DCN reveals more than 50 speaker sessions for Manchester show
Digital Construction North (DCN) has revealed the 50-plus best practice CPD-certified sessions for this year’s event at Manchester Central on 18 November.

The sessions take place across four stages: information management; innovation; technology; and transformation. There are nearly 70 speakers drawn from organisations including Amodal, AtkinsRéalis, BAM UK, Defence Housing Service, Glider, Kier, nima, Okana, Ramboll, RLB Digital, Scottish Futures Trust, Sisk and Skanska.
Here are the 10 sessions that have grabbed DC+’s attention:
10am – The wrong person in the wrong room
Operam Academy’s Paul Shillcock will offer a practical alternative to the job title of ‘BIM manager’.
10.30am – Embedding UCL’s uplifted employer’s requirements across capital delivery
Amodal founder and MD Thomas Whiting and UCL head of data and digital estates Joe Jones will explore how UCL is embedding requirements into appointment documents, assuring information at key gateways and completion, and supporting stakeholders new to CDE and ISO 19650 working.
11am – The hidden asset identity crisis
Digital Guerrilla MD Andrew Waring will explore a critical but largely overlooked challenge in the built environment: the lack of a universal, immutable and globally resolvable identity for physical assets.
11am – Site data capture and quality assurance on MCFC north stand extension
Sisk DPD lead Nidaa Alazmeh details the digital approach the contractor took on the extension of Manchester City’s North Stand.
Noon – How 1,393 cubes helped prove IFC 4.3 is project ready!
After 18 months of research, Skanska digital delivery coordinator Hayden Day and APTA BIM coordinator Julie Gonzales investigate whether Autodesk Revit is truly ready for IFC 4.3 project delivery.
12.30pm – AI competency and the professional brain
Most AI governance in the built environment relies too heavily on a single control: a competent professional reviews the output. In this session, vBrief co-founder and CEO James Wright-Zhang will show why that is only one facet of the problem and what the overlooked, and increasingly important, facets mean for your practice, policies and risk register.
2.30pm – Cloister to COBie: Structuring seven centuries of heritage data
Can a single repair to a 700-year-old cloister change how a national institution manages its data? Representatives from the UK Parliament and Donald Insall Associates will reveal how a small masonry repair at St Stephen’s Cloister Court – part of the Palace of Westminster, and home to one of the oldest surviving fragments of the estate – became the test case for turning centuries of narrative heritage information into structured, reusable asset data.
2.30pm – Reporting to reducing carbon emissions: Kier case study
Ben Stone, head of sustainability at Kier Group, and Dan Botterill, CEO of Rio AI, will explain why carbon reporting is the baseline requirement, and why reduction demands a company-wide operational data capability rather than a project-by-project exercise.
3pm – Smart hospitals without the new build: A practical digital twin journey for legacy healthcare estates
Can an ageing hospital become a smart hospital without a multi-million-pound digital programme? This practical session from Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust explores how healthcare estates can use accessible LiDAR technology and the information they already hold to start building digital twin capability.
4pm – Who owns the decision? Governance for autonomous building systems in data centres
Representatives from Siemens will answer the following question: when a building’s HVAC, power or security system can act on its own, who’s accountable if it gets it wrong?
As well as the speaker sessions, there will be 50 exhibitors.
Due to venue capacity, tickets for DCN are limited. All registrations go through a vetting process, and places will be approved on a first-come, first-qualified basis. Tickets are free for industry professionals. Register to attend DCN.
Keep up to date with DC+: sign up for the midweek newsletter.