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Winner
Davis Langdon
Davis Langdon has done the business equivalent of learning to ride a unicycle while juggling with live cats: that is, over the past decade it has transformed itself from a straight-up-and-down quantity surveyor into an all-purpose construction consultancy, with a highly successful project management division. As we know from firms that have got into difficulties, this is a task that requires dexterous management: it's a measure of Davis Langdon's success that it has done this while remaining the client's favourite project manager – it came top of our random client survey by a mile. To see the physical evidence of this success, take a trip to The City of Manchester Stadium, a £120m project that Davis Langdon nurtured for about 10 years, and the cost of which it managed to reduce by a spectacular £20-30m.

'It delivers a very professional level of service using a very high level of internal back-up resources'

RUNNERS-UP
Cyril Sweett
The big QSs understood about five years ago that they had to evolve beyond the role of simple project scorekeepers to become active project managers. Most have managed the transition well, but few have been as thorough and wholehearted as Cyril Sweett. In the past year alone, the project management arm has increased turnover in the UK 32% and profit 96%, expanded from 74 to 94 staff and increased the money that those staff bring in by 9%. What this means in the real world is that Cyril Sweett has won more than 15% of the total PFI market, five of the 20 largest retail schemes in Britain and more than one quarter of the NHS LIFT schemes. If the firm managed its own project of becoming a leading project manager with this degree of success, the project management of mere buildings must be an absolute doddle.

'It has been particularly proactive in anticipating and mitigating potential problems'

Gleeds
One of the first things to check when choosing a firm in which to entrust your profit is how good it is at looking after its own bottom line. By that criterion, Gleeds is a pretty safe bet: its operating profit has grown more than 70% over the past three years, and it is a tribute to the efficiency of the management, and a comfort to the client, that this is considerably more than the growth in fee income. The proof is presented in the BBC's £250m White City scheme, 1 million ft2 of new-build office, delivered on budget and four months ahead of programme – a performance that has won it the commission to manage the £450m redevelopment of Broadcasting House.

'Professional and committed support to achieve a most successful project for a satisfied end user'

Turner & Townsend
If there's one thing that distinguishes Turner & Townsend from its competitors in a highly competitive sector it is its commitment to doing business as intelligently as possible. Pretty much every good idea that industry critics have had in the past six years has been adopted, implemented and refined. So, it has become apparent that IT is essential to uniting the project team: T&T invests 10% a year on R&D. You want to get the most out of the knowledge base of the companies' different divisions? T&T has done this and used it to cut fees by up to 10%. Think that projects should be costed on a whole-life basis? T&T has @Risk, a program that does just that. Long may it run.

Mace
It's slightly ironic, for those of us who follow such things, to compare Mace's spectacular financial performance with the public teeth-sucking over the state of its markets. In fact, Mace's spectacular financial performance has proved that the poor state of the London commercial market doesn't matter when you can pick up jobs such as Heathrow Terminal 5, and be the project manager of choice for clients such as Royal Bank of Scotland and GlaxoSmithKline. In the process, the firm has continued to acquire more staff, growing more than 30% in the UK and 500% overseas. And the chance is that those staff will stick around for a bit: Mace was ranked 50th in The Sunday Times' best firms to work for awards.

Osprey Mott McDonald
Regular attendees at these awards will be familiar with the Osprey brand; now it has merged with the engineering group Mott MacDonald to become one of the UK's largest project management consultants. In terms of what it has to offer its clients, which include outfits such as HSBC, London Underground and English Partnerships, it has a whole-life cost management tool that is designed to capture, benchmark and recycle into a live database all construction cost, both capital and operating.