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The week before she joined, Construction Manager had reported a stalemate between Defence Estates and the Major Contractors Group on the issue of prime contracting. Alan Crane, Movement for Innovation boss, was said to be mediating between the two groups. Contractors objected to onerous conditions and restrictive payment conditions.

"If you don't mind me saying, I can see you know this much about prime contracting," she had said, squeezing thumb and forefinger together to indicate diddly squat.

She was right, but I felt then she was using expertise as a smokescreen.

That's all water under the bridge now because she has resurfaced at another controversial location, Ken Livingstone's Transport for London (TfL). It is pretty ironic that Young leaves one government organisation embroiled in procurement controversies and joins another.

Prime mover
Her post, director of group property and facilities, is a new one. As London Underground transfers to TfL next month, Young's job will be to merge two discrete departments, property and facilities. It was her idea. She will have approximately 230 staff. She's now examining contracts and will design a way of getting value for money. She said partnerships and framework agreements will feature heavily. Facilities, for example, is festooned with many contracts worth 拢10m or less. Suppliers can expect some degree of rationalisation.

She has only been there since April. It's a complex brief. She's not responsible for the tunnels and bridges that form the infrastructure, but everything else - from compulsory purchases attending the proposed CrossRail to refurbishing the depots that house 6,000 buses - will be in her remit.

Young will bring elements of prime contracting to TfL. But there are some things she will be glad to leave behind at the MoD.

Ivory towers
The curious thing about Barbara Young is that, as a self-professed mover and shaker, she has often ended up in restrictive, bureaucratic environments. The exception is BRE, where she was involved in a major upheaval after privatisation. There she spearheaded BRE's Best Value Service, developed the PFI unit and provided consultancy on "integrated asset management" for public and private clients.

Before that, however, she spent years as an academic. She did an Economics degree in her 20s, which started her on the perpetual student's journey which took her to UMIST and finally deposited her as director of building and professor of construction management at University College London. Europe had never seen a woman in a post like that.

One part of her hated it. She calls academia "stifling" and "a vacuum", although she claims she managed to revamp the UCL department, which was in a kind of crisis, with falling numbers, morale and activity.

I鈥檝e built a reputation as trustworthy and fairly straight

Barbara Young

Then she went to the BRE as director of consultancy and construction innovation, where she helped to develop BRE's expertise in PFI consultancy. She maintains BRE is the best place she has ever worked. She was seconded to Defence Estates in 2001.

Less success
As clients go, Defence Estates is still seen by some as one of the worst. Major Contractors Group chairman Colin Busby recently lambasted prime contracting for severe delays, unreasonable documentation and lack of teamwork (see www.ciob.org.uk).

"Very disappointing," he said. "Prime Contract documentation is unreasonable and has not bought into the concepts of team working, best value, etc. As a result the process has not really moved forward."

Defence Estates hired her to push prime contracting, but she is willing to take only so much responsibility for its continuing sluggishness. Last year, she handed responsibility for prime contracting over to a new director of major projects following the arrival of a new chief executive, Rear Admiral Peter Dunt. She retained responsibility for single living accommodation modernisation (SLAM) but her main task changed. She was given the job of studying the facilities management market within the MoD.

"I was aware [of prime contracting] but not involved," she says.

She offers a thin defence of the MoD as client. "Any contractor has got to be flexible because that is the nature of the MoD's business," she says. "A regiment could be moving into new accommodation one week and sent to the Middle East the next.

"Prime contracting is used as a default for PFI when a client doesn't really know what it wants."

She stands by the people in Defence Estates, but admits that the military as a whole was a "highly frustrating" organisation to serve. For instance, she learned only after joining that no money could be released for a project until an internal review board had assessed the business case. In short, this meant that contractors could be bidding for work that didn't actually exist yet.

Removing red tape
Young helped change that by putting "gateways" in place. These are formal milestones in the project by which all involved (including clients) must have done their bit. It meant Defence Estates had to have funding in place before instigating a project.

"A lot of what Colin Busby said is correct," Young says. "But what you have to accept is that this was a pioneering approach. The lessons learned were captured."

A lot of what colin busby said is correct

Barbara Young

Therein lies another point of pride. Young says she was instrumental in bringing integrated project team leaders together to learn from each milestone. She offered this effort in knowledge management to the university community to study in a formal way and she received practically no interest from the built environment faculties. Only Cranfield bothered to take it up.

Young left Defence Estates with head held high. She points out that the secondment was to be one year, but the permanent undersecretary invited her to stay for another. She takes personal credit for the signing of the Scottish prime contract, awarded to joint venture Amec Turner for property management services, worth 拢460m. This was the first prime contract to be awarded.

"If I hadn't have done half the things I did it never would have happened," she said.

She chaired the internal approval board's relevant sub-group and pushed hard with the top-level budget holders.

Even though Young invested a lot of personal capital persuading contractors to be patient and bid for the work, she's confident she won't be tarred with the MoD's brush.

"I've built a reputation as trustworthy and fairly straight," she said. "I'm told that the industry sees me that way."

Rising ambition
Young admits she is ambitious. In 1999 she told Construction News that she aimed to be chief executive of an organisation eventually.

Oddly enough, when her secondment was coming to a natural end, the other job she applied for was the managing director's post of a university. Why, is the obvious question, since she found it so stifling before?

"Because as a sector it needs changing. It's still in the dark ages." She turned the job down.

After being deputy CEO of Defence Estates, which spends around 拢2bn per year on construction, is the TfL job a demotion? Not according to Young. "Defence Estates had an operating budget of approximately 拢92m. It procured large amounts but never actually had any of that money itself. This is a 拢300m a year operation.

"This is setting up a new business, a new organisation. It has a diverse portfolio, a hugely complex client base. And it's full of innovative people. If you start to compare Defence Estates with Transport for London, this is bigger. It's like running a medium-sized contractor."