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Doha and Chennai Embassies 
The Foreign and Commonwealth Office’s overseas estate consists of over 4,300 properties ranging from substantial office blocks to garages for vehicles, and includes offices, residential accommodation for staff and amenity facilities. Its global network of posts play a vital role in promoting the United Kingdom ’s interests abroad. The FCO is fully committed to improving design standards recognising that good design also achieves value for money. This commitment led to the FCO registering as a DQI trailblazer.
“We have performed the DQI process on two of our newly planned Missions in Doha and Chennai and are committed to using it on our new British Embassy in Warsaw . The process evoked debate and conversation between the many stakeholders as to the buildings’ design specifications. Not only do designs need to be fit-for-purpose and take into account the local environment, they also need to fulfil the requirements of other Government Departments represented at the Post. This process ensures effective delivery of ‘joined-up’ Government. As well as individual FCO Departments, stakeholders may include other Government Departments, such as DFID and the MOD, and also proposed users and local architects engaged on the project.
At Chennai we performed the DQI at the pre-contract design development stage; we held a facilitated workshop in the UK consisting of all relevant stakeholders, the UK project management team, the architect and the structural engineer. Additionally, local users completed the DQI questionnaire.
The workshop generated wide-ranging debate that allowed us to ensure all views and requirements of the stakeholders were incorporated into the design process. It was useful as it allowed opinions to be collated in a generic language and evoked debate about design priorities. We found it identified certain requirements, which ordinarily may not have been considered. A typical example were questionnaires received from users who asked the simple question of where could staff store their bicycles and scooters? In Chennai these are essential forms of transport and the value added to the users by incorporating space is unparalleled! We plan to revisit the DQI results throughout the design and construction process to benchmark the original design aspirations and to re-evaluate their importance.
From our use of the DQI on the Doha Embassy, which initially became a redundant design due to a change of allocated site, we are now able to use the results from the original scheme as a secondary brief for the new site, and as a checklist to see that the different stakeholder views have not changed.
The FCO is committed to using the DQI. The DQI rating process has recently been included into the key stage review process for individual projects.” 
Peter Finch
Mike Kelly
FCO
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