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It's late, doesn't work properly, is unfinished or unreliable. When a building isn't working and the client wants it to, this is the cry that's heard. It hasn't changed much in thirty years.

Of course, they don't mean me. It's the rest of you they're talking about! Sorry? What was that? Me too? How bloody unfair. After all I've done for you Mr Client/Architect/...

More depressing still is that, with notably rare exceptions, clients/architects/project managers/qs's seem hardly to have reflected on whether they may have a part to play in eliminating teething problems beyond proofing themselves against the fallout.

It seems a strange affair in the so-called age of teamwork, where successes and failures are supposed to be shared. I guess the building services industry carries a lot of the responsibility for not explaining what underlies the problems of poorly performing services. Instead, we have let the rest of the team see them as so esoteric that they can only be resolved by the 'm&e people'.

Intuitive unreliability
The problems of system unreliability mean we are dimwits to have chosen to be m&e engineers in the first place. After all, structural engineers are off the hook when their constructions stop moving – we're not even in the ball game until ours start up! Structures are intuitively reliable. They are founded on huge lumps of concrete grounded in mother earth, and their elements diminish in size and cost as they are less put-upon.

M&E is intuitively unreliable. We 'found' huge expensive machines on the integrity of a control circuit device and then connect them to systems comprising strings of fallible components of all sizes and types, which must all work – and harmoniously – to achieve our successful outcome. I'm often astonished that our systems work as well as they do at handover!

M&E needs time margins to bed down and to show that they work and will continue to work. I have been privileged to work with a petrochem client for the last six years who knows m&e systems are intrinsically unreliable – and who puts time in the programme to prove them. The outcome is sweet; routinely we have satisfied 'customers', and the reputation of the whole design/management/contractor delivery team is enhanced.

Unlike structural engineering, m&e is intuitively unreliable and needs time to bed down to show systems work and will continue to work.

A change of approach
Time is, of course, money. On most projects, practical completion triggers income – the rewards for earliest completion are huge. What technical argument could prevail?

Consultants can (and do) use time and technologies to do as much proving as possible concurrent with other construction activities but the composite whole has to be tested at some point – and this is usually just before practical completion – for well understood reasons.

So m&e designers are changing their approach. They now sit in the architects' laps to help/persuade them make their building enclosures 'work' harder. It is a rich seam for mining – architectural design in UK is modishly wedded to components (like glass), where some guidance from the engineer on its optimal use can transform the effectiveness of the building as a climate moderator.

The outcome of working the building harder is that m&e systems can be designed out, moving money from m&e into architectural budgets. Although it's not good for the industry financially, the investment is more enduring and m&e systems are less necessary (and less missed if they don't work 100% at the outset). It is therefore good for our reputation.