We have recently commenced our Technical Excellence Strategy, which represents a coordinated plan to enhance our professional capabilities and support fire engineering competency. This strategy focuses on utilising and contributing to research, developing an educational framework and material, ensuring quality, promoting internal/external communication, and creating a culture that empowers our team to pursue their technical passions while addressing both our clients’ challenges and broader industry needs.

Our approach empowers engineers with autonomy through the development of Technical Skills Groups (TSGs) – specialist teams led by fire engineers passionate about their areas of expertise. Each group focuses on essential areas which broadly align with a number of existing fire engineering competency frameworks:

• Fire & smoke dynamics
• Human behaviour and evacuation dynamics
• Structural fire engineering
• Fire protection systems
• Fire inspections
• Fire risk assessments

This decentralised approach places decision-making in the hands of the fire engineers with direct experience and passion, giving them space and trust to lead, innovate, and contribute not only within Ashton Fire but within the industry as a whole.

Each Technical Skills Group is tasked with achieving a range of functional objectives listed below. They are then tasked with developing yearly plans that define a roadmap for how these will be achieved.

A. Research & technical: Collating the latest available research and disseminating understanding for use on our projects and conducting new research/technical activities where gaps and needs are identified. New research and technical activities will be conducted internally, where we possess the resources and capability to do so, and externally through collaboration with other organisations.

B. Education: Supporting our fire engineers’ understanding of the core technical subject matter domains in fire engineering and methods/tools to apply that understanding to inform decision-making within the fire engineering process to competently fulfil their roles and support their professional growth.

C. Quality control: Supporting the work and deliverables produced by the team to ensure it is of a high technical standard, which is communicated in a clear/consistent manner, and mitigating mistakes being made through robust quality assurance processes.

D. Internal/external communication: Communicate technical work both internally and externally. Internally, this will be used to educate our staff through the development of practically usable content (e.g., training material, documentation, etc.) that can be readily utilised/applied to commercial projects. Externally, this will provide confidence/value to our clients, encourage new clients to work with us, enhance our reputation in the fire engineering industry to inform and shape its future, and facilitate the recruitment of highly talented fire engineers.

E. Culture: Fostering a culture of technical excellence founded on the principles of:

1. Passion and curiosity through a desire to learn/understand fostering technical growth.
2. Humility with recognition that we might be wrong sometimes which presents opportunities for growth and appreciation of uncertainty.
3. Psychological safety where people feel secure in being able to suggest new ideas, challenge assumptions and ways of working, learn from failures and speak out if they think something is not correct.
4. Empowerment of individuals to identify problems and take the lead with developing technical solutions through the support of others.

To support the teams in implementing their yearly plans, a Technical Excellence Committee (TEC), which comprises members from the Ashton Fire leadership team, regularly meet with team leads and associate leads to ensure they are being given enough time and resources to implement their plans, identify opportunities with other TSGs, and give feedback.

A core tenet of the Technical Excellence Strategy is to support individual and collective competency within Ashton Fire. It may not be possible or even desired for any one individual to know everything about all topics within fire engineering. All fire engineers have different experiences, and some people will become or have become highly specialised in given areas. Operating as a well-organised team as part of the strategy where any one person can readily access the skills and experience of others to inform decision-making on projects will provide a basis for education/knowledge exchange, individual growth, and maximising value for clients. Furthermore, it’s essential that we have cognitive diversity in the team, as reflected in our capability to recruit people from a range of backgrounds and experiences who can bring new ideas and perspectives to help us solve some of the most complex problems facing our industry.

To support this, we have embarked on an ambitious initiative of developing a Fire Engineering Fundamentals (FEF) Course, which will provide a solid foundation for all fire engineers, regardless of their academic/professional background, from recent graduates to senior professionals. Developed by our Technical Skills Groups, this course will build essential skills and give exposure to a range of areas they may be less familiar with, which they may decide they would like to develop further.

As we roll out the Technical Excellence Strategy, we’re enhancing our fire engineering approach to provide a springboard for our fire engineers to focus and develop their technical passion and individual growth, while supporting our commercial practice to help clients solve some of the most complex problems in the industry.