Your Supply Chain is “the”​ Critical Strategic Asset in Construction
By: Francisco X Pineda
Tags: Construction, Engineering, Partnerships, Supply Chain, NYU

“How best to organize the efforts of individuals to achieve desired objectives has been one of the world’s most important, difficult, and controversial problems” (Likert 1961).

For several years, researchers at the NYU Tandon School of Engineering have explored questions related to construction project team alignment and its impact on project success. The research findings revealed several process and team engagement conditions that were correlated with success and de-risking project delivery.

Project management is at once one of the most important and most poorly understood areas of management. The construction profession, and sector at large, need to understand how organizations work in order to better understand their client organizations as well as their own. A fault with much of the way that project management is taught and framed is that it views project management as a collection of planning and control techniques. Both are important frameworks, but so is approaching project delivery through a lens of partnering in supply-chain networks.

As a strategic process, projects are an organizational form that mobilize inter-firm competencies and resources with the goal of creating something unique. The organizational issue, which deals with how people are organized and managed in the project management process, is one of the most important elements in project management. Teams are critical to successful project delivery.

EVENT RECAP

On December 1, 2020, Dr. Michael Horodniceanu and William Raisch, co-directors of ProjectNEXT, brought together a group of leading project management scholars and turnaround practitioners to discuss the key characteristics of construction supply chains and the capabilities of high-performing project teams.

A great deal of the discussion built on the work of Dr. Bud Griffis, Dr. Andrew Bates, and Dr. Frank DarConte’s Rapid Alignment Initiated Delivery™ (“RAID”) model. The RAID model (representing an optimal project delivery environment) provides a method of benchmarking the alignment level and potential effectiveness within a team by working through several constructs — Stakeholder Alignment Proposition Elements or SAPEs found to be critical to project delivery performance outcomes.

The construction sector is unique, and traditional project management practices or management principles are not easily adapted to the challenges posed by the distributed networks that make up the construction supply chains. Eighty percent of the firms involved in construction are small businesses, a significantly much larger share than across other sectors. Mr. Francisco Pineda, from Columbia University, talked about how the business models between different tiers of the construction supply chain are often at odds and create conflicting incentives. In addition, the economic weight of the supply chain itself can be a source of significant pressure and added complexity. Project management and delivery must account for this peculiar structure and consider strategies, such as partnering, closer coordination, and integration that are tailor-made for a given project to be successful.

FPineda

Mr. Brendan Leary, former Navy SEAL commander and Partner at The McChrystal Group, shared lessons learned that were developed from the tactical and operational reorganization of Special Operations Command in the Middle East. He highlighted the important insights developed by General Stan McChrystal in fighting a distributed enemy from the inside of a rigid hierarchy. The concepts of trust, common purpose, shared consciousness, and empowered execution came together as systems level capabilities for building high performing teams to address complex challenges — a method and approach very well suited in the project delivery phase.

Ms. Sadai Junjua, PSP, Chief of Project Controls and VDC at the Port Authority shared some of the highlights of that Agency’s digital transformation and some of the multifaceted issues that it had to overcome, especially in regards to the integration of technology, departments, and their varied project portfolio. “Digitalizing Delivery” did not just speak to difficulties in managing unstructured and non-compliant data elements but in creating governance frameworks around the digital strategies. Specifically, the strategies address workflows that are not optimal and organizational structures and procedures that are not ideal. From a VDC standpoint, coordination and partnering in the digital transition to improve issues of claims, delays, change orders, bidding errors, and constructability, are critically important.

Lastly, Dr. Frank DarConte and Dr. Joe Hogan provided an interesting case study of applying the RAID model at the USTA — Billie Jean King National Tennis Center in Flushing Meadow, NY and State University Construction Fund (SUCF) at its SUNY Albany — ETEC academic facility. Both projects highlighted some of the optimal project delivery conditions required to deliver successful projects — specifically, how these capabilities and conditions help project organizations and teams mitigate the impact of risks, avoid disputes escalation, create a path to achievability, and enable innovation during project delivery. Simply stated — consistently delivering projects with best value outcomes through teamwork and partnering.

In addition to covering some of the important forces that shape the way teaming, partnering, and behavior affects a construction project or a large public agency developing and delivering large capital projects, the ongoing conversation hope to support additional thought and knowledge sharing across the following key topics in the construction space.

o What drives high-performing program/projects?

o What collaboration models and capabilities enhance project innovation?

o Which project conditions and team capabilities are essential to project success?

o What are the main organizational and market-level barriers to ensure alignment and enable the creation of conditions that support achieving project expectations?

What is RAID

Modeling Rapid Alignment Initiated Delivery® Supported by an array of social and behavioral constructs and theories, Rapid Alignment Initiated Delivery® (RAID) is introduced as a change management tool to improve process and the effectiveness of the project delivery team. RAID offers a systems thinking approach to the formation of a high performance project delivery team, where the Stakeholder Alignment Proposition Elements (SAPEs) are interdependent of one another and intrinsically linked to a defining feature of the delivery process, a Mission Critical Cannot Fail (MCCF) construction program. By applying a systems methodology to the building of a conceptual model of RAID, the multiple linkages of the SAPEs are represented as generically being in balance. RAID simply speaks to the pathways required to improve the effectiveness of the project delivery team through the recognition and alignment of each of the SAPEs under the pre-condition of a MCCF criteria.