CIBSE ANZ brought building services engineers together across Australia and New Zealand on 13 August for its 2026 Lessons Learnt the Hard Way technical seminar. The event was hosted across six venues in Sydney, Melbourne, Perth, Adelaide, Auckland and Christchurch, combining in-person panel discussions with a live hybrid broadcast and offering attendees up to seven hours of CPD.
Nine speakers — Pratik Shrestha, Mark Davie, Rohit Sharma, Chris Arkins, Lucy Cole, Chris Bird, Steve Hennessy, Mark Crawford and Chris Killoran — shared lessons from projects, alongside local panellists. Communication and teamwork emerged as recurring themes, particularly in interactions with clients, contractors and different disciplines.
A Soft Landings Workshop ran in parallel across all six venues. Steve Hennessy of WT Partnership introduced the Soft Landings framework as a collaborative approach to delivering better-performing buildings through respect, openness and extended aftercare. He covered five stages from inception to long-term aftercare and presented examples where the framework had been treated as a box-ticking exercise rather than embedded in project delivery.
In Sydney, workshop participants discussed barriers including adversarial culture, competing priorities between funders, tenants and project teams, and commercial pressures. They explored early and transparent communication, dedicated facilitation and senior sponsorship as ways to address difficult issues earlier and create safe spaces for feedback.
Ideas collected from workshops in Adelaide, Auckland, Christchurch, Melbourne, Perth and Sydney will inform revised Soft Landings guidance that CIBSE plans to develop. Presentations, panel discussions and Soft Landings workshop recordings are also being made available through CIBSE ANZ’s CPD webinars.
Seminar Chair Jen Elias said: “A theme running through the day was teamwork and how important it is to build a strong team culture with open communication in averting problems before they materialise (and in fixing issues once they’re identified!!). In many cases, communication – with clients, contractors, and across disciplines – was the difference between a project that runs smoothly and one that doesn’t. It was a timely reminder that the ‘hard way’ lessons in engineering are rarely about the engineering alone.”
