“Like many institutions, MIT has built in a cyclical manner,” says Poodry. “The first campus was built in 1916, and there wasn’t a lot of building until the 1960s. Suddenly you get this giant spike. In the 1990s, 500,000 square feet was built during that ten-year period. In 2000, the intention was to put in two million square feet in about a five- to six-year period. That was our charge: there was a lot of building to do in a short period of time.”

MIT’s building program includes a number of important facilities for campus residential life, while the design of academic facilities supports state-of-the-art research, all the while addressing infrastructure, obsolescence, improved environmental performance, and the special requirements of multidisciplinary buildings.

Capital Projects Group

To undertake this cyclical ‘bubble’ of capital projects, the Facilities Department created a special group—the Capital Projects Group—as a unified task force to undertake the program. For many years, MIT’s original organization had a separate planning office and physical plant department. The physical plant was responsible for design and construction. The planning office was charged with programming and planning. The unified Capital Projects Group—with its strong central management systems and improved staffing of project teams—resulted in cradle-to-grave responsibility, from the first thoughts of the project to occupancy. This cohesiveness provided a good foundation for future projects with long-term benefits.

“The volume increased five-fold,” says Poodry. “When you jump to a large program quickly, you need to invest in systems to manage that. And you want to take advantage of whatever you do to provide some long-term benefits.”

The first benefit was a high standard of decision-maker information and engagement, including a structured set of approval gates with the upper level decision makers, all through a documented sequence of decision support reporting. This level of detailed and proactive information supports decision-makers’ more active and effective involvement.

Another benefit is the new practices such as commissioning, milestone check estimates, formal design review, and integrated technical management put in place to shepherd through the projects.

Other long-term benefits include in-depth upfront project planning and procedures, the space management system, and improved project tools for budgeting, communications, scheduling, permitting, and contracting in the early stages.

Challenges

The Capital Projects Group faces a unique set of challenges as the nearly 15 large and technical projects worth more than $1 billion begin to take shape.

MIT, located along the Charles River, is densely surrounded by the city of Cambridge. The projects being planned totaled nearly two million sf, a roughly 20 percent increase to the campus base.

“The Brain and Cognitive Sciences Complex illustrates the challenge of working in a tight urban setting,” says Poodry. “It is 400,000 sf of neuroscience space built over an active rail line.”

Another challenge is MIT’s decision to work with leading international architects on most of the projects. Fumihiko Maki, Steven Holl, Charles Correa and Frank Gehry are just a few of the renowned architects working on MIT projects.

“MIT’s decision to work with these international architects is seen as a periodic investment in architecture as art and as a discipline,” says Poodry. “It is seen as a way of expressing what is happening in architecture the same way our researchers work on a daily basis to create what is happening in science.”

Most of the projects field international teams. The architect was sometimes in one country, the supporting architect in another, the engineer in a third, and, of course, MIT is in Cambridge. Using such innovative architects also challenged the traditional views of project culture and institutional culture.

Tools for Capital Planning

In addition to individual project scheduling, comprehensive program scheduling supports permitting schedules that coordinate with multiple regulatory bodies and projects. It also allows the group to deal with a lot of issues such as construction mitigation, the communications program, and shut downs which are critical to the program’s success, but are not under the purview of the builder or the designer.

Additional tools, which provide key support to program implementation, are:

• program-wide, standardized contracts for design, construction, art, and planning;
• budgeting tools, including a project budget template and program reporting, to support consistent project budgeting;
• active benchmarking and consideration of operating budget impacts; and
• linking enterprise accounting to program-wide budgeting and reporting.

“MIT was going through the process of instituting SAP as enterprise accounting software. SAP tells you what has already happened, but it is not very useful to your project managers or to your program in thinking about what is going to happen in the future and in managing that effort,” says Poodry. “So we developed a new set of connections that allows us to link SAP to our program-wide budgeting and to consistent project budgeting.”

Quality management systems integrate all the pieces so the design and construction decisions can happen in an environment that is ready for them and can support them. Some of the elements include organizational commitment, employing a top-notch staff, integrated technical coordination and design review, and program permitting.

An active communications program including a Web site, internal, external (press program), and technical communications helps to keep the active academic community informed.

An in-house space management/information tool allows for analysis and thematic mapping of the campus, resulting in improved support to space management systems. In addition, a spatial platform for integration with other campus data sources and analytical programs allows thematic mapping for the campus, to find the individual spaces, subsets, and types of space. The space management tool provides an effective base for improved campus planning, facility management, and investment, reduced cost with increased accuracy of space data, and collection, management, and analysis of space characteristics data.

Upfront Project Analysis

A good deal of time and effort was spent adopting a front-end planning process, says Poodry. “It takes time, it is complicated, but the outcome of that is that you get sound projects under way rather than getting halfway down the road and suddenly discovering that a project is way over budget or it doesn’t work or it is not what you need. That advance knowledge was an outcome of this program.”

MIT follows a structured process for rigorous upfront analysis including:

• Extending the project process back into the strategic phase in terms of the mission delivery to create a capital plan in the very early strategic stages.

• Project planning, concept design, designer selection, programming, and site selection, followed by setting budgets formally at the end of schematic design, when the project characteristics were better defined. The comprehensive physical, financial, operational, and programmatic reviews and planning included project definition, programming, development of options, draft plans, and an action plan.

Finally, there is a close link to policy and decision-makers at every step, with a structured set of approval gates with the upper level decision makers, and a series of funding milestones.

Positive Outcomes

One outcome was a program of multiple award-winning projects completed in six years. The second includes improved management tools and practices that have been folded into the ongoing work of the facilities department as basic institutional practice. And finally, system parameters are established to allow future planning for campus-wide facilities and systems.

When planning projects, it is critical to understand the community’s values. What is convincing and credible with the community? It may be a bottom line issue. It may be a mission accomplishment issue.

“When undertaking something different, understanding the temperament of the community, and what it will and will not support is very important,” says Poodry.

As the building cycle winds down, the official task force group is no longer in existence. The facilities department continues to oversee projects within MIT, using many of the systems approaches developed by the Capital Projects Group.

Poodry states three lessons drawn from the recent building program: “Plan ahead for large projects, be proactive in recognizing the scale of the project, and staff up to anticipate the need.”

By Lisa Brown