James Kerrigan

Sound judgment.

For more than three decades, across APAC, EMEA and the Americas, I've helped organizations make better decisions about workplace, real estate and transformation. These are the observations that emerged from that work.

Scenario study testing sharing ratio, scope, floors, and cost across three buildings
A kit of parts, space types standardized across a portfolio
Enclosed booths and modular nooks, built to be reconfigured
A workday mapped across three personas, arrival to decompress
A finished collaboration pod beneath a branded wall
A site-strategy comparison across four portfolio scenarios
Balcony and unit studies checked against the same model
A floor-by-floor amenity legend, mapped from G through 4
A finished lounge, striped rug and a city view
One of the five destinations, built
A branch network's site strategy, mapped by role and geography
A finished Fidelity Retail cafe and gathering space
A desk neighborhood beside a mirrored sightline to a meeting room
Scheduling scenarios modeled hour by hour against real meeting load
A team working through a plan at the wall, mid-project
A stair connecting reading rooms across floors
A finished booth, built from the amenity plan
The West Office Building, after the scenario study
A reading room built from a standardized space type
An activity-based neighborhood, reset around observed work
Zoning tested against the Dunbar number, the size a village can actually know
A communal table anchoring a finished lounge
An inflection point in real estate and space strategy, mapped
A finished boardroom, built from a behavior-first plan
Existing vs. proposed building stack, 80 to 120 usable square feet per workseat
An enclosed glass pod for a two-person conversation
Work modes plotted then, now, and future, across a whole company

Every image represents a decision.

Sound design.

I trained as an interior designer, and design is still how I work through a problem. Workplaces, research libraries, retail branches and aviation projects, in Perth, Dublin, London, Los Angeles and Dallas, each one starting from how people actually use a space.

Five ways of working, and no single space that suits them all.

01 One size fits all02 Distinct, overlapping activities03 A connected spatial framework
FocusCollaborationLearningTeam interactionRespiteSocial connection

For Jacobs' own new ways of working program, we identified five modes of work, and the kind of space each one needs, before a floor plan existed. Each became its own destination, tuned to a reason to be there, not a headcount.

I defined the behavioral model the destinations answer to.

A finance workplace, river-facing lounge and meeting hub, built from the destinations model

A room built for one purpose is a room waiting to be wrong.

01 Assumed: one size fits all02 Calibrated to organization 103 One size does not fit all
Learning / MentoringGroup or one-to-one sessions, where training and learning take place.
Group / TeamGroup work, idea sharing and presentations.
Social interactionA hub for employees and the wider community, fostering connection.
DecompressWhere people unplug, unwind and find respite from work.
FocusedIndividual, heads-down tasks, where deep work happens.

Modularity was decided in the structure, at the start. Within a year the same footprint had been used three different ways, without construction.

That became the standard for every site that followed.

Sound strategy.

People and real estate are most organizations' two largest costs. I help leadership teams decide how much space they need, where, and what it's for, across Fortune 100 portfolios in APAC, EMEA and the Americas.

Scaled across the program, to new and legacy sites alike.

Enclosed booths and modular nooks in a finished Jacobs workplace, built to be reconfigured rather than fixed to one use

Behavior data showed that 50,000 people had changed how they worked, and the space hadn't. We reallocated it rather than cutting it. No new construction spend, space used 30% more effectively, and roughly $38M a year in savings, going forward.

I led the program across 40+ sites, with Finance and HR leadership making the calls alongside us.

The portfolio you have isn’t necessarily the portfolio you need.

Workplace lounge with sculptural lighting and a mountain view, the finished space an earlier scenario study was built to protect

Fifteen years supporting Fidelity's national portfolio, with annual spend often in the range of $100M. Each renewal was a chance to ask what the organization needed next, rather than carry the existing buildings forward. We tested them one by one against real sharing ratios and scope. When Boston needed a temporary headquarters, that habit avoided roughly $50M.

The executives approving each lease saw the same evidence every time.

Sound decisions.

A decision is only as good as the evidence the room trusts. I build the models and tools that let executives, Finance and HR look at the same picture, and keep it current as things change.

Scheduling, capacity and space, brought into one model to show where the opportunity was.

Two staffing scenarios modeled hour by hour against real meeting load

Fidelity's national retail branch network needed all three answerable to each other before a room could be sized. We sized rooms from the hours demand actually peaked.

Turned three independent planning streams into one shared decision.

A living model keeps every decision connected to current data.

Capacity, timeline and cost held together in one live model rather than three separate reports

Built as a tool, not a deliverable, it held capacity, timeline and cost in one place. Teams were still checking against it long after the meeting that commissioned it.

That thinking became Locus and Census, the platforms executive teams now use as one source of truth for real estate decisions.

Sound leadership.

The largest programs are delivered by people who are rarely in the same room. I've built and led multidisciplinary teams of 25 to 50+ across three continents, and most of our clients have come back for the next one.

Six million square feet, tracked in real time as the design evolved.

The whole destination, filtered by asset as the design changed.
The same model read down to a single room
The same model, read down to a single room.

At NEOM, twenty-eight space types, with the design changing week to week. One model could be read at the scale of the destination or a single room, so every decision was checked against current data, both ways.

I defined that decision model.

Structure, space type, balconies, rooms, each a call made by a different team, on a different schedule.

By space type: 28 space types, 15,812 rooms.
Balcony study: 1,026 balcony rooms, 74 premium rooms, 203 winter gardens.

A team of thirty-five, across eight locations and six time zones. The work depended on those calls staying compatible without me in the room. Most of the time, they did.

The finished environment is easy to see. The judgment that shaped it usually isn't.

James Kerrigan is Director, Design and Strategies at Jacobs, based in Dallas. Trained as an interior designer in Perth, he has practised in Dublin, London and Los Angeles, and leads programs across APAC, EMEA and the Americas. Fellow (FIIDA) and Past President of the International Interior Design Association. NCIDQ certified, LEED AP.

If you're weighing a decision like these, I'd be glad to talk.

jameskerrigan@me.com LinkedIn Download résumé