| The New Jersey Educational Facilities Construction and Financing Act (the Act) signed into law on July 18, 2000, resulted in the state’s investment of at least $8.6 billion in public school (referred to as state school in the UK) construction during this decade. The Act included full funding for all school renovation and construction projects in the state’s 31 special needs school districts, known as the Abbott school districts.1
Pursuant to the Act, the New Jersey Schools Construction Corporation (SCC), a new subsidiary corporation of the New Jersey Economic Development Authority (EDA), was given responsibility for financing, designing and constructing all of the school facilities projects in the Abbott school districts bringing such projects to fruition is shown in the box below.
At the end of 2001, PB+3DI, a joint venture between PB and 3D International, was hired as the program management firm (PMF) responsible for managing the Newark School District’s school improvement program. Newark is the largest of the 31 Abbott districts. The total planned improvement was estimated to cost $1.6 billion and encompasses 73 schools, 42 of which will be new and 31 of which will be renovated. The four major work categories in our scope of work and current activities in each are as follows:
• Land Acquisition Support. Being provided for 32 school projects where multiple lots including commercial properties are involved and where the relocation of owners and tenants is required.
Abbott School District Process
- Each district must prepare a long-range facilities plan that is submitted to NJ Department of Education (DOE) for approval.
- DOE reviews the plan initially and, in turn, each individual project application to ensure consistency with state facilities standards and educational adequacy.
- Following DOE approval to initiate a project, SCC assumes responsibility for its implementation. Throughout design, SCC obtains DOE approval as needed for program changes that could raise the project’s final costs.
- Once final costs are accepted by DOE, SCC undertakes construction of the project.
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• Design Management. Underway for three high schools and thirteen pre-kindergarten to 8th grade schools with a total estimated construction cost of $450 million.
• Construction Management. Underway for two high schools with a total estimated construction cost of $140 million.
• Managing Design and Construction of Interim Health and Safety Repairs/ Emergent Projects. This category involves latent defects that had gone undetected previously, such as parapet deterioration and projects transferred from local school district to state responsibility, such as aircraft noise abatement improvements. This work included fire alarm upgrade, roof and outside envelope rep airs, and interior fixes completed by year end 2004 for a total estimated cost of $130 million.
Challenges
As managers, we strive to overcome challenges, and of course, this program had its share. Just a few of them are discussed below.
Ramp Up. The program started with a focus on three major fronts—staffing, master planning for schools, and health and safety projects. Staff balancing was the key. Managing who would do what and when was a major task. Our team started with a basic but solid work plan that we updated on a bi-weekly basis to reflect the status and the inevitable scope creep associated with correction of years of deferred maintenance. Our work plan was developed in Microsoft Excel and migrated to an industry standard cost loaded CPM software package.
Complex Organizational Relationships. Our client is SCC; the owner (school district) is Newark Public Schools (NPS); the approval agency is the New Jersey Department of Education, and the permitting agency is the NJ Department of Consumer Affairs. As program manager, we must deal effectively with all parties, each of which has different priorities and agendas. Reaching consensus between these parties became our team’s highest priority.
For more than a year after we started this project, SSC was still in the development stage with overworked personnel drawn from other private and public entities with disparate cultures. They brought with them histories and experience that were largely positive but sometimes not applicable to a school environment. Notwithstanding our facilitation of partnering meetings, progress during the earlier stages of the program was often stymied by conflicts between the owner, client, and other agencies. Our team has managed to improve this situation tremendously by fostering proactive communication, implementing good document tracking, and scheduling regular scope of work discussions with the client. Rigorous attention had to be given to regular management meetings including key decision makers from stakeholder agencies. Without such face-to-face dialogue, decisions were simply deferred.
Planning. The scope of work required our team to perform an independent long-range facilities plan update. It was an ideal exercise for understanding the thinking that had gone into the school district’s original long-range plan and to help us prioritize the work. It also formed the basis for us to update the team work plan and staffing projection.
Processes . The client had defined the procedures and process we were to follow in a PMF manual, which included a process flow/responsibilities matrix for each step of the project. They also prepared a design manual with the performance parameters to be met by the design. It was apparent from the start that these two documents were works in progress. While well intended, they proved to be overly detailed in some areas and lacking in others. Uncertainties within and conflicts between them resulted in confusion and disputes, so we worked closely with SCC to rescind and restructure selected processes and procedures to make them more effective.
Huge Amount of Information. Our team uses two management tools for this program—IMPACT and Sharepoint. IMPACT is a proprietary schedule and budget control software system developed by 3DI. It is similar to PB’s ProjectSolve. Sharepoint is document control software the team uses to log and store all documents The challenge here was to make sure that all team members diligently stored and shared project information in a timely manner—a task that Sharepoint made much easier to achieve.
Standards. New Jersey Department of Education guidelines, the International Building Code (IBC), SCC design standards, and NPS Standards were the only major codes and practices that the team needed to follow. Establishment of a priority list and governing areas early on helped reduce confusion and disagreement that arose from the fact that New Jersey did not adopt IBC until when initially promulgated. IBC was only adopted by the state in mid 2003 and then with amended sections, some of which retained provisions of the 1996 Building Officials and Code Administrators National Building Code (BOCA).
Nevertheless our efforts to secure a building permit were not always without controversy. For example, where BOCA and the principles of Engineering Economics indicated that a handicapped lift was an appropriate means to address a 1.5 m (5-foot) difference in elevation between sections of a lobby that could not be served by a ramp, our regulators required the design architects to add an elevator.2
Lessons Learned
At the time of writing, three years have passed since our team received notice to proceed in December 2001 and we are at the end of the original contract. During this time we learned a lot. While much of what follows is not uncommon to large programs, they were valuable lessons learned.
Know What The Client Wants. With the SCC being a new organization with employees cobbled together from other private and public industries, reaching a common goal and concise decisions required a lot of effort on their part and ours. The effort entailed educating the client and advising about potential down falls of some of their requests. This effort was successful because our team held early partnering sessions, housed client representatives in our offices, and then co-located with the client in a regional SCC office. In short, our aim was to establish trust early on and then build on it.
Semantics and the Permitting Agency. We likewise learned that precise use of terms was imperative, even within seemingly innocuous notes on design drawings. One design consultant’s drawing notes referred to a theater lobby instead of the entrance to the school auditorium. Another consultant’s notes referred to a tabletop box for painting small architectural models as a “spray booth.” In both instances, the permitting agency invoked ventilation requirements for commercial rather than educational applications, that is for a performing arts theater lobby and an automotive shop spray booth. Naturally, the design drawings were amended rather than add expensive and inappropriate specialized ventilation systems.
Know What The Owner Wants. The main goal of NPS was to have schools that would satisfy its educational needs while being inexpensive to maintain. This goal differed from that of SCC, which considered cost effectiveness, budget, time frame and capital planning to be its more critical concerns. For example, one 700-seat school has a staff of more than 100 and wanted on site parking for all. It was critical for us to work with the owner early on and define what the real parking need was. It was agreed that each school would be provided with, on average, about 60 parking spaces. This solution reduced the land and construction costs and satisfied the owner requirement.
Assign Budget Responsibility to the Owner. Using client (SCC) mandated cost-per-square- foot targets, the onus was shifted to NPS (owner) when it became necessary to choose, amongst nice-to-have-but-budget-busting amenities. It was critical to define the construction budget for each school and inform the owner that we were all required to work within this budget. The owner then had the ability to increase or decrease areas as it saw fit.
Define All Risk Issues. A comprehensive risk matrix was prepared early on by staff with extensive schools management experience. At times, it seemed they were clairvoyant as many of their hypotheses proved to be reality. For example, the PB + 3D/I management team was better able to deal with issues such as key client personnel turnover because we had the opportunity to consider an appropriate range of responses in advance. Due to the uncertainties in the project, which included program changes, school size changes, systems controversies (geothermal vs. traditional in an urban environment), site location changes etc., it was crucial that the client was notified of any issues that impacted budget, schedule and quality. We issued notification letters to the client whenever these risks issues arose.
Defend/Clarify the Contract. Independent scope-to-budget validations that we performed on nine pilot projects prior to initiation of the health and safety work showed a wide variation in the quality of the scoping work done by prior consultants. Sometimes we and the client had very different interpretations of the contract so we worked aggressively to resolve the issues. For example, the client assumed that building commissioning3 was within our scope, but in reality it was not. We worked with the client by discussing the contract language in its entirety and by documenting standard industry practices. This maxim, defend the contract, became very important because the client often viewed us an extension of its staff, whereas our contract was a lump sum agreement for specific services.
Conclusion
The client relationship is the most important item in a successful program. While we had to work hard to prepare them for the challenges they faced and to assist them in dealing with the communities, politicians, parents, students and agencies, it was well worth our effort. The new schools rising in Newark are widely recognized as a key component in the city’s renaissance.
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