Managing a Higher Education Institution’s Most Important Asset: its Campus byMichael Guidera, LEED AP, Project Manager, KBE Building Corporation

Farmington, CT – Even the best-maintained buildings and facilities need an upgrade or repair every now and then. Like all problems, the sooner maintenance issues are addressed, the less likely they’ll snowball into larger, more costly problems. This is particularly true for colleges and universities with campuses constantly filled to capacity with thousands of students. Repair projects become all the more challenging when factoring in the need to protect students, faculty and staff during construction – while keeping vital buildings fully operational throughout the duration of the repair work.
KBE Building Corporation has gained expertise in helping colleges and universities and to develop and implement a maintenance/repair construction program that minimizes disruptions to academic and campus life. KBE works with the institutions’ facilities staff and administration to plan and manage a master schedule and budget that addresses the institutions’ long-range planning, capital requirements and immediate repair needs.
One example of this approach is Connecticut College ‘s Asset Reinvestment Program. This ten-year campus renewal plan spells out a $53 million program for renovating and preserving the College’s most important asset – its physical facilities and campus. The program is designed to enhance technology in learning environments, revitalize student life, boost energy efficiency, and update staff and faculty office space .
Each year since 2005, Connecticut College, KBE Building Corporation, the design team and trade contractors have spent the nine-month school year meticulously planning an impressive scope of work that is then implemented over the following 12-week summer break.
What’s exceptional about this program is the depth and breadth of the collaborative approach established by the C ollege and embraced by every member of the project team.
From the very start, the team has incorporated a unique hybrid planning strategy that blends Critical Chain Project Management, a project management methodology adapted from the Microsoft Project software, and Partnering, a collaborative and collegial approach to managing projects through team-building, cooperation, and encouragement.
For example, the 2007 construction program tackled more than 100 projects over the course of the summer – $9 million in construction value. As with each program year, work began with a formal Partnering Kick-off Meeting that engaged the college’s facilities staff, the KBE field team, the design team, and representatives from all the major contractors and vendors.
A non-binding Partnering Charter was drafted, debated, and ultimately signed by all participants, defining how the team would work together and how conflicts would be addressed and quickly resolved. A Conflict Resolution Matrix is presented and agreed on, which provides a framework and strict time-frame for problem resolution at the field level (superintendent to foreman. If no resolution is achieved within 24 hours, the problem rises up the chain of command – again, within very strict time frames to keep the schedule moving forward – until resolution has been achieved.
The success of Partnering is more than evident in the fact that, over the course of six years and more than $35 million in construction work to date , not one single claim has been filed.
Simply put, Asset Reinvestment takes a planning and construction approach that streamlines multiple projects to form a single, linear building program developed to enhance the college campus. What we have seen through this program is that a well-conceived facilities improvement plan and construction process can build the case for obtaining the needed funding and backing.
The program can be structured to accommodate as few as 10 to as many as several hundred projects and implemented over the course of one or multiple years.
Depending on the specific needs of the university or college,, an independent consultant can be engaged to review and assess the overall campus condition. The result would be a list of recommended projects that would be prioritized by:
– Severity of need,
– The “visibility” of the work and its impact on student recruitment and retention,
– Impact on long-term operating costs, and
– Impact on the institution’s ability to safely and efficiently continue to use the facilities, as well as on projects that could be deferred without incurring additional repair costs.
Institutions, of course, always have the option of pursuing campus upgrade projects with a different team each year, but this single-year/single-team approaches has limitations.
A multi-year project, on the other hand, can achieve the following benefits:
– The benefits of the process become an integral element of the team structure, and typically foster a highly cooperative work environment and a commitment to quickly and efficiently resolving conflicts and challenges that arise. Typically, newcomers to the partnering process don’t realize the full value of partnering until they have completed a Partnered project, because trust is a major aspect of partnering, and developing an environment of trust is developed only over time .
– Trade contractor performance and loyalty to the success of the project are significantly enhanced by the win-win focus of the Partnering philosophy and the prospect of future work in the subsequent years.
– The project team evolves from a “learning team” into a high-performance team.
KBE has helped the University of Bridgeport (CT) and Hood College (Frederick MD) implement similar campus improvement programs over the last several years.