Anil Sawhney FRICS
Director of Infrastructure, RICS
Construction is a major world industry, which has a substantial effect on the public, society and prosperity.
Many world bodies, governments and construction clients acknowledge that the financial management of construction requires improvement. Numerous studies have recommended that unifying international standards are required within organisations and markets, and across markets, to provide consistent, comparable reporting and data.
ICMS, international construction reporting standards, were initially developed by a coalition of 50 professional bodies and published in July 2017. Following strong global adoption of the standards, the coalition decided to extend ICMS to cover life cycle costs. Hence, ICMS 2, covering the whole project life cycle, presents a globally standardised way of cost reporting for portfolios, programs and projects around the world.
This is a seminal step for those professions involved in cost management of constructed assets. It will improve financial management by standardising and improving cost prediction and control data and aid forensic analysis of construction costs.
RICS professionals play an influential global role in this market and RICS, as a member of the ICMS coalition, is developing a Global Professional Statement in Cost Prediction to augment and implement ICMS. This will review global best practices in benchmarking, cost estimating and cost prediction and implement ICMS reporting for qualified professionals. To enable connections to more detailed national standards and design classifications, various mapping exercises to ICMS are also being carried out by RICS.
These standards will promote a more internationally-recognised, harmonised, profession across the financial management of buildings and infrastructure – raising competence and meeting growing demand – in an industry that is expected to grow output by 85% to $15.5 trillion by 2030.
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About the author
Anil Sawhney FRICS
Director of Infrastructure, RICS
Anil Sawhney is the Director of the Infrastructure Sector for the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS). He leads the emerging RICS initiative and strategy on placing and positioning the Institution within the field of commercial management of infrastructure projects globally. His primary focus is on the (economic) infrastructure sector, defined by the RICS as transport, utilities, energy and similar fields. Anil is involved in the production of infrastructure sector’s body of knowledge, standards, guidance, practice statements, education, and training. He’s also a Visiting Professor at Liverpool John Moores University in the UK. Dr Sawhney is also a Fellow of the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (FRICS) and a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (FHEA) of the UK. Anil has a rich mix of academic, research, industry and consulting experience gathered working in the USA, India, Canada, the UK, and Australia.