Has the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) exposed the tip of a federal iceberg that is made up of flawed construction management practices and that is wreaking havoc via massive cost increases and schedule delays?

Earlier this month, an official from GAO, the investigative arm of Congress, told a House panel that her office has found significant shortcomings in the way the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) is managing the construction of major medical facilities. ConstructionPro Week (CPW) then asked the same GAO representative whether she believes similar problems are common throughout the federal government. Click here to read her response.
 

What are the best practices for avoiding and managing “scope creep,” an ominous term that refers to uncontrolled changes or continuous growth in a construction project’s scope? “First, we recommend that you implement a documented change management process, which can actively manage changes on [a] project,” Marsh Risk Consulting Vice President and Managing Consultant John Ciccarelli told a target audience of engineers, architects, risk management professionals, construction and project managers, presidents, vice presidents, contractors, subcontractors, and others during a webinar that WPL Publishing held late last month. Click here to find out what other steps both he and fellow Marsh Managing Consultant Todd Vandenhaak suggested for preventing and managing scope creep.

It will be interesting to see the degree to which professionals and their prospective employers will value the Association for the Advancement of Cost Engineering (AACE) International’s new Certified Scheduling Technician (CST) credential. In a recent interview, ConstructionPro Week asked AACE International Executive Director Dennis Stork, “About how many professionals are expected to enroll in the program … and by when?” Click here to read the response he gave to this question and other details about the program, which the organization is targeting to “the young professional with a minimum of four years of professional experience or a four-year degree.”

Specification writers for construction projects may be moving into the role of a ‘knowledge manager,’ the president of Kalin Associates, an independent specification consulting firm in metropolitan Boston, said during “BIM (Building Information Modeling) Specifications and Information Management,” a WPL Publishing webinar for which a recording recently was added to the ConstructionPro Network (ConstructionProNet.com) Download Library -- free of charge for members. The webinar was the third of four sessions in a series entitled “BIM Strategy: Leverage Your Business for Profit and Growth.”

Mark Kalin explained that specifiers “can help the design team with a lot of decisions that will constrain [a building information] model appropriately and get the right level of information in there so that everyone from the owner to the designer to the contractor or construction manager, all the way to the installer, will have the ability … to make [implementation of BIM technology] work.” ... Read more.

Just because an analysis of productivity in a construction project may be called a “Measured Mile” analysis, “don’t believe it,” Trauner Consulting Services Inc. Director Mark Nagata advised a target audience of contractors, public and private owners, subcontractors, construction managers, owner representatives, architects, and others during a webinar that WPL Publishing held last week. “Dig into the details. Understand exactly how the calculation is being performed. I evaluate a number of different claims with inefficiency components, and in almost all instances, the analyst or contractor calls those calculations ‘Measured Mile’ analyses when they’re really not.” ... Read more.

By William Ibbs and Farid Saddik

The Critical Path Method (CPM) has been a staple of industry scheduling practice for more than 50 years, and the software that has arisen around CPM has evolved substantially in the past 30 years. That evolution to some extent has been good and to some extent bad. We believe that the construction management community in general, and schedulers in particular, have a lot of experience and wisdom to share. Our goal, through a series of articles such as this one, is to stimulate discussion about both the CPM methodology and the software. We start with a short review of CPM history, followed by a discussion of the application of “dynamic modeling,” to common CPM activity components, including durations, relationships, and constraints. Feedback is therefore definitely welcome. ... Read more.

It pays to plan for green construction as early in a project as possible, attorney Bryan Jackson told attendees during “Green Construction Contracts,” a WPL Publishing webinar for which a recording recently was added to the ConstructionPro Network (ConstructionProNet.com) Download Library -- free of charge for members.

“In my studies, I’ve [found] that if you make changes [to incorporate green features] early on, it’s at a very low cost with a very high level or ability to make change,” Jackson said. “As you go further out into the construction design and construction process, it becomes harder to make change, and [it becomes] more costly. So, the time to green your project is at the very get go, at the inception of design rather than later as it starts to cost you more and you have less ability to make change. The nightmare, which hurts projects the most, is when you’re actually making a change at the end of the project, perhaps because you weren’t able to get all of your green points [for certification], and now you’ve got to add on something that wasn’t planned, and that’s the most expensive thing to do that could really hurt you.” ... Read more.

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“Tens of thousands” of professionals within the construction community ultimately may be able to benefit from a recently formalized agreement between Associated General Contractors of America (AGC) and Burger Consulting Group Inc. (BCG) to move the industry toward interoperability, AGC Chief Information Officer C. Fara Francis told ConstructionPro Week (CPW). The association engaged Burger to work with contractors and construction software vendors to facilitate easy data exchange and integrated systems using agcXML schema -- an endeavor that AGC believes will yield “significant cost savings for software developers, ease of communication between contractors and their systems, and accurate data storage.” ... Read more.

By John S. Crane, PSP, CFCC

The purpose of this article is to shed light on some of the questions and scenarios that stakeholders need to consider when addressing weather in the project schedule as a result of commonly used contract documents. In addition, this article will provide practical approaches for establishing the amount of “reasonably anticipated” weather as well as ways to incorporate the “norm” in a schedule and track actual weather effects during the project. The reason to do this is that troubled projects often finish with a bucket full of puzzling “delays” or “impacts.” The challenge of sorting out such complex delay claims is often exacerbated by inadequate reasoning for time extension requests coupled with inaccurate calculations of the delays or impacts. Allegations of the role Mother Nature played in the project finishing late are frequently part of this puzzle. ... Read more.