In this month’s interview, Chris Fitzsimmons chats to Richard Northwood, Senior partner at UK-based media consultancy COMS. Important questions such as what does a consultant do? are answered, along with a look at the future of technology development.
Richard Northwood has a fairly impressive CV when it comes to major projects. Now senior partner at his own consultancy firm, COMS, I started out by asking where it all began.
“I started out doing the ABTT theatre lighting course at college at Paddington College at the age of 17. My knowledge was had won fought in the real world rather than being theoretical and testing it out. That didn’t seem like an unreasonable approach when you were a callow 16-year-old. I’ve now been involved in the business for over 25 years.
“I started out doing theatre things, then set up System Sound and Light with Simon Biddulph. I was doing lighting and he did sound, but when you’ve got a warehouse full of toys to play with you can develop an interest in the sound side because it’s more interesting.
“You were only just starting to get moving heads on shows like Starlight Express. We did a lot of work building special effects and lighting into West End shows in those days. It was a lot of fun.
“I don’t think I ever sat down and said, hmmm I’m good at this now, I shall become a consultant. That smacks of an organised plan, and life isn’t like that. I moved on from the West End to work for TeleStage to work on a couple of projects in Saudi Arabia, and that’s really where my love of the Middle East started. It was some kind of bizarre different world at the time.
“I first went out to Jeddah, when I was 18 or 19 to work on a university conference centre. There was a site manager out in Saudi and I was managing the UK end of the bits of design, and logistics and purchasing to get everything out there, and then went out to help with commissioning.â€
Fast forward several years, and stint with Shuttle Sound and we get to the establishment of COMS (consultancy on media systems). I asked Richard what he felt the company’s main work is.
“I guess my own focus, because of the background we’ve just been through, is more the audio systems. I’d say audio control, multimedia – we’re the ones who bring it together. We supply that expertise as a consultancy package via the normal method. However, there are two sides to the firm, there’s the consultancy and then there’s the engineering side. We have still have engineers who get their hands dirty designing things not just on a consultancy level with a schematic and a kit list. Some of the guys will take it on further and do the rack wiring drawings and the detailed drawings for how that’s going to be installed and commission it.
“I see that as one of our great strengths. We have guys that get their hands dirty actually doing it, so when you are designing a job as a consultant, you are putting in products that you know work, because we’ve been through the mill with them.
“With the best will in the world sales and marketing guys can be a bit loose with the actualité of the data sheets. We live in this dual world of a bit of consultancy and a bit of R & D and brainstorming with manufacturers. We can say ‘as a consultant I want it to do this and as an engineer I want it to do this.’ And we can stick things on a bench and test them – I enjoy that part, it’s fun.
Working with manufacturers gives Northwood a real chance to see and shape what’s coming down the pipeline. But just how far does he see?
“How far it appears to be in the future, really depends on how long it takes the manufacturers to ship some of this stuff. So when you go to a presentation it might be only a few months away, but then there are production problems, or they take onboard a neat idea so it delays things. I’d guess we see things six months to a year in advance. I think that’s about right, because the projects we are working on are two to three years in the making.
“You need to be flexible and be able to change things, but also have a very clear idea of what you are trying to get to, so that when you do change things, you don’t lose control of the project.â€
And given that access to the crystal ball, what does he think the most interesting things to come are?
“I think the emerging standards such as IEEE 802.1 AVB is really important. I mean that actually came from the consumer market, but there is real impetus from the professional market for it too. It’s been talked about for some time, but hopefully in the next few months we’ll see some real convergence happening.
But is it a definite replacement for our current mess of proprietary systems?
“I think it’s great, but I’m trying to not to be too exciting because we’ve been burnt in the past, going back to the lone wolf days, but I think because IT and the consumer business is behind it, we’re in with more of a chance.
Apart from this issue of standardisation, I asked his views on what the biggest challenges are facing integrators at the moment.
“Well I think the biggest one we have, and it doesn’t only apply to the systems integrator, is lack of time on the project. Certainly up until this current credit crunch, everyone wanted their new, big, building up and running. Construction inevitably runs late, it does on every project, and the only one who gets squeezed is the poor old integrator at the end. Unless there’s a good element of planning and understanding of what’s going in, and communicating that to the rest of the project team, you’re going to get slammed at the end of it.
“You need to be able to work with the architect and the interior designers. ‘We all need to get this room to work, you need to do whatever décor things, or physical construction, we need to get this equipment in here to deliver what the client wants. If you don’t work together on that, then with two week to get it all in, it won’t like right and you probably don’t have enough commissioning time to make it work right either.’
And finally, what will Richard Northwood be doing in ten years time?
“Hopefully still being involved in very interesting projects. That’s the glimmer of hope at the moment. Yes we’ve had a down turn at so forth, but there is still talk going on, of large interesting projects. It doesn’t even have to be large scale, just interesting.â€