Field Service at the British Army and HS2

Ryan: Alan, welcome to the show. It’s a pleasure to have you with us today. We like to start these chats by getting a sense of your professional journey. In your case, you’ve gone from plant operator, supervisor and technician to eventually a regional field service manager. How have those early practical, hands-on roles helped you succeed in management and leadership roles?

Allan Fairhurst: Yeah, firstly, thank you very much for having me, Ryan. I think it’s helped me by giving me a real sense of “the do”.

I started out on construction sites doing anything I could. I was a service leaver, I came out and felt a bit behind some of the other people in the industry, so I took on anything I could get: steel fixing, shuttering, bricklaying, mixing, any kind of labouring job. Eventually I got into plant operations, which gave me more oversight of how sites work as I moved up.

I was involved in lots of different projects: archaeological works, large infrastructure projects, small track work, muck shifting – you name it, I wanted to do it. While I was contracting for one company, they said, “We really like the way you work, would you like to come on full time?” I said I’d love to, but thinking about career progression, I felt ready for a supervisor role.

They gave me that supervisor role, which was brilliant – lots of hands-on experience managing teams, running sites, setting up jobs, doing risk assessments, method statements, all of it.

That then brought me into utilities. I’d had an incident with a high-voltage electrical cable on the highways and realised there was an area I wasn’t very familiar with. So I took a job as a utility services technician for a local authority, using ground penetrating radar and locators on SED projects.

Combined with my civil engineering background, I was suddenly the one with what people called “x-ray vision” – looking under the ground before we opened up permits and dug holes. If there was a substation, a bridge or anything out of the norm that might have additional or shallow utilities, I’d go out first, survey it and report back on what to watch out for. Maybe you needed to contact certain utility companies if you were working near a rail bridge, or near larger pipelines flagged up with those red-and-white posts.

I was also dealing with plans and drawings. Working near intermediate high-pressure gas, for example, I’d have Cadent out to site, and I built good working relationships with utility companies. They’d come out first, give us permission, survey locations and help us understand what we were working around.

From there, stepping into management came while I was still with the local authority. Fibre was booming, streets were being dug up everywhere, and cables were being hit left, right and centre. I knew that world really well, I knew the issues people were dealing with, and I saw an opportunity to help a company coming into my area in Cheshire East.

That’s the origin story in a nutshell. I walked into the office, heard what they were doing and what they wanted to do. It sounded a bit like a fairy tale at first. I told them what I do and my background. They basically said, “We’ve no idea what you just said, but it sounds like you know what you’re talking about,” and I got the job – very similar to when I came out of the services.

At first, I was doing a lot of utility surveying: where people should dig, where they shouldn’t, minimising downtime, increasing safety, pushing productivity up. Then I moved into build assurance, looking after a couple of contractors – all kinds of digging and fibre works, permitting, managing civils crews and fibre crews. Once the build was coming to an end, I moved into service delivery.

That was West and Midlands for field service, eventually delivering it – but the roles beforehand absolutely led into it. We were still finishing off bits of build where we found them. There was still traditional digging around utilities, and then on private property you’ve got driveways and gardens to go through. You still need to choose the right route so it’s safe and you’re not causing damage.

That’s me in a nutshell, really, Ryan.

Ryan: Excellent. How was the jump from having no team to managing these crews as part of your FTTP delivery?

Allan Fairhurst: The jump was helped by the fact I was hungry for it. My military background meant I was used to leading teams, and coming up through the trades meant I’d already worked with the fibre teams and the civils teams. I knew what they needed and what they wanted because I’d done a lot of it myself.

So bringing them together felt like a natural progression. The only new part was the formal side: direct reporting lines, welfare, career progression. That was a bit different, but not a challenge I shied away from.

Ryan: It sounds like you take the opportunity when it appears – when opportunity knocks, you’re there.

Allan Fairhurst: One hundred percent, it always does. You don’t know where it’s going to come from. If it’s something I haven’t done before, I want to learn it. In that case, I’d done a lot around it, and I wanted to lean into it and grow.

Ryan: We’ll come back to this later, but it already sounds like you’ve got a lot of advice for aspiring managers coming from a field service engineering background. You’ve touched on it already: your early career was with the British Army as a logistics supply specialist, which really interested me. What were your day-to-day responsibilities there? What did that entail? And what lessons did you take from military logistics that shaped the way you lead teams today?

Allan Fairhurst: Day to day it varied a lot. I had the opportunity to go abroad and work all over the world, and that gave me a wider understanding of logistics.

You start with receipting and issuing – equipment into the warehouse, equipment out of the warehouse. Then you move into provisioning levels and accounting. Everything has a monetary value that ultimately comes from the taxpayer, so it must be accounted for and properly managed.

One of my roles was in PCNA – Provision Control and Accounting. We supported lots of units – infantry, REME, engineering units – all with a huge range of equipment. Our job was to set provisioning levels: how much are they allowed? If there are 100 people, do they really need 5,000 screwdrivers? We’d set those levels sensibly so they weren’t overstocked and could control inventory.

We also handled immediate demands: sometimes someone needs something right now. That has to go through the right authority and still be moved, tracked and accounted for.

On top of that, there was setting up remote logistics – Divlogs or Divlog RVs – where you can go to a location, set up a mini warehouse, people bring stores in, take stores out, then you collapse it and move on.

So it was very varied. You also had what we call “green skills” mixed in. If you’re setting up remotely, you need to be camouflaged and concealed, keep a minimal footprint, factor in local people, security, and your own logistics – water, food, everything.

We could do another segment on it and still need a few hours. But essentially it’s about making sure people, especially front-line units, have what they need when they need it. They can’t perform without the right kit. People like me were there to make sure that kit was in place.

Ryan: You touched on provisioning there. Understocking and overstocking can cause issues with spare parts availability. Was that one of the biggest challenges you faced, and how did you go about reducing it?

Allan Fairhurst: Yes. We were operating all over the world. One of my roles was to interrogate everything due into units that they’d ordered. A lot of kit is moving by air, land, rail and sea, globally.

You’d get situations where something hadn’t arrived in time by one route, so they’d reordered it on another route. They might have ordered it by train, then ordered it again by plane and already received it. So we’d need to find where in the world that first shipment was, because it still had value and someone would still need it.

There was a lot of juggling. As long as units had what they needed, great – but you also had to tidy up double orders and equipment in transit. If something was due in but they’d since received another batch, we’d trace it and send it back to where it needed to be so it was available for the next unit.

Ryan: It sounds like a lot of layers.

Allan Fairhurst: A lot of layers. That’s why we say there are 24 hours in a day – and sometimes you wish there were 25.

Ryan: Another part of your experience that really interests me is the integral role you played in large infrastructure operations. As a plant operator, you supported major projects like HS2 and the Commonwealth Games. What did that teach you about the pace, coordination and planning of working on projects at that scale?

Allan Fairhurst: I almost wish I’d gone from smaller projects to the larger ones, because I was spoilt by the big ones. The pace on the larger projects is actually slower. I think that’s mainly down to budgets. On something like HS2, you have huge budgets, multiple health and safety managers, advisors, framework managers, designers – no one is rushed. They can take time to plan things properly.

The pace on site was very coordinated. There was a set scheme of what had to be done, and it wasn’t “just get it done”. It was “we’ll take time for A, B, C, D and E to get us to F”. That pace-setting gave you a lot of thinking time.

On HS2, I was involved in the initial pre-setup work: demolishing SAS tanks on old water sites, removing graveyards on kerbside streets, digging up a 200-year-old train station to look at the old architecture and how things were built 200 years ago. There were lots of moving parts, but not all crammed into one rush.

It was similar with the Commonwealth Games. “We want to build a swimming pool.” That meant looking at sewage, utilities, everything that needed moving well before the Games. You’re taking an empty field and turning it into an Olympic-sized pool and everything around it. The planning was very far-thinking and next level.

Coming from highways work, where a supervisor just tells you “dig there”, and then walking onto HS2 or Commonwealth Games, you suddenly sit with project managers and people at every level going through designs. Not just utility plans, but full CAD drawings of where everything will go, where it ends up, phase one to three, what it looks like now, next week and next month.

Ryan: And that’s everyone involved on the project getting that view.

Allan Fairhurst: Yes. I walked onto the Commonwealth Games site as a plant operator. I was used to utility drawings. They showed me a full design drawing and I said, “I don’t understand this. I can find utilities, but this is beyond me.” The project manager wasn’t frustrated. He said, “Great, let me show you.”

We spent a solid hour going over the drawings. He explained what was what. That really stuck with me: you go faster by going slower. He took time to invest in me, explain what the designs meant, and give me the understanding so that when I went out on site, I had the bigger picture and wasn’t as nervous or likely to flap.

Ryan: And that’s helped you understand the project as a whole.

Allan Fairhurst: Massively. There’s another saying from the military: informed soldiers are happy soldiers. I’ve always kept that. When someone explains the project – the ultimate goal, the mission, the steps and how what you’re doing contributes – it helps you understand the bigger mission instead of just digging holes day by day.

Ryan: Fast forward to your time at Zzoomm. You coordinated fibre-to-the-premises delivery from design and planning through to engineering and permitting. Where did you see the gaps between what was planned on paper and what was delivered on the ground? Was it similar to HS2 and the Commonwealth Games, with that detailed planning?

Allan Fairhurst: No, it was different. Again, I’d put that down partly to budgets. I’m biased towards utilities and utility locating, and at the time I believed nine out of ten problems could be solved with a CAT and Genny.

On the planning side, you’d get old OS maps and utility maps. Someone would decide, “I want a cabinet here”, submit the permits, and then you’d get to site and there’d be a gas pipe or an electric cable. You can’t put it there – it’s a permanent fixed asset. So I started by mapping these places out properly.

Someone would say, “I want an active cabinet here; it’s right by the exchange, perfect for distance.” I’d go out and say, “No, you need to survey this on site.” One example that proved the point was a location that looked great on paper, but where they wanted the cabinet there was a small plaque in a lovely woodland area – it was an ancient burial ground.

So we weren’t going to get permission to put it there. I started surveying alternative locations away from utilities – no gas, no water – but still close enough to a DNO supply to power the cabinet. Then we started getting cabinets in the right place first time. You could see some where it was clearly meant to go in one spot, but on the day it had been moved because of issues.

On the big infrastructure jobs, you’d spend a long time doing pre-site surveys, trial holes and investigations. In the fibre world, everything had to go in the ground “yesterday”. Some steps got missed. That’s where I saw the biggest differences between planned and delivered.

Ryan: In the example you gave of routing around that burial ground, what sort of delay did that put on that part of the project?

Allan Fairhurst: In that case, none – because I got out early to pre-site survey. They’d say, “We want to do this in a couple of weeks, can you check?” I’d go, say “that’s not good enough”, and give an alternative location. They’d still have access to PIA and a DNO supply, so there was no delay.

Without that pre-site survey, it would have been a wasted permit and three to six wasted planning days for the civils gang. We saved time and money by doing those pre-site surveys and investigations. But there were other times when I got called out with a live permit in place: “There’s a utility here, what do we do?” Then you’re closing the permit, leaving site and finding a new location.

Ryan: So that extra planning isn’t just saving time, it’s saving costs too.

Allan Fairhurst: Absolutely. You’re paying a civils crew – a ganger, a couple of ground workers, a supervisor – plus equipment, fuel, permits. Those three planned days suddenly disappear. It’s cost saving on that side, plus the planning hours that someone’s already put into scheduling that work. Then they’ve got to move that crew onto something else to keep them busy.

Ryan: When you were overseeing FTTP delivery, there’s obviously a focus on accuracy, efficiency and customer satisfaction. In your experience, do end customers ultimately want speed, communication or installation quality the most? If you had to rank them, what comes first?

Allan Fairhurst: They want all three, of course, but from experience I’d put quality first. You’re drilling holes, mounting equipment on walls, running cables around someone’s home. Most complaints I dealt with were along the lines of “I don’t want that there”, “that’s an eyesore”, “you’ve drilled in the wrong place”, “you’ve hit my pipes”, “you’ve clipped my cables” – far more of those than complaints about speed.

Speed would be second. A lot of that is about expectations – if you’re advertising a 1 Gbps package, people want to see 1 Gbps, but then they’re testing on a phone two rooms away. It becomes an education piece on Wi-Fi limitations and when to use a direct connection.

Communication is third, but still crucial – especially with failed activations, where you can’t install for some reason. People want to know when you’re coming back, when you’ll fix it, and when they’ll get their broadband. So my order would be: quality, speed, communication – based on the types of issues I had to deal with.

Ryan: And within communication, you’ve got layers like education and expectation management – teaching them how to reset things, explaining where they will and won’t get the advertised speed, that sort of thing.

Allan Fairhurst: Exactly. You need teams with the experience and knowledge to explain it. Customers will ask “why?”, and you need to talk about things like large houses and how Wi-Fi behaves. We used to say Wi-Fi is like water – it doesn’t flow straight through walls, it takes the path of least resistance. Once people understand that, it makes more sense.

We ran very quickly in this country from dial-up to gigabit broadband. I’ll never use a full gigabit, but people want to see it. All three factors matter, but based on complaints, installation quality usually comes out on top.

Ryan: I’m really interested in how you measured and tracked operations across your roles. As a regional field service manager, you produced high-level KPI reporting across geographic regions. Which KPIs matter most when you’re trying to build a consistently high-performing team and operation?

Allan Fairhurst: For a high-performing team, my priorities were slightly different from what the C-suite might want to hear.

There were two KPIs I always focused on, and as long as those were consistently where they needed to be, I was happy: successful jobs completed per day, and failed activations turned around and fixed.

Say we set a KPI of four installations per engineer per day for profitability. If three of those jobs fail, the number doesn’t mean much. So we pushed hard on pre-site surveys and getting eyes on as many jobs as we could, to give them the best chance of passing first time. We also made sure engineers were trained and trusted to make a call on whether a job could go ahead, early enough that they could swap in another job and still hit four successful installations.

So it wasn’t “jobs visited per day”, it was “successful jobs completed per day”. Then the failed activations: those are still customers who’ve ordered and want broadband. You might hit four successful installs, but you’ve also got a pool of failed ones waiting to be resolved. Hitting four per day is great, but you also want to see failed jobs being fixed quickly and turned into live installs.

I’d look at completion rates for successful jobs on the day, plus how quickly we turned failed jobs around. If we were outside a 30-day turnaround, it didn’t look great. Fixing them within a week was fantastic.

Ryan: So those KPIs are very end-user and delivery focused.

Allan Fairhurst: Yes. Once customers are on the box and receiving service, that’s what you take to shareholders – we’ve got X number of paying customers online. If you’ve placed 1,000 orders and only 750 are live, that remaining 250 is a problem. They’re not paying customers yet, so you have to work that backlog down and turn them into live connections.

Ryan: There are two other areas that really interest me. The first is your strong focus on compliance and safety. What does a real safety culture look like beyond paperwork and mandatory training?

Allan Fairhurst: Culture is huge. For me, a good safety culture beyond the mandatory side looks like this: we “fail forwards”.

If you make a mistake or have an accident, as long as it’s not deliberate or reckless, there’s no punishment. It’s a chance to learn. I want people to tell me what they did wrong and what they’ll do better next time. That takes pressure off the team, but it also forces them to look at problems and health and safety issues differently.

Practically, it looks like good practice being shared and praised. It’s about how people behave when you’re not there. For example, if someone is putting up an overhead cable and they know they can get it from the pole to the house, but it won’t be within tolerances, it will hit their KPI as a failed install. A good safety culture is them having the confidence to say, “I can’t do this job safely, so I’m not going to do it.”

I’d always say, “Tell me how it could be done.” So an engineer might fail a job but send half a page of notes on why it failed, what they saw, and what would need to happen to resolve it. That reduces downtime. Instead of three or four visits, you’ve got one visit to identify the problem, a second to fix it, and a third to install.

That’s what it looks like to me: people doing the right thing when you’re not watching, and having the confidence to stand up and say, “I can’t do this” or “I won’t do this – but here’s how we could do it”, even if it hits them financially or on their KPIs.

Ryan: The second thing is that you’ve led root cause analysis and investigations, which really stood out to me. How do you make sure you identify the real issue rather than just the obvious one?

Allan Fairhurst: I always use the “five whys”. If you ask “why” enough times, you get to root cause.

Say someone cuts their leg with a still saw. The immediate cause is obvious: the saw cut the leg. But then you ask, “Why did that happen?” You might find that someone entered the work area, brushed past them, they got a shock and stood up into the saw.

So you ask, “Why did they enter the work area?” You might find they didn’t have proper cut-off saw training, or they didn’t understand exclusion zones. You keep going because there are multiple layers: the immediate cause, underlying causes and then root cause.

I also like using a fishbone diagram. In field service, you look at all the contributing factors: the person, training, equipment, ground type, weather, visibility, PPE, whether they were wearing headphones, why someone walked into the work area, and so on. You map them all out and then assess what’s most likely.

Root cause might not be a single thing – it could be a combination. In the example, it might be lack of training and someone entering a live work area. How do you address it? Training, process changes, and lessons learned.

Allan Fairhurst: Then you feed those lessons into future training. In that case, for example, “If someone’s working down with headphones on, they can’t hear you. Take five, wait for them to finish, then approach.”

Ryan: So you’re a bit of a private detective as well as a regional field service manager.

Allan Fairhurst: It does feel like that sometimes. It’s interesting because it’s something new and different. Incident investigation and service delivery give you variety. I’m not saying I like people having accidents, but when something happens, I want to understand why. The same applies to failed jobs – I want to know why, so we can put things in place to stop it happening again.

Ryan: In my role at Comparesoft, I’m always looking at different tools, technologies, how they’re implemented and the output they give. You supported the rollout of new technologies at Zzoomm to streamline delivery. What types of tools – even simple ones – made the biggest difference to performance or cost?

Allan Fairhurst: I’ll admit I’m biased, but utility locating was massive for me. I came from using advanced utility locating equipment, which is very expensive. At first, I tried to push that in, but we needed to measure the cost savings to justify it.

We ended up running a trial with a different locator to the one they were using. It was cheaper but did the same job – and more. At the time, we were having six strikes per kilometre. Every strike means stopping work, investigating, calling the utility company, dealing with affected customers and all the cost.

I said, “I can train people to use this equipment. It will save you money and help you make more money.” We ran a trial in four regions. I trained them on locating and PAS 128 principles for surveying the ground.

We reduced strikes from six per kilometre to 0.4 per kilometre. That 0.4 was one strike they’d already marked up – they knew it was there and hit it anyway. What we proved was that they could do more metreage because they weren’t stopping for strikes. Productivity went up, equipment costs went down, and the only extra investment was me and the training time.

Once they saw it, they bought into it. You don’t even always need to use the locator. Sometimes you just need that “condor moment” at the beginning – don’t jump straight in.

There was one street where they wanted to put a top-cutter, a trencher, down the carriageway. I found all the utilities except the gas because it was plastic. But I noticed a scar running up the carriageway with dots in line with the gas risers on each property. I’d found everything else, so it had to be gas.

I labelled it as gas and said, “You won’t know the depth because it’s plastic. It used to be metallic, they’ve probably replaced and moulded it. So when you get to these sections, lift the top cutter and go over by hand, dig around those bits.”

They sent the trencher straight down where I’d marked the plastic gas pipe and hit a 300 mm plastic gas main. The health and safety team actually loved it, because it proved the point: even without a locator or GPR, we’d identified the utility exactly where it was. They asked how I did it and I said, “I just looked.”

So I’d say the CAT and Genny, plus training on EM locating, had the biggest impact for health, safety and productivity.

Ryan: You’ve also overseen logistics, materials handling and managing teams – lots of project and materials management. What tools have you seen work best there? We’ve had guests talk about spreadsheets, software, or combinations of both.

Allan Fairhurst: For us it was mainly spreadsheets. There was a kind of WMS – a warehouse management system – but most of it was done in Excel.

We’d get the designs, and at high level they show where nodes go, how fibres route from 144s down to 12Fs, the ultra-lightweight overheads, aerial nodes, underground nodes. You can pull the bill of materials from that.

First we’d make sure the low-level design was accurate: how many fibres, where we need track and trench, what goes overhead or underground. Then you get an accurate representation of materials – trenching metreage, fibre types, everything – so you know what it’s going to cost.

We were lucky to have a depot, a strong depot team and project managers who handled a lot of the logistics. My role was making sure designs were accurate enough that they could order the right materials – not ending up with too much left over or being short.

Again, doing that early – and tying it into proper surveying – meant we avoided nasty surprises like 600 metres of PIA suddenly needing to become trenching, which would have huge cost implications.

Ryan: Yeah. For these last few questions, we like to focus on your insights and advice. One of the big things in your career is that journey from technician-level work into leadership roles. For engineers wanting to move into leadership, what skills or behaviours do you think make the biggest difference?

Allan Fairhurst: I read something recently that said 80 percent of skills in a job can be taught. I definitely felt that when I was recruiting.

I wasn’t looking for the 80 percent I could teach – I was looking for the 20 percent I couldn’t: behaviour, work ethic, morality, integrity. We can send you on courses, get you qualifications, train you up. What I want is integrity. I’ll always tell you the truth, even if it gets me in trouble. I expect the same.

That ties into “failing forwards” and why we had a high-performing team. We didn’t waste time pointing fingers. We knew what the problem was and where we needed to get to, so we got there as fast as we could and learned along the way.

If you’re looking to make the jump, don’t waste time blaming. Be the person who stands up in the room and says, “I know what needs to be done,” and then goes and does it. There are plenty of people who can manage information. We need doers. That’s probably where I had most of my success – I’d just get up and do it.

It wasn’t because I thought nobody else would; it’s because I wanted the experience. I wanted to know how to fix things myself. That experience moves you forward. Next time you face something similar, you’re not practising until you get it right – you’ve practised until you can’t get it wrong.

So if you want to make the jump, do the do. Don’t wait for someone else. Do it yourself and stay humble with it. And look around you. I think there’s a big difference between management and leadership. Management is a title – you’re a manager. Leadership is open to anyone.

Anyone can be a leader: staying a bit late, coming in early, or simply turning up on time and doing your job properly. The management side is ticking boxes and filling forms. You need both – know when to apply each. But never stop doing the do.

Ryan: Alan, thank you so much for sharing your experience today. There have been some really powerful takeaways on safety culture, leadership progression and what it takes to run field operations at scale. You’ve seen it from beginning to end. If you’re listening and you manage a team of engineers, or aspire to a leadership role, I hope you’ve taken something practical away from this conversation. Thank you for listening. Alan, thank you again.

Allan Fairhurst: Thank you so much, Ryan.

Ryan: Awesome. We’ll see you on the next episode. Thank you. Bye.