Own the Project Portfolio
Looking to gain better control over costs and schedule, owners take the reins with technology to help manage the project portfolio.
Step into any one of 160 of Crate & Barrel’s, www.crateandbarrel.com, Northbrook, Ill., many locations across the country and you will not see the same design or layout from store to store. As John Moebes, the company’s director of construction, points out, “We don’t build the same store twice.”
Crate & Barrel’s construction arm works on eight to 12 new projects at any given time, each new building a custom design. So, unlike other retail builders that have a standard store design, Crate & Barrel can’t rely on a prototype for its construction.
“We have to fit together a team of people that is very large in order to produce these custom buildings,” Moebes says, “from suppliers to designated subcontractors to construction managers, as well as the internal team. We usually have over several hundred people on a single project. When you are running ten of those simultaneously, that’s a lot of people to keep track of.”
Moebes, like many other construction directors and managers, has turned to technology to help him coordinate building projects for the retailer. Web-based technology solutions allow all members of the building team to have immediate access to things like design changes or budget updates.
The first bit of technology that Moebes employed was a project-management Website. Initially, it was a crude FTP (file transfer protocol) site that housed documents and visual files on the Internet, allowing Crate & Barrel to transfer this information via the Web, rather than printing out documents and mailing or faxing them.
Crate & Barrel has successfully expanded this throughout the last decade to the point it can do almost all of its project management and workflow through the Website. Moebes notes it is fast becoming a true workspace where construction managers work from, as opposed to email and other platforms.
While it has been an advantage in terms of organizing the workflow, he says the challenge has been getting others outside the company trained on the system.
“When we started using it, we were using it in such a small fashion that it was easy to huddle up with someone and explain how to proceed with each step,” Moebes continues. “Now it takes some real training to get them up to speed.”
One thing to help with training and management is to use one standard file format, Moebes says. In his case, it is Adobe Acrobat, www.adobe.com, San Jose, Calif.
“We require everyone to send us everything in Acrobat,” Moebes continues. “Now we’ve expanded that to do all of our mark-ups and reviews on Acrobat, as well. Once we implemented that, we saw a huge savings in mailing charges.”
In the world of retail, time is money. Any little variance in the schedule or snag in costs can hold up a construction project, ultimately delaying the cash registers from ringing and bringing in sales for the company. Therefore owners are looking to get actively involved in construction projects.
But this trend is not limited to the world of retail. Owners across all sectors are turning to technology in order to get a better handle on costs and schedules. The fact is, however, each of these sectors has nuances to their projects that make applying a universal application across the board nearly impossible.
Finding the right portfolio-management technology comes down to understanding the unique factors that make for a successful project in your market segment.
Kicking off the Project Right
Dawn Naney, projects services director, BJC Healthcare, www.bjc.org, St. Louis, Mo., says she is beginning to integrate her overall building team with the software system she uses to manage schedules and projects. Thus far, partners are happy for the opportunity to make the overall project more productive.
“We can coordinate activities that need to be folded into the schedule,” Naney explains. “As the schedules come in, I can do an analysis of them and make sure they are meeting our expectations and have everything we need to better do our program management job.”
Naney uses two software systems: CMiC, www.cmic.ca, Toronto, Ont., as the project-management platform for cost and budget control and Primavera Systems, www.primavera.com, Bala Cynwyd, Pa., as the company’s scheduling tool.
BJC has 13 hospitals and performs hundreds of millions of dollars of construction. These projects run from small, quick projects to complicated, multimillion-dollar construction.
“Our projects require a lot of thought and flexibility into how we build the schedule,” Naney says. “Primavera also provides an enterprise solution. I can perform a portfolio project, set up a standard work breakdown structure, and look at trends and similarities in the types of projects I manage.”
CMiC was chosen for a similar reason, she continues. “We have an extensive list of service providers. At the end of the day, they were walking away with all of the information on the project, and we’d only have a hard copy. We were spending a lot of time trying to assimilate that information into something useable.”
In addition, the architects, subcontractors, and other providers had their own methodologies for managing projects. Naney was put into a position of trying to figure out how all the different firms and crews she worked with collected and used information. She says the technology allows the team to take that information and assimilate it into useful performance metrics. It also helps control the project as it’s moving forward.
While Naney had tried other software options, none of the systems allowed her the flexibility she needs to manage the portfolio.
“In my opinion, there is no system out there that actually incorporates schedules and project management,” Naney says. “There’s a lot of good project management software out there, but not a lot of good portfolio-management software.”
The teams Naney works with access the information via the Web and are able to input cost-driven information. “It’s advantageous for them because it means their pay requests will move through the system more quickly,” she says.
Her long-term goal for using these systems is to provide more insight into the projects BJC manages and to build a better project for the client. These software tools will provide BJC the opportunity to see where there can be improvement, which is a benefit all in itself. It will also serve as a performance measure for the vendors used by the company during construction projects.
Because BJC Healthcare is so large and because the company deals with patient data, it is difficult for Naney to backend her project software programs into the accounting system.
“Our general ledger system is geared toward running our business,” she says. “We have found ways to make the systems talk together, but we are looking at other systems out there to tie together our project management system with the general ledger system.”
As she continues to refine the system with her vendors, Naney sees the software as a way to not only cut down on overall costs, but also as way to save money when it comes to collaboration efforts. “I think this will allow us to produce a better project on the front end, during the planning and initiation phases and let us kick off a project right.”
Flag Luxury Properties, New York, N.Y., broke ground on a multiphase, 280-acre destination resort, golf course, and residential community on the Caribbean Island of Anguilla in 2003. Managing the outsourced work between New York City and the Caribbean was becoming too costly, so in 2006, Kesh Gollapudi, then the new project controller, was asked to incorporate the program management software he had been using nearly 10 years.
With Meridian Systems’, www.meridiansystems.com, Folsom, Calif., Prolog, Gollapudi says he is able to break down a project into different models, and transfer all of that information into a database.
“The most important thing we can do on Prolog is the budget,” says Gollapudi. “You can have a number of contracts for a single project. Here, everything is manageable with one model.”
Gollapudi finds it is also necessary to have a program to track the work of the architects. When the architect makes changes to design or adds a new drawing, he can submit it into Prolog’s document database, and the drawing can be instantly accessed by everyone working on the project.
This becomes essential when working on international projects, which is common at Flag Luxury Properties.
One of the most important changes Prolog has made in Flag Luxury Properties’ business is the scope of the projects the company can now work on.
“In 1990, we had four people doing very small projects,” Gollapudi says. “Today, we’re able to do billion-dollar projects.”
The most important aspect to using project-management software is the amount of information that gets to everyone on the construction team and in a timely manner. Gollapudi says in the past, all of the parties involved in a construction project had access to a limited amount of information. Now, he doesn’t have to worry about someone being kept out of the loop. All they have to do is login and not only find out the information needed, but fine-tune it.
Access to realtime information is what Stan Sykes, construction project manager, Staubach Co., www.staubach.com, Addison, Texas, believes is the most important aspect of automating the project. The real estate advisory firm uses technology from Expesite, www.expesite.com, Columbus, Ohio.
“Project management is done more remotely today than in the past, so it is important for all the various parties involved on a job to have access to information in realtime,” he says.
The technology solution was chosen by corporate executives, but Sykes has been pleased with the results, as are the people he works with. As everyone gets on board with using the software, Sykes says it will become more custom-tailored to individual client needs, making the overall job process smoother.
The custom route is ideal for many owner organizations as they are able to work with the core set of applications from the software provider and add custom applications to fit their specific needs.
Many owners use USGN, www.usgn.net, Phoenix, Ariz., for example, which is a collaborative project-management system, built on the company’s own application development platform. It allows corporate business units, such as construction, to build and run their own applications that link company processes with those of external and internal constituents. Owners like the ability to manage processes from multiple business units on one platform, which can run on any operating system, using any browser.
Tight Spaces, Multiple Phases
Matthias Ebinger, manager of project-management systems, New York Presbyterian Hospital (NYP), values his project-management software for slightly different reasons. While Gollapudi is building luxury resorts along the ocean, Ebinger has to configure buildings in the limited space of Manhattan.
“We’re unique in that we’re working with buildings that are 60-70 years old,” he says. “With limited room to grow, we have to maintain the structures we already have. So we need to have a very organized approach.”
NYP’s building approach incorporates different elements of the company, including bio-medical, infrastructure, facilities, and IT (information technology). “We want to make sure all four groups are involved from the beginning so we know how the impact of one group affects the other groups,” he says.
When investigating technology to help him balance the project load, Ebinger looked at the asset lifecycle of their strategic-planning process. A renovation can end up going through the cycle several times. It also allows him to track the lifespan of different elements of buildings.
“What we’re trying to do is capture information strategically, so we generate the information only once,” Ebinger says.
Currently, the company uses technology from Skire, www.skire.com, Menlo Park, Calif. “We looked at 16 different project-management systems,” he says. “We were looking for a system that was integrated, that included schedule management, cost management, and others, all in one tool.”
As of now the technology helps coordinate the lifecycle aspect of project management, but in the future, Ebinger hopes to use it for maintenance as well.
“What I like is that I can integrate schedule and cost,” he says. “You input the information, and you automatically get the cash flow. Once you do this over a portfolio of 170 projects, like we are, you get a good understanding for what your means are.”
This past summer, Ebinger says the program was scheduled to go live with integrating outside contractors. He anticipates it will improve communication with contractors, as well as cut down the amount of time it takes to get paperwork approved.
“As a project manager, knowing whether or not your project budget has been approved will be right at your fingertips,” says Ebinger.
Like BJC Healthcare, Ebinger says the hospital environment makes it difficult to backend Skire into the accounting system.
However, he says Skire is fully in synch with the finance department.
“I’ve worked in the industry for a while, and we used a lot of generic tools,” Ebinger says. “And now, this epic tension between project manager and finance can be reduced by this simple exchange of information.”
Sue Marquette Poremba is a contributing writer for Constructech.