← Construction Leaders Podcast
Construction Leaders Podcast
Managing Complexity: Evolving Construction Management in the Public Sector
00:31:26
Loading summary
Transcript34 lines
- [00:03]
A
Welcome to this episode of the Construction Leaders Podcast. I'm your host, Evan Hendershot and I'm here today with my co host, Carly Trout of cmaa. Welcome, Carly.
- [00:11]
B
Hi, Evan. Good to be here.
- [00:13]
A
Yeah, happy to have you. We're looking forward to this conversation today and we're joined by Jesse Heimowitz of Tectonic Engineering, Dana Hecht of H and H and Graham Briggs of PMA Consultants to talk about the realities of project management in the public sector, how PM principles play out across different agencies, and why lifecycle scheduling still isn't as consistent as it should be. We'll dig into the value of early planning, lessons from projects that went wrong, and best practices from the ones that went right. If you're involved in public project delivery, consulting or construction management, this is the episode for you. So we'll get started today with a question for everyone. Graham, we'll kick it off with you. How did you end up getting involved in project management, construction management side of the engineering world? And also with that, would you just give us a little background of who you are, where you're coming from?
- [01:05]
C
Yeah, sure.
- [01:06]
D
Thanks. Graham Briggs. I'm with EMA Consultants up in the Boston area. I grew up here and that actually probably is the best way to start my answer to your question. I graduated with a civil engineering degree and got introduced right onto the Big Dig in Boston, which was one of the largest infrastructure projects in the country, still underneath a 300 year old city. And while that was going on, I was brought in, obviously thought, okay, I'm on a civil engineering project, I'm going to be doing civil engineering. And immediately fell in love with the scheduling side of things, the project management world, helping those see the whole project, even though it's underground or what's whatever's going on. Being able to tell the public and see stakeholders along the way where things were, that's really where it started. Everywhere I went after that, I always got pulled back into the project management, project controls world. And here I am today.
- [02:04]
A
All right, we'll transition over to Dana.
- [02:08]
C
So I'm currently with H and H and we're building out a program delivery business line. H and H is 139 year old legacy engineering, known for movable bridges. But H and H also recognizes that evolution of project management, project delivery, how critical it is to the success of building and delivering infrastructure. How I started, it's not as clean as Graham. I wanted to be an architect. I love homes. I'm growing up in New Jersey. Once I got my license, would Find areas I could drive around and see fancy homes. That's where I grew up. Went to college, started. Stop. Community college, ended up at Temple. Finally Temple University. And then I realized as an architect major, I can't draw freehand. And even back in the 80s, they were starting to do computer renderings, but you had to still be able to draw freehand even though things were shifting towards computer. And I went to my advisor and I said, I don't know what I want I can do now. I can't be an architect, and I really don't want to be an engineer. But I said, if I can't be an architect, I want to manage large residential home sites. So back in the late 80s, project management wasn't really a thing. But Temple had a major called civil and construction engineering technology. You didn't derive the equations. You applied the equations in the design courses. But we also had a critical path schedule scheduling course. We had estimating, so we had project management courses sprinkled in. It's probably equivalent today to the construction management degree along with, like I said, some engineering courses. It took me six years to get my bachelor of science. I graduated May of 1991, and it was a recession, and so there was not residential home building. I couldn't get my job doing that. I did one hour of film developing and then I was just sending out resumes. And in November of 91, went to a mass interview for NJDOT because there was an influx of federal funds due to ICE T. I still didn't know what I wanted to do. I ended up on the programmatic side of things@njdot. I spent eight years actually in helping to develop the capital programs. But within that, I was going to all the different projects Progress meetings. In 1996, NJDOT became a true project management centric organization. And so dealing with the capital program, I learned what caused delays, what caused host increases, even opportunities to accelerate projects. Sometimes you have to find money to accelerate, not just for delays. So then I moved over in 2004 to project management and I ended up running the division of project delivery. And so that's how I ended up there. And when I look back, that's really where my skill set and my passion was. I just never knew it. And somehow that advisor, the room I walked into, that person didn't really know me, but they started me on the right track. They saw something that I didn't recognize.
- [05:14]
A
Thank you, Dana. We'll turn over last but not least to Jesse.
- [05:18]
E
All right, Jesse Heimowitz. I'm the vice President and rail and transit sector lead at Tectonic Engineering. We're celebrating our 40th year in business this year and we founded as an engineering a geotechnical engineering firm. But we've turned into a full suite of disciplines including our largest now discipline being project management, construction management and construction inspection. So I lead that part of the division for the rail and transit side of life and how I got into the industry. Much more straightforward than both Dana and Graham. I get made fun of. As the only kid from school that actually went on and did what he wanted to do in life. I was always a huge transportation nerd. Roadway, highway, bridge, rail transit, aviation, everything like that interested me. And so I set my path on an engineering, construction, management focused education. Ironically enough, I'm just coming back today from doing a career day at a junior high school and that's kind of where it spurred my interest in the field. Is somebody actually coming into school and telling me, hey, this is a profession you can do. I really enjoy paying it forward now in in this part of my career, but went to Polytechnic Institute, which is now NYU Tandon School of Engineering. I will always call it Poly. Sorry. So went to Polytechnic and majored in construction management, civil engineering. And right out of school was able to join the Long Island Railroad, which was just such an amazing opportunity for me. Joined them as a junior engineer and I spent about 14 years of my career there all in project management, construction management, really manag design and construction of all facets of the rail and transit space from stations and bridges and tunnels. And just like NJDOT with Dana, it really was a project management focused agency. And with my involvement with CMAA from an early, early age in Poly, I was actually the president of the CMAA student chapter. So I always had that project controls, project management, best practices focused approach to how I did work. And a lot of the other people at the railroad were more engineering technical focused folks that came from nuclear and came from other facets of the industry. So I wound up attaching myself similar to Graham to the project controls and project management side of life where other people really had a knowledge gap. And through my involvement in CMAA and through my degree, I really had a better understanding of the project control side of life and wound up really focusing a lot of the career on that side towards those things. I joined tectonic back in 2021. So it's been about five years and I'm doing pretty much the same thing, but now the private side of life and continuing to remain engaged in the industry with CMAA professional development committee and all these things. So, yeah, really excited to be able to continue to do these things and to join with you today.
- [08:00]
D
Evan.
- [08:01]
B
Jesse, it's great to hear that you were just at a career fair. We actually talked a couple episodes ago about ways to get involved and teach the next generation about construction management. So super excited to hear you were doing that.
- [08:12]
E
Oh yeah. Love giving back to the community with that. That's a lot of fun. Do I try to give back because that's how I learned about the industry. So I want others to be able to do that. So whenever I have the opportunity, always love to do that.
- [08:23]
B
Great. And so we appreciate you all sharing your background and giving us some context there. So let's dive into some of your different experiences and how project management principles are applied within the various public agencies that you've worked at, either as a consultant or direct agency staff. So, Dana, why don't we start with you.
- [08:43]
C
So what I failed to mention earlier is I spent 33 years on the public side. I left almost a year and a half ago. So the majority was at njdot. Like I said, project management centric, true to the sense of the word, where division of project management, it's the project managers and their assistant PMs.
- [09:03]
A
Right.
- [09:04]
C
Everybody else is matrix to the project team. So it really is a project management organization. We had our schedules, we had our budgets, we managed to those programmatically and on a project by project basis. And so when I left NJDOT and I had subsequently been in a few other agencies, they were not highway, they were mass transit agencies. I was surprised, I thought, when I knew what I grew up with was the norm throughout. And I think that part of it is that and in talking to other professionals that really follow project management principles when delivering a project, not just diving into the engineering, is that the highway agencies typically utilize or project management and are further along than the rail mass transit agencies. And that was my experience through my journey. I think that sometimes the rail side, because rail is such a legacy form of transportation, that sometimes you just get this is the way we've always done it. And it becomes so focused on the engineering, the technical, the operations, that these things like scheduling and your estimate at completion, your earned value and your risk doing risk management, that these things can be seen as a nuisance. So there's still an evolution that's happening. But I think the good thing is that there is a recognition now by the entire industry that it is important. So it's the gap now of getting from where we're at to where we need to get to. And I think even on the highway side, Jesse mentioned something that project controls, I think even though that they're advanced, we still have ways to go with true project controls. But just because you have a schedule for everything does not mean that you're really doing the portfolio type analysis that you can be utilizing a suite of schedules or so. All my experience, like I said, has been very varied, all different levels. It was very surprising to me when I left NJDOT that this was not something that people just went, yeah, this makes so much sense versus I don't need to do this, I can do this without putting the time in. So it definitely, I think it varies by the agency, but also the industry, like I said, whether it's the aviation, public transit, highway.
- [11:50]
B
Graham or Jesse, do you have anything to add to that?
- [11:54]
E
Yeah, sure. It's very similar to Dana. It definitely. And I've mainly worked on the railway and transit side of life myself. So my observation is really more it has to do with the individual that is managing the project. Right. So I see to Dana's point, a lot of the, I'm going to call them old school engineers who have been doing this for 30 years who don't want to be told what to do and how to do it. And they've done it their way for a very long time. Right. Those are the types of project management team that project management principles, best practices, project controls fall on deaf ears. Right. Whereas the newer class of project managers who have more of the recent best practice experience, both in education and certification and licensing, tend to be a lot more open to hearing different ways that these types of skill sets can help them manage a project. The thing I have seen though is an inconsistent application of those principles, procedures, guidelines. A lot of the agencies and authorities I work with are in varying levels of sophistication with those types of principles. And it really all depends on the type of project management team. It depends on how far along the agency or the authority is in their evolution and their acceptance and their adaptation of these best practices and principles. But it definitely is varied, which is a challenge. On the consulting side, if it wasn't a challenge, they wouldn't need us to help with a lot of these programs and projects. Right. And that's what we're good at doing, is coming in and adapting to what their different level of knowledge and skill set is to be able to build best practices in a program, be it for a program or a project that fits their current knowledge level and Their current level of sophistication with these things.
- [13:42]
D
I'd like to just add a little bit. It's interesting based on your backgrounds, Jesse and Dana. My background's all over the place. I worked on the private side, I worked in life science, power industry, everything under the sun. I've landed in transit and transportation most recently and I love it. But in the background, the question with regards to the PM principles, the fundamentals are the same across any industry. It's how the actual agencies or the owner or the contractor is actually using them and what tools they're using. I find that some have formal requirements, formal stage gates, formal enterprise scheduling standards across the board. Then others ask us consultants to help establish their controls and their processes. So as Jesse mentioned, a level of maturity is all over the place. But I think that the principles are all the same.
- [14:35]
A
So we sometimes see that the use of CPM pre construction project schedules are not yet as prevalent as CPM construction schedules. Is this a lack of fundamental CPM lifecycle project schedules just as a public agency issue, or is this something that the entire industry, including consultant project management teams, need to continue to evolve for the most effective project delivery? Dana, do you want to tackle that question?
- [15:00]
C
Sure. And I think this continues to build upon what I was speaking about Prior and Jesse and Graham with maturity. I think what I realized when I came over to the private side, because I just figured, okay, the agencies are at different levels, but as Jesse said, on the public side, we're relying on the expertise of the consultants, but the consultants are also producing what the agencies are asking for. And we also silo ourselves. Even from a project management perspective, I went from the highway side to the mass transit side because project management, that's in and of itself, it's a skill set. I don't need to be the technical expert. I'm an SME of delivering a project and then my technical expertise is assigned to me. We tend to silo in the agencies and on the consultant side, I'm a PM for highway or I'm a PM for rail. So in that vein, if you're working for a highway agency where part of the scope of work is to create or on your own mega project, to create an integrated project schedule, which is more prevalent on the highway side, then you're going to do it on the rail side. This has been my experience, my short time on the consultant side, that the rail project teams were not necessarily producing the pre construction schedules because it wasn't a client requirement. And that was very baffling to Me, because it's about, first of all, even if they're not requiring it, how do you manage on your end what you are doing for the client? And if we are delivering the design, how are you managing the pieces that affect the design and the timeframes associated with that and the budgets? I have seen the inconsistency is governed by the request of the client and the maturity of the client. And the other thing is that if it's not in the scope and requested by the client, then it's seen as. It could be seen as an additional cost. And that's where I tried to educate. But there's many efficiencies that you're gaining that will way offset any costs that you're not accounting for because it's not in the scope. So I think that as an industry, project management has become a buzzword. Agencies like to say they have project management. We all like to name someone to be a project manager, but not necessarily equipping and making sure that the skill set is understood, that it's the right people and that they're equipped. And I think we're growing into that, we're evolving into that. There's that recognition, but that's where that inconsistency comes from. And as mentioned earlier, the maturity of the agency that the consultant is working with.
- [17:53]
B
So to follow up, Dana, on what you're saying, how do you convince those who are saying, like, we've been doing this for years without the detailed life cycle schedule? Jesse, I'll direct this to you. How do you convince those that putting the time up front is a minimal investment as compared to the benefits of managing the risk, the scope, the budget? Because I'll tell you, I don't know if you know this, but people don't like change.
- [18:17]
E
Oh, especially railroad people. Let me tell you, if you're brought up in the rail side and you're there for 30 years, that's just how it's done. You're not allowed to tell me otherwise. Right. So it is a very difficult job to change hearts and minds. And that's one of the reasons that the three of us have come together on this podcast, is because the three of us work together to actually do exactly that. Change hearts and minds at a rail and transit agency, to drive cultural change, to accept full lifecycle scheduling and project management principles. So we know the struggle, we know what it's like. Two of the best tools that I had in my toolbox to be able to shift that mindset. Number one, folks who are data driven really, it was case studies, right? So be it with cmaa, be it with the dbia, be it with pmi, all of these professional organizations who carry data on these, it really is uniformly seen that no matter where you look and what organization is talking about it, if you are doing advanced project planning, if you are doing full life cycle project scheduling from the start, from the inception of a job, from the scoping of the job, all the way through construction completion, you are going to have better project outcomes, you're going to have less claims, you're going to have less change orders and you're going to have less delays. That is just a proven fact. It's almost like case law in law, right? You're arguing cases in, in court based on past case studies and case law. Same here in the construction industry. Use exactly what has been done and the studies and the results of these projects that are out there for you to consume, to be able to drive how you apply best practices in your everyday life. For those who are even further naysayers than believing the data that's in front of them, they like to hear the accountability side of things. And with a full lifecycle schedule that is properly coded and properly set up with a work breakdown structure and with responsibilities assigned to a lot of these tasks, these folks like to see that, hey, everything is not on my shoulder. I don't have to be the one to blame for every single delay. I have a scientific tool where I can properly track where things are getting held up in the life cycle of a project, who's holding it up, why it's being held up and what the impact to the job is. Instead of letting these issues fester, getting to a point where you actually do have a project delay before construction and now you're the one holding the bag as the project manager and you have to backtrack through emails and correspondences and try to put together this forensic analysis of exactly what happened. Whereas if you have this schedule that's properly utilized and coded and updated, you can very easily point to the delay and go, here's where it happened. This group was responsible. This authority having jurisdiction was responsible. We had a reasonable timeframe for it. It didn't happen. This is where the accountability for the delay lies and you can fix that and you can also mitigate those delays, right? You could see schedule trends so that you don't have to wait till something's an issue before you take care of it. You could be less reactive and more proactive and to be able to solve these issues before they become an issue. So for those who don't want to just look at the data and realize that no matter where you look, this is the right way to do it. Everybody does love the accountability part of it. And when they're able to shed something from their shoulders of, hey, it's not just all my fault, it's usually a good selling point.
- [21:35]
A
Great. Let's turn to lessons learned and best practices from projects gone right and projects gone wrong. So, Graham, do you want to kick us off and let us know maybe either a lesson you learned from a project gone wrong, or maybe a best practice from a project gone right that you've since integrated into your approach.
- [21:54]
D
Yeah, Project gone wrong is one that I, I actually teach primavera classes as I, I was certified a while back and one of the lessons in the project gone wrong category I, I use quite often. I was working on a project where we needed to. It was a life science project, but it was a schedule. And I needed to move one lab over to another side of the street. And it sounds simple, you're moving some scales and beakers and refrigerators and everything else. But in the GMP world, everything has to be qualified and validated and commissioned according to various procedures and protocols. And when I put the schedule together, there were a lot of different pieces that needed to be put into this schedule. So you needed different shifts. Scientists worked, they could use this scale, they needed to commission this scale, they had to commission the one on the other side of the street. So we did a resource loading schedule and we resourced down to the person to their vacation time, to their training time. And what came out of the schedule when I leveled it was a five year schedule. Literally, to move beakers and refrigerators from one side of the street to the other would take five years to do. And it was, I was so sure of my data that my project manager was like, I'm not going to senior management. You can go to senior management with this. I'll be there for support, but I'm not providing this to them. Went up, put it up on the screen and said, here's the schedule. It's going to take about five years to do. I've looked at every other angle and senior management said, nope, it needs to be done in 18 months. And I then at that moment said, okay, we'll do it in 18 months. We won't level the schedule. I'm not privy to all the information you are. And a long story to the end of it was it took five years to do so. The reason I bring that up is I needed to convince them more. So I needed to get more details to explain to them the data behind what I did not just show a schedule up on screen, say it's five years.
- [24:00]
E
I knew all the data, but without
- [24:02]
D
the report, without the details behind it, it didn't look like anything that was really worth the screen that it was showing on.
- [24:09]
B
So unfortunately, we only have time for one more question. I wish we could stay in chat longer, but I'm wondering, Dana, which phase of the public project do you think is the least understood by senior management? And how does that lack of understanding show up downstream on projects?
- [24:26]
C
Again, I think it depends on the maturity of the agency. But speaking more generally, I think the concept development phase, as Jesse alluded to earlier, right, it's the least visible, it's the least sexy of the phases. And I think really where it's getting more and more critical is as we're going to alternate delivery, choosing the right delivery method. You can't really do that without doing the proper upfront planning that you need to do, which involves also, I think that risk also has a misconception that you only need to do risk if it's a very complex project or if it's over a hundred million. We'll do a Monte Carlo. I literally have had just a few people around a table to start off with and have a word document and categorize and write high level risks. And then how do we bring them into the concept and how do, how are we adjusting the engineering or what stakeholder engagement. So I think that the upfront, the least visible, and then again, if you don't pick the right delivery method, if you don't identify the proper resources, the proper risks, the stakeholders that you need to engage with early and often and at what level, then it's going to show up in large schedule cost. And it could be political ramifications because I always say that engineers can engineer anything, contractors can construct anything, they can figure out when they're out in the field how to fix it. But if you make a mistake on the political side, that will kill your project quicker and could be forever. And that is why up front to me is the most critical and that senior leadership has to understand measure twice, cut once, patience will pay off throughout the rest of the process of project delivery.
- [26:30]
B
And Jesse, did you want to chime in on that question as well? We'll give you the last word.
- [26:34]
E
Okay. I appreciate it. Yeah. Honestly, I do fully agree with Dana. It's in the early planning stages of A project, Right. It's something that we talked about before even recording this, is that planning is often treated as something to get through instead of something to actively manage. Right. And that's because us, as engineers and construction managers, we're human. We want to do the cool stuff, right? We want to build things. We want to put shovels in the ground and get excavators out there and get cranes out there. We want to get to that part of our project as soon as possible. And so in order to rush ourselves to get there, and also politically, to Dana's point, politicians don't want to see funding, partners don't want to see things not happening. If you're getting money from a local government or federal or state government to build a job, they want to see progress. They want to see something delivered for their money as soon as humanly possible. So a lot of times, political pressure also does force the planning stage of a project to speed through and things not to be paid attention to. Right. Unfortunately, that winds up, like Dana said, causing delays and budget busts. Right. But I think two main points in that planning phase are mostly, number one is constructability. A lot of agencies and authorities, they see a constructability review as the project management team, who's looking at it. Try and build it in your head, Right? Of course we're going to try and build it in our head. This is what we do through the entire design phase to make sure.
- [27:57]
D
Right.
- [27:58]
E
But to get outside perspective, not only within your agency or authority, but from a sister agency or authority. Right? Let's say you're running a commuter railroad in New York. You may want to have a connection with a commuter railroad in Maryland or on the west coast and go, hey, guys, I want to know your experience. I want to know if you've experienced any similar issues on projects of this type and do that. True lessons learned and constructability review. Because the more diversity you have in your thought process amongst the whole team and giving that out to other team members as well, it's just so important to be able to better inform the project. Second of all, it's resource and support planning, right? Especially in industries as specialized as rail and transit or the medical and manufacturing side, where skilled labor to do some of these very specialized tasks are not something you can hire off the street. They're somebody you can pull out of a union hall. These are skilled individuals that have to be trained for months, if not years to be able to do the work you need them to do. And if you are going to wait for a contractor to produce a schedule to figure out when you need these individuals. You're going to wind up running the job directly into the ground because you're going to find out at the wrong time that these people are not available, that there there is not enough skilled labor to do the job that you need, and you're going to end up delaying your project and costing yourself a lot of money because you didn't do that upfront. Resource and Support Planning Whereas if you're trying to plan the job like a contractor and you're trying to fully schedule a construction project in the early to middle phases of a design, and you're resource loading that schedule, right, you can properly plan for those resources. You can help the agency or the authority or the owner with hiring plans to be able to boost that specialized skill set to make sure that the support that you need for that project is going to be there when you need it. And that is, I think, one of the best takeaways. If there's a closing word that's really such an important part, poor planning equals poor performance, right? It's plan the plan and then work the plan. You can't work a plan if you're not planning a plan in advance, and you need to plan that plan in those early stages of a project. Which is why full lifecycle scheduling and these important project management principles are so important.
- [30:09]
B
Great. I want to thank you all so much for joining today and sharing your expertise. This was a great discussion. I'd also like to thank all of our listeners for tuning in today. If you found this conversation valuable and would like to take a deeper dive into this topic, you can check out the CMAA On Demand Conference session presented by today's speakers. The session is titled Plan Hard or Go home. Full project life cycle Scheduling tips from CMS who sleep at night and you can find it on the website@cmaanet.org also be sure to check out the upcoming spinoff series of the Construction Leaders Podcast, the decision you didn't make. Just like Today, Evan, Nick and I sit down with industry leaders to discuss lessons learned and the huge impact that early planning can have on project success. As always, don't forget to subscribe to the podcast so you don't miss out on future episodes and follow us on social media. Maahq, we'd love it if you could leave us a review and let us know what topics you'd like to hear in the future. On behalf of cmaa, I'm Carly Trout with Evan Hendershot. Thank you for listening.