Program Management

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Part 5: Elements of Program Management

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Program Director
A new classification of professional that must understand all aspects of a project, the importance and relative contribution of key competencies, possess the experience needed to identify issues before they become problems and drive full project success. This person must also be well versed in the impact of the human resource and information technology areas of a company and capable of integrating these into projects, pulling information from the client organization in sufficient detail and in adequate time for incorporation into the project. This blending of real estate, human resources and technology, frequently referred to as Corporate Infrastructure Resource (CIR) management, is a fundamental underpinning of future success for facilities projects; the ability of a facility to serve as a competitive weapon for a company in carrying out its business strategy. For example, without the broad perspective of CIR, many potential opportunities to create overall organizational savings, such as a new furniture system or a more appealing but expensive location would be discarded on first examination without the appropriate comprehensive consideration of expected savings from lower employee turnover or decreased absenteeism, consideration brought to the table by including HR in the discussion.

Strategic Brain Trust
At the Program Director's disposal sits a physically collocated collection of multi-disciplined professionals with mission-critical expertise in key upstream roles such as programming, planning, real estate strategy, negotiations and process, finance, design, pre-construction estimating, scheduling and technology infrastructure. This team needs to have adequate depth to be able to scale to multiple simultaneous projects, if needed. This serves as the core "A Team" of experts whose input and ideas are instantly available and utilized on all projects.

Their “accumulated learning” of a company's basic business strategy, corresponding facilities strategy and operational systems increases over time. Members of this team, along with the Program Director, must be employed by the same company and collocated so that they share knowledge and operate with consistent goals and objectives, undiluted by the pressures of competing organizational loyalties. Collocation of this team is critical.

Unless they work together, side by side, every day, sharing challenges, brainstorming issues and bouncing ideas off each other, this team will not be capable of capturing value and optimizing project results. Impromptu meetings take place. Questions get answered immediately, instead of waiting on the response to a voice mail. Competing time pressures are managed in a synchronized way. There is no better way to have people work together on a project. As a comparative example, the concept of "design-build" is a hot topic these days. But design-build means different things to different people. Some companies “team” to pursue a specific project with little or no prior history together, and no formal process, system or methodology for interaction. It is not surprising that these teams fall short in delivering the promised results or the true potential value of a fully integrated design-build strategy.

On the contrary, there are numerous examples of truly integrated design-build organizations that deliver a measurably better project result, driven, we submit, in no small part due to the experience that their people possess in working hand in hand every day. In much the same way, the information shared by the proposed strategic brain trust will help clients capture more value in the process of a transaction; value in time compression, value in cost control and value in better operational environments. All in all, better quality decisions.

Real Estate Process Architecture
The real estate process for individual projects is inherently variable with unique characteristics. Identifying and understanding these differences is vital to project success. The major differences relate to 1) customers, 2) facility type, and 3) geographic market. For example, every customer has a different approach to their individual business - different goals and objectives, operating procedures, financial limitations, margins and many other important issues, all specific to their business and their culture. Next, each facility that a customer may need will have vastly different characteristics. It may be office, industrial, retail, educational, high tech, low tech; it may be needed next month or next year; it could be people intensive or equipment intensive. Finally, every geographic market has varying conditions, which will affect project efficiency; supply constraints, zoning and permitting issues, cost differences, state and local regulations, and many other factors, impacting project success. Consequently, these enormous variables demand an approach, which we refer to as Real Estate Process Architecture, the proactive development of a plan/system to precisely respond to the project-specific needs of a customer. This planning approach considers appropriate strategy, timing, people, experience, service type and process synergism, and recognizes flexibility of approach as a key element of project success.

A Best-In-Class network of Local Professionals
These are to be selected based upon their capability to deliver the best specific local service on a given task and engaged on a project-by-project basis. Certain service providers will almost always be hired in the local project market such as real estate research, certain design activities, general construction, etc. It would be inefficient and economically unfeasible to attempt to bring each and every possible expert that might be needed on every project and every city into a single company, full time. Additionally, it is inconceivable that a single company could truly be the best at all needed tasks. By recognizing this and drawing a line between the centralized strategic brain trust and the decentralized local professionals, the Program Management approach obtains the best of both worlds, while creating a sustainable service company business model. Staffing flexibility is key to implementation of projects since each project is inherently different and demanding of a unique collection of skills, talent and experience.

A consistently applied Project Methodology
Project Methodology is to be powered by a robust, secure Web-based Information Management System to speed project communications, coordinate the team and control information. The project methodology must be established and followed with discipline on all projects in an organized and deliberate manner. This allows for a basic systematic approach to all requirements, eliminating the inefficiencies and costs of repetitive re-invention of the project methodology, or needless re-evaluation of frequently reoccurring issues. It will additionally make the task of incorporating the local professionals less burdensome. The web-based information management system serves as the backbone tool to conduct such an approach, enabling the team to communicate with each other and with all constituencies of the client organization, control dispersed professionals, share documents, and manage the project schedule and budget. This system needs to be “end-to-end” in functionality and support the seamless integration of all team members in order to truly support Program Management. To date, there have been no such comprehensive systems created, with each industry making piecemeal attempts at web-based support for only their own "silo" of involvement.

Proven Experience
Proven experience in assembling, managing and coordinating a multi-disciplined team. Without such demonstrated prior experience, Program Management will not achieve the potential valuable benefits. There are many organizations or corporate departments who might claim to be instituting Program Management practices already. But our experience shows that they lack many of the needed elements to truly drive great projects, and most importantly they lack the experience of working across all of the needed disciplines. We see a lot of “vendor selection management” taking place today by organizations that purport to offer comprehensive services, but don't have the experience to know when the vendors being selected are running off course or getting behind. These organizations “monitor” the project instead of “driving” results. Only when it is too late do they "report" the problems. Program Management identifies issues before they become problems, in time to redirect resources, change and avoid the consequences.

Program Management, in short, is a knowledge-based system for integrating all project members, combining:

1. A Program Director serving as single point of contact, accountability and responsibility.

2. The brain trust, expertise and real estate systems architecture to make good decisions.

3. The leveraging capability found in traditional “outsourcing”, reducing full time staff.

4. The flexibility of selecting best-in-class local professionals from multiple organizations.

5. A systematic platform for consistent project delivery.

The “single point” benefits cannot be overemphasized. Never before has there been a project approach that truly concentrates full responsibility and accountability within one entity that has the resources to best utilize information to drive projects to completion. Better project reliability, control and flexibility result from this approach.

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