"Because of the business climate the project was not driven by schedule but rather by spending limits imposed by the business," says Harold (Jay) Steimer, senior project manager at DuPont Crop Protection Products. "We sped up and slowed down, not the best way to manage a project. But this project was far more successful than others in the past because we gave ownership to our end users by organizing our work around their participation."

Construction of the new laboratory stemmed from a decision to consolidate all research and development operations for the Crop Protection business unit in one location at DuPont's Stine-Haskell Research Center campus in Newark, Del., The new facility came to be designated Building S315, or OPD1 (Optimization of Process Development #1).

Two primary goals were to ensure safety for the diverse types of work performed in the lab and to improve the ability to manage resources through significant efficiencies in asset utilization. Communication among scientists was also a priority.

"We knew from experience that the best work is performed by researchers in an environment where they can easily interact with each other, so another of our goals was to enhance interaction by creating a strong sense of community through the lab design," says Steimer. "Of course, we also wanted to ensure that the lab incorporated state-of-the-art information technology that supported the researchers' needs."

The Essence of Ownership

DuPont organized project management for the new facility into four groups:

• The steering committee, composed of business leadership and the project sponsorship;
  
• The core project management team, composed of the project leaders, including subteam leaders;
  
• The lab subteam, composed of the end users;
  
• The design subteam, led by the contractor and the architectural engineering firm.

"The steering committee provided direction to the overall project and core team, while the core project management team led the process," says Steimer. "The lab subteam set project criteria and winnowed down through design options and gave results to the design team. The options presented by the design team came from the evaluations of end users, so the work of each team fed upon that of the other in an interactive process."

The core project management team consisted of individuals who each had strong user community connections. For example, Steimer's client, Don Morgan, was the Research Manager who filled dual roles on both the core team and lab subteam. Coming from the lab community, he was able to gather and present valuable feedback from researchers on the functionality of different design aspects.

The lab subteam identified needs and criteria for the design subteam to translate into building specifics, with the goal of achieving consensus on the resulting proposals. Sometimes agreement came quickly as design proposals were approved on the spot; other times there would be two, three, or even four iterations before consensus emerged.

"We didn't want consensus-building to slow things down," says Steimer. "We already had an elongated process. We pushed aggressively on the core team to keep the participation of all parties from creating a slowdown. I credit the high-energy people who had ownership in the process with creating an effective and responsible sounding board in the lab subteam by being patient but remaining focused."

What Kind of Building Do You Want?

In general, the participatory process worked well because of frequent, productive communications among all three layers of the project team as well as the members within each group.

"The people in the subteams made thousands of specific design decisions," notes Morgan. "Sometimes our focus was down in the weeds asking questions like, 'Where are we going to put the outlets?' or 'What kind of door knobs are we going to use?'"

The end users were even involved in blocking and stacking. Ultimately, the overall design of OPD1 came down to a two-story 'hockey stick' floor plan, rather than the originally proposed three-story 'T,' because lab occupants said that they would rather travel horizontally than vertically.

According to both Steimer and Morgan, despite the many individual decision points the question that remained foremost was, "What kind of building do you want?"

Users responded that the building should be the absolute best functionally for research and development of agricultural crop protection products. While budget constraints injected the need for economy into the process, researcher input actually produced cost-consciousness decision-making.

"Challenging industry standards saved money because in the process of deciding what they wanted, the end users challenged everything," says Steimer. "The bottom line was: do we truly need that? Fixtures that would otherwise have been specified throughout the lab were therefore scrutinized and rejected where they weren't needed, or replaced with something else where they were inadequate for users' needs."

Full-Fledged Partnering

The participation characterizing the project management process extended to the contractor, Bancroft Construction Co., as demonstrated by the leadership role the Delaware-based company played in the design subteam.

"The Bancroft people were full-fledged partners in the project planning process," says Steimer. "Their contract with DuPont gave them the responsibility to hire the architectural and engineering firm, Kling Lindquist of Philadelphia. However, the decision was a joint one, indicating the good regard that everybody had for each other."

Among Bancroft's contributions to make the project run more smoothly was the creation of an electronic bulletin board, a measure responsible for greatly reducing conflicts in the field.

"We posted the architectural backgrounds, and then we had all the shop drawings associated with the project dropped in on top of that," Steimer explains. "Then we coordinated work against that unbelievably detailed document, probably eliminating about 95 percent of the potential paper conflicts, keeping them out of the fieldwork.

"Bancroft is a full-service contractor and a partner in engineering, procurement and construction," he continues. "The type of partnering used on the project is directly parallel with the FUSION methodology as presented at a recent Tradeline conference. This cooperation brings all players on board, keeping them committed to the project and on the same page."

The Technical Process Made Human

The OPD1 team did not use any project management software in the early stages of the effort, including the phases of Statement of Criteria and the Basis of Design. Instead, face-to-face communications and meetings were the modus operandi, occurring at inconsistent frequencies over a period of two and one-half years. Although Documentum is the standard project management software within DuPont, it was not used until the turnover from the design phase.

"Our approach was to maximize end user input in the design phases with the face-to-face meetings," says Steimer. "Once we did that, it then became a technical process of implementing the design."

Value-Engineering Workshop

Recognizing that the project was over budget during schematic design, the core management team put together a value-engineering workshop. Collaboration during the four days continued to embody the concept of ownership by participation in the process.

"We brought into the workshop the members of the core team, the lab subteam, Kling Lindquist, Bancroft, and sponsorship representation," says Steimer. "They broke the building design down component by component and carefully analyzed it. It was a validation process for what was going into the building, down to the door knobs."

Characterizing the workshop as a combination of value engineering and risk analysis, Steimer observes that it shaved $3.8 million in expenditures from the delivery cost of the new lab.

Meeting Goals

The building that resulted from DuPont's participatory planning process incorporates specific features that address all the objectives originally spelled out. For instance, the goal of ensuring safety was accomplished by creating multiple means of laboratory egress, eliminating dead-end aisles, providing eyewash and safety showers, isolating material flow to a service corridor, and several other techniques such as ventilated cabinets for the containment of materials.

Management's ability to utilize resources has been improved through a laboratory design that houses three major types of laboratories, is modular and adaptable to new configurations, and contains 90 individual laboratories.

Increased interaction occurs in "neighborhoods" that cluster researchers, associates, and office support people in open zones of work spaces around related laboratories.

State-of-the-art information technology is delivered via an internal network based on a backbone combination of fiber-optic and gigaspeed-certified copper wiring to every data/telecom port in OPD1. Videoconferencing can be done from any of the telecom ports.

"If I had to do it over, probably the one thing that I would do differently is push the technology envelope harder relative to e-based project management systems," says Steimer. "I would also explore using financial incentives for the project team. For example, why not attach rewards to the end result?

"However, I have to admit I'm just speculating," he continues. "I'm not sure that project technology improvements and incentives would be all that useful since our results were great without them."

Three-quarters of the way through the project, DuPont underwent a restructuring, and ultimately a different set of end users moved in to Building S315. According to Steimer, the original group of end users actually had the ownership in the process of creating OPD1, but they had done their job in a manner that played out well with their successors.

By Lawrence A. Howard