As the teams reached the halfway point in the Preliminary Rounds, it is appropriate to reflect on how success can be measured. Teams at the top of the table, and battling for a place in the 12-team final at the end of the Preliminary Rounds will consider their position in the table a measure of how well they are running their business. Teams at the wrong end of the table will now look to success being able to turn round the fortunes of their companies, and this can only be achieved by focusing on the key areas that could improve their growth rates i.e., competitive bidding to secure new work, and managing their jobs in progress as profitably as possible, and close analysis of past performance will be important to prevent past mistakes from reocurring.

Period 8 proved to be a tough quarter for many teams, with 30% posting deteriorating growth figures. Many of the declines were down to teams struggling to win new work, and there were a number of reasons for this. Where there are KNOWN rival bidders, their bidding history is available, and it is possible to assess the margins their rivals have bid with in the past, and formulate an effective bidding strategy to undercut them. However, this is not possible where their are UNKNOWN rival bidders, or even KNOWN rival bidders that are new to the Industry, such as The Crayford Road Group in period 8, who had no bidding history. In this scenario it is much harder to gauge a competitive margin to win work, and margins often have to be cut further to try and mitigate against being undercut.

During period 8 there were just 2 new entries into the top 12, and qualifying places for the Final, but they could prove to be significant ones. The "Antipodean Pavlovs" (Jacobs, Australia/New Zealand) climbed 16 places to joint second to become the currently highest ranked Jacobs' team, and the students are back in the mix after a first-class performance from "SiX GoLdZZ" (The University of Manchester, UK), a 22% improvement that catapulted them up 50 places to 9th. At the very top of the table a Stantec team continues to lead the Competition, but this time it is the vastly experienced "Whatever it takes" (Stantec, Italy), runners up in the last two years, who moved up 4 places to become the fourth consecutive new leaders with 1,698 pts, as previous leaders "Stan Movers" (Stantec, United States) dropped back to joint second. The "Martians" (WSP, UK/Canada) consolidated their period 7 rise up the table to stay in 4th.

As the teams enter the second half of the Preliminary Rounds it is still all to play for before the identity of the 2024 Finalists are revealed, with many teams lying in wait just outside the top 12 should the leading teams slip up.