Breadcrumbs

About Us

 

About Me

 

I am Ivan Hurst, and as I sit here writing these words, I have been retired for a number of years.

First, let's look at an extract from my former website relating to my company, Ivan Hurst Consulting Ltd.


About Ivan Hurst FCInstCES

My Career

This web site is primarily about my work, my career, my passions, my interests, and the people I have met along the way. By describing this in such detail it demonstrates how I can help my Clients.

Quantity Surveyor

Primarily I am a Quantity Surveyor in the Civil Engineering and Railways elements of the Construction industry. I started my career over 4 decades ago. Most of the time it has been a rewarding and fulfilling time. Initially I moved around the country wherever the work took me, but for the last 20 years I have been based in Epsom and commuted to work.

Main Specialties

  • The early part of my career was with main contractors, building roads and bridges, or highways as they are now known. A particular interest at the time was earthworks, including the measurement, theory, and claims.
  • Latterly my career has involved railways, with Clients, Contractors, Consultants, and Designers. Track is my special interest area within rail.
  • Throughout my career I have been interested in the collection and manipulation of data. This includes helping develop holistic project life cycle tools, creating industry codification structures, generation and defense of claims. The current developments regarding redrafting the Uniclass structure and the advances in Building Information Modeling are particularly interesting.
  • More recently I have extended individual training and mentoring to include more widespread knowledge sharing. At Hyder I instigated and commissioned a 'Global Commercial Management Services Community' and a Knowledge Base.

The Shard and London Bridge StationThe Shard and London Bridge Station

Precis

I am a Senior Commercial Manager in the Rail / Civil Engineering sectors of the construction industry with a career spanning four decades. I have worked for Main Contractors, Clients, PQS Consultancies, and an Engineering Design House. This gives me a wide and holistic appreciation and understanding of the industry in both pre- and post-contract elements. Specialties include rail systems, and roads and bridges, in approximately equal proportions with respect to time.

Amongst many other projects, I have worked on both The Shard and London Bridge Station Redevelopment, pictured left, award winning, and the King’s Cross Station Redevelopment Programme, train shed roof, pictured below.

View of the new train shed roof from the central platformsView of the new train shed roof, including PV imbedded glazing, from the central platforms

I am passionate about excellence, innovation, and data. The collection, organization, and dissemination of data is fundamental to an organization, a community, a society. Data packaged with parameters and a little insight is knowledge. Creating and using tools to enhance decision making, improve efficiency, and exceed quality expectations is important to me.

Caring about people, their aspirations, needs and wellbeing is part of my nature. Give people the right environment and they will excel. This applies to people who report to me, those I report to, associates, clients, and suppliers, and of course me. I do acknowledge that there are challenges the more remote people become, as the sphere of influence weakens.

During my career I have been involved in a number of team events, team role and psychometric tests. I have been described as a ‘tamed Rottweiler’, a ‘Plant’, ‘Completer Finisher’, and ‘Data’. In a very recent free online test at 123test the top 4 results for me were Innovator (19%), Executive (17%), Expert (14%), and Analyst (11%). Follow the link to take the test yourself. The tests have changed over time, as have my results. I recall that at my first introduction there were six team roles, but now there are nine. I have looked at the revised Belbin Team Roles but have not taken the test recently. I am interested in team dynamics, the Forming – Storming – Norming – Performing model of group development, cultural change management, and Soft Systems Methodology (SSM). However, I do not consider myself and expert or practitioner. Get the team right for the task, and it will perform.

I also enjoy complex problems. This is a trait that I can trace back to my schooldays. Many people have suggested things like 'KISS' and 'simplify', however, I do not believe you can make a truly complex problem simple, unless you ignore significant elements of the problem. There is an inherent risk in that approach. However, I do consider that a complex problem can be managed so as to appear more simple. In spreadsheet terms, this could be expressed as having a user friendly input end, and reporting section, but an even more complex, but hidden, middle section, or engine. The debate goes on.

Kings Cross Shot 4 Everyone 099 2 Low Res 75pcKing's Cross Completion - Everyone at Christmas. Photo by Network Rail. I am near the centre.


 My Company, Ivan Hurst Consulting Ltd

An extract from the home page of my company website, ivanhurstconsulting.com. I have taken down the website as I have dissolved the company following my retirement. I did not want to sell the company on as a going concern with my name, but without my involvement. Also, I did not want to semi-retire. Having retired, I don't know how I found time to go to work. :-). I am not short of things to do.

Ivan Hurst Consulting Ltd web home page

The page gives an idea of the areas I covered. 

I enjoyed my time working for myself on a variety of projects, in a range of positions.


 

 


Travelling

At the beginning of my career, I was lucky enough to be able to take a break in employment and go travelling. After, the first break, I returned to the previous employer. Following the longer second break, I started with a new company.

Read about how it all started here.

After "My Grand Tour" the time available for travelling was considerably reduced. Holidays were the alternative. Not the same, but still very enjoyable and rewarding. Slowly the holidays became more Cruising centric.

 

 

 

 

About my family

My immediate family consists of my wife, Wendy and our son, David.

One of my hobbies is genealogy so I know of a much wider family going back some 100 generations, but that is a different story.

 

 

 

Wendy Hurst

Wendy Hurst at Legends Hotel

Wendy on the terrace of our room at Legends Hotel, Mauritius

Wendy grew up in Lincoln. Wendy had just started working as a physiotherapist when we met in Ipswich. We have now been married nearly forty years.

Which trips were Wendy involved with:-

Almost all apart from The Grand Tour, and the Southern Africa Safari, too many to list here.

David Hurst

David in VancouverDavid at one of the tree walks at Capilano Suspension Bridge, Vancouver, Canada.

David is our son.

He was born in Epsom, Surrey, England.

Which trips were David involved with:-

Almost all from his birth until he was a adult, and became selective as to which holidays he would join us for. Again, too many to list here.

 

 

 

 

Counter

 

 

Free counters!

 

 

 

 The flag counter below is for my original travelogue, which is slowly being replaced by this one, but can still be found here.

free counters

 

 

News Flash

Repairs following hosting move

 

Spending some time this May repairing links and photos damaged in the move to the new website host. Particularly the articles transferred form the previous travelogue to this, the current Travel website. 

Change of host Sept 2023

 

Change of host Sept 2023

 

In the begining of August 2023 I transfered my ivanhurst.me.uk sites, including this one from 123-reg to IONOS. It was meant to be a simple task. However, that was to to be the case. The reason for the move was primarily the hugh increase in price that 123-reg was applying regarding email boxes. Previously, the upto 500 of the boxes were included in the various hosting packages I had. Now they were going to charge for each mailbox based on size, and as far as I could make out, this was going to cost me nearly £2,000. This was not acceptable, and I did not get satisfactory answers from support. So I turned off all the auto renews and stated to move sites and domains accross to IONOS.

Travel data problems

 

Travel data problems

This is where it starts to get a little technical.

The site is built on a content management system, CMS, using Joomla. Joomla is moving forward and version 3.10.?? is being discontinued. Future developments are for version 4.??

Similarly, PHP 7 is being replaced with PHP 8.

Part of the migration is relatively simple, I have already changed to a new template which works on the new platforms.

However, some of the helper applications, which work within Joomla are not yet ready.

Fabrik is one of those applications, if fact a significant 'Joomla Custom Website Application Builder'.

Refresh 2021

 

Site refresh Easter 2021

I decided to give the site a bit of a refresh over Easter 2021 and install a new template and some additional functions. One of the things I didn't like about the old site was the delay in text appearing which probably meant some people left before the content appeared. This has been disabled now.