Innovative Federal Agencies Push Home-Grown Methods
...estimates from people who are putting their [butts] on the line.” He notes integrated delivery helps the project team shorten schedules, cull unnecessary costs and navigate mid-stream changes with agility.
“CMc is an evolutionary step up from D-B-B but it is not a silver bullet,” Wickstrom says. “Far more important is the attitude the three parties—owner, architect and builder—bring to a project.” At the Eugene courthouse, “GSA took ownership. They were more like a private developer that cared about the outcome of the project,” he says.
With bridging, a variation of design-build, GSA contracts with a designer to draw up initial designs which “can go as far as 95% into some parts of the project, but only preliminary design on other parts,” says Gilbert Delgado, GSA’s director of construction excellence and project management. “Then, the CM, who will also be the constructor, takes over completion of the design.”
On the Census Bureau job, GSA hired Chicago-based architect Skidmore, Owings and Merrill LLP to do site location, initial design and the environmental impact statement and assessment. “They did about 25% of the basic concept design,” says Bhavgava. “But for the interior design, we wanted to go much further, up to 70%” before hiring a design-build team to finish design and handle construction. GSA awarded Parsippany, N.J.-based Skanska USA Building Inc. the contract to build the complex.
In the bridging method, the handing off of the preliminary design to the design-build team is a critical point in the schedule, a transition stage that can make or break a project’s schedule, says Michael Luondi, executive vice president at Skanska USA Building Inc., and the project executive on the Census Bureau project. The handoff was not completely seamless. “The biggest challenge was interpretation of the contract itself,” Luondi says. “There were some scuffles. It was a complicated project with a number of components and some parts of the design were far along and others not at all. We probably could have done a better job upfront of making clear what was required, but in the end, it worked out very well.”
The Census project reportedly was at the heart of a Skanska reorganization that saw the departure of Michael J. Healy, the chief of the U.S. unit, and the writing off of $47 million in losses. Big hikes in steel prices partly were to blame.
The new approaches to project delivery at GSA have come with some growing pains. The need for contract and project delivery standardization has prompted GSA to develop with the Associated General Contractors a “CMc standard clause,” which GSA acting administrator David L. Bibb says will help GSA “package a project a certain way that should fall within a set of expectations regarding the type of information and preparation necessary to prepare a proposal. That’s simply more efficient.”
GSA also is currently working with the Construction Management Association of America to develop standardized procedures for CMc-delivered projects. “The goal is to develop a national consistency in delivery,” Winstead says. He notes GSA project schedules also include peer reviews at the 30%, 60% and 90% stages of completion on every job. GSA has assembled a “select cadre of experienced construction people,” who visit jobsites and evaluate progress, Winstead says.
While the evolution in GSA’s approach to project delivery is a work-in-progress largely driven by market conditions and the unique requirements of each project, GSA also has initiated in-house programs to help project managers identify and share best practices for project delivery. Project managers from each region meet annually to share and review project delivery experiences. GSA also uses an information-collecting program called the “Project Information Portal” to track GSA’s major projects and their respective delivery methods.
