RPC Reflections on 2024
It’s time for our annual look back over the business across the year. A chance to reflect on the year’s successes, significant events, new developments and more.
The calendar of regular industry events helps to set the rhythm of the year, but one of the first in 2024 was a new venture for us, and for our Project Controls Expo colleagues, as we ventured to Dubai for the first PCE UAE. With so much large-scale, complex construction in the Middle East – not least the extraordinary NEOM project – and the proliferation of oil and gas business in the region, we felt that there were many potential opportunities here for us to explore a new market. We weren’t quite expecting to be met by such very British weather! Heavy rain battered Dubai during our visit, overwhelming a drainage system designed more for desert conditions and closing roads en route to the conference venue. But spirits were not dampened and it proved to be an interesting event, where local Oracle colleague Sherief Elabd shared the presentation stage with Nathan Lambert, introducing our Unifier project controls solutions to the conference.
Overall, our revenues are up by an extraordinary 40% compared with the same time last year and we’ve had some ground-breaking client work throughout the year to support this. One major project with National Nuclear Laboratory was a complex migration from Microsoft Project to Primavera P6 for their planning capabilities, but not just that, the required levels of security for the business made this the first deployment on Oracle’s highly-secure OC4 environment. It was a project that came with many complexities and challenges and we’ve been excited to take some opportunities to share our learning and experiences in case study presentations at both our own conference and Project Controls Expo UK. We’d like to thank the whole NNL team, but particularly Jennifer McCarthy, for being such a pleasure to work with this year and we’re looking forward to continuing to help them to grow their project controls capabilities in the coming year, too.
Elsewhere, another deployment of P6, with Leonardo, has kept Paul de Cort busy in creating and delivering bespoke training across the length and breadth of the UK. Our Learning Consultancy offering allows us to conduct learning needs analyses for clients so that we can craft courseware to meet their individual needs. Often, as with the project at Leonardo, scrutinising a client’s processes reveals opportunities for improving and refining those processes as part of the project – it can be so much more than just training.
We continue to support the Ministry of Defence with ongoing projects with DE&S and SDA, and were delighted to welcome Charles Weston, MoD, and Andy Dunn from Babcock to speak alongside Sarim Khan from SharpCloud at our Primavera User Conference about the complex project controls platform we have all been working together to implement in order to support the key drivers towards greater efficiency in our armed forces. This work with the MoD is important work that we are proud to be a part of, and we were thrilled to see DE&S awarded Public Sector Organisation of the Year at the recent APM Project Management Awards.
Our work with SharpCloud at the MoD is a good example of the partnerships and alliances we establish with like-minded organisations in order to expand our capabilities and offer our own expertise to support a partner’s business where required. We see it as a strength to have a small, but mighty group of partners to work with, such as PMIS and SharpCloud, and are delighted to have recently added Movar to this list. Our two organisations share the same fundamental core values and have different, but complementary skillsets that we know will enable us to work together effectively in opportunities that will benefit us all. We're excited to see what the future will bring.
Thanks to the ingenuity of the RPC Solutions team, we think we've really started to leverage the powerful solution offered by the Unifier Accelerator this year, combining out-of-the-box fast deployment and custom configuration. A particularly noteworthy project is the amazing work our brilliant team has done to support the roll-out of a full project controls platform using Oracle Primavera Unifier and P6 for a major industry client who can now manage all their project controls – including NEC4 and FIDIC contract management, earned value and more – within a single tailored solution. All this, in just a few months.
We're proud to be innovating alongside Oracle and really pushing the capabilities of their tools to help our customers to achieve things they did not think were possible. Perhaps we can do the same for you next year?
We’ve supported and attended numerous Oracle events throughout the year, including the Construction and Engineering Customer Day focused on NEC4 in March, the first in-person Partner Day for as long as anyone could remember at the Reading offices and Innovation Lab in July and two insightful Construction Buzz webinars alongside Oracle on the topics of NEC4 Contracts and FIDIC.
The close working relationship we have with Oracle as an established Partner is something we value greatly, and we’re delighted that it continues to go from strength to strength. We were particularly appreciative of their support in hosting us for our first RPC Primavera User Conference in October. This was a significant event for us, and took a lot of organising throughout the year, but we were confident that there would be a swell of support from the Primavera community, and we were right! It was a tremendous day of learning, sharing, meeting and networking and we have had such an overwhelmingly positive response from everyone who came – and many people who were disappointed not to be able to come – that we are already planning for next year (9th October – put it in your diary now!).
The reason we invest so heavily in attending events is that they offer really valuable opportunities for face-to-face discussions with people we might otherwise never get to meet. We learn so much from these conversations about what project controls professionals want and need to make their projects run more smoothly, how other solutions tackle some of the industry’s perennial challenges, and what RPC can work on in development in order to improve our product offering.
This year we have continued our previous support of Steve Wake’s engaging EVA conferences, the London and Northern NEC People conferences, Chirag Shah’s lively and popular Project Connect Group networking evenings, the brilliant PMIS Primavera User Conference and, of course, Project Controls Expo UK. We’ve also sent company representatives to APM regional events, the Women in Project Management conference organised by PMIS in Dublin, the ACostE conference, APM Project Management Awards dinner, SharpCloud User Day and more … For us, it’s all about making connections, giving our team opportunities to expand their horizons beyond their day-to-day working environment, and learning.
That idea of learning is even more important to us now than it ever was. As a 100% employee-owned business it’s vital that everyone on the RPC team has an understanding of the whole business, not just their individual role within it. To support this, we spent a whole day together at RPC Towers in Guiseley in September to look long and hard at our business and agree together who we are, what we are trying to achieve, and how we propose to do that. Spending time thinking about our core values and our company mission was an insightful exercise that helped us all to feel better engaged as a group in the purpose and the running of RPC.
The support of the Employee Ownership Association is invaluable in guiding us through our adoption of employee ownership, as we find our way in understanding how the business model will work best for RPC. Several of the team have attended EOA courses, networking events, engaged with discussions on the EO forum with other employee-owned businesses and we’ve attended the EOA conference again this year, where there were many, many fascinating topics in discussion. We were also appreciative of the input from Joe Baggaley of Anderson Acoustics, an established EO business, as part of our Values day with his valuable first-hand experience of many of the issues we are working through.
Professional development through accredited courses or on-the-job training, opportunities to stretch people’s experiences and capabilities via attending events or other cross-industry activities and being open to learning from others to change the ways we work – our people are at the heart of everything we do at RPC. They are our business.
With that in mind, we can’t look back on the year without acknowledging some significant staff milestones. Most significant of all, we bade farewell to RPC Founder and Chairman, Peter Gable, in April when he retired from the business. Pete had been working with Primavera tools since he was introduced to P3 during a 3-month contract with Railtrack (now Network Rail) in 1997, and took over the running of Richard Palmer Consultancy in 2006, with weekend help from his sister, Tina Johnson.
‘I’ll look back,’ Pete says, ‘and I’m mostly proud of building the team that I’m leaving behind. Three of us: me, Tina and Keith, that’s where it started. Now we’ve got me, Tina and 23 other people. All hand-picked for their character, their suitability and their fit with the RPC family, which we’ve always stressed is the most important thing for us. It’s not been a job. Not a career. It’s a way of life.’
Anyone who follows Pete on any form of social media will know that he is certainly enjoying his retirement so far and keeping the travel industry in business! We miss him and continue to wish him well.
We also said farewell to Natalie, who so many of our customers and particularly training delegates will remember for her brilliantly friendly manner with everyone who encountered her. But in Nat’s place we have Tracy Smith, who joined us in April. Tracy is proving to be a perfect fit in the team and if you haven’t met her already, you surely will.
April was a month of comings and goings, and adding to our team of consultants to help us to meet growing demand within the business, we also welcomed Ellison Ainsworth to the family. Ellison joined our project delivery team with an initial focus on Oracle Primavera Cloud Services, but with a view to broadening his skills across the full Oracle Primavera toolset. He’s already moving into the Unifier squad and (perhaps it’s his Territorial Army background) is proving that he can calmly handle whatever we throw at him!
As well as continuously developing our team, we’re also always looking at ways to develop the products and services we offer to our clients. Our Hosting service, a complete Primavera P6 hosted environment, is a growing part of our business, with numbers up by 23% compared with last year and a really impressive renewal rate of more than 90%, of which we are rightly proud. It goes without saying that keeping our clients’ data safe in this environment is of paramount importance, and each year we work hard on maintaining our Cyber Essentials Plus accreditation to verify our security standards. This year, we have introduced penetration testing to the service’s annual review – this is an added level of reassurance that other competing services do not have, and we have to thank our Support team of Chris Callaghan and Steven Rushworth for the extremely hard work they put into introducing this additional service and in gaining the Cyber Essential accreditation once again.
Another renewal we are proud of is that we have, once again, been awarded the Framework Contract for G-Cloud 14 for our Cloud Hosting, Cloud Software and Cloud Support services. This means that these products are available through the Crown Commercial Service (CCS) Digital Marketplace, expediting procurement in the public sector from 9 November.
Our training business is as strong as ever, and we’re proud to have trained more than 1,000 delegates from more than 85 different organisations this year: in person, online, at our Leeds offices and at client sites from Plymouth to Glasgow. We’re rolling out Credly badges to these delegates now, to make it easier for them to share their achievements with colleagues and connections online. Credly badges are a simple way to document your qualifications on LinkedIn and share with your digital community when you successfully complete a new course or accreditation. They're widely recognised and employers or potential employers can easily see what you've done to gain your badge and understand the value of you qualification. It's great to see so many of our delegates sharing their badges with pride on LinkedIn and to receive so many great comments from them about our training – and our amazing trainers!
It's been a busy and rewarding year for us. We would like to thank all our customers, colleagues, friends and followers for their support and wish you all a prosperous 2025 to come.
