Users' Group Briefing on 27 April 2018 to share suggestions regarding subcontracting and cost saving design of further enhancement in mutual trust and cooperation. Meanwhile, Mr. LAI Yuk-on, Senior Engineer, shared with subcontractors on DSD's experience in using NEC for better project delivery in the Construction Industry Council's Subcontractor Leadership Summit 2018 on 12 November 2018.

Partnering Workshop

Under the NEC form, the project team for the "Upgrading of Central and East Kowloon Sewerage - Phase 3", which consists of DSD, the project consultant and the main contractor, hosted a Partnering Workshop on 29 March 2019. The Workshop aimed at strengthening mutual trust, fostering cooperation and setting common goals among the project team members. Managerial personnel and frontline staff from all three parties participated in the workshop. Through the group activities in the workshop, participants learnt that, the success factors of a project include to use the strengths of each partner wisely, to be innovative and to makes decisions after balancing the views of all parties. Participants also exchanged views and discussed the challenges encountered during the construction works, and acknowledged the importance of teamwork.

After the group discussions, participants set a series of common objectives, including advancing the project completion by six months, reducing project cost by 5%, achieving zero accident, zero environmental summons, adopting four innovations in construction for promoting Construction 2.0, as well as winning two safety awards and obtaining 10 recognition letters. A partnering charter was signed accordingly. By dint of the partnering approach of NEC and our project slogan of "upgrading the sewerage to cope with the pace of developing community", we will overcome various engineering challenges collaboratively.