Strategic Plans

Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital will begin construction in summer of 2016 on a 100,000-sf project in New Brunswick. Two new facilities totaling 50,000 sf will be constructed and 50,000 sf in the existing hospital will undergo renovation. The expansion will allow more space for emergency and intensive care as well as accommodating preoperative services. Completion is expected by summer of 2018. The project is part of a master facilities plan to strategically increase capacity on the academic medical center campus.

In order to increase capacity, improve student/faculty ratios, and boost space utilization by 150 percent, Purdue University’s College of Engineering developed a five-year strategic plan for increasing efficiency and space on the College’s main campus. The plan—which was driven by the need to meet the goal of a 30 percent growth in engineering faculty and staff, along with growth of graduate and undergraduate students—combines a mix of strategies including renovation, portfolio rebalancing, and new construction.

In the largest higher education restructuring in the nation’s history, the facilities group at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, was elevated to a leadership role, taking its place alongside the offices of finance and research as part of an administrative troika whose heads now report directly to the president. The strategic alignment among these three functions was instrumental in allowing Rutgers to meet a legislative mandate that saw the university grow to 27 million sf in 1,009 buildings with a $3.7 billion operating budget and five different campuses in less than a year.

An explosion in computation and large data set analyses is challenging the nature and processes of translational research, significantly impacting how such institutions plan for space needs. The link between strategic planning, programming, and design is much more dynamic, and requires faster feedback and the development of new metrics to drive value creation through strategic planning.

"That increase in computation has a significant impact on how we strategically plan for translational research,” says Andy Snyder, AIA, principal/architect at NBBJ.

The siting of sensitive instruments in a research facility requires awareness of the electromagnetic field (EMF) environment and the various types and locations of emission sources. Some of the most difficult electromagnetic interference (EMI) challenges include DC and geomagnetic sources such as cars, trucks, subways, and trains, as well as facility elevators. The EMI footprint from the movement of an elevator through the earth’s magnetic field can exclude large areas of a facility from housing sensitive tools and instruments.

A new master space plan for the University of Texas at Austin’s College of Natural Sciences leverages program adjacencies and shared infrastructure to improve collaborative interdisciplinary research while maximizing space use. This “soft growth” renovation approach allows the college to increase capacity and improve efficiency without demolishing or adding new buildings.

A total systems approach to space management is allowing the University of Michigan Medical School to make better-informed and more objective decisions in planning for growth within 4 million gsf of existing facilities in Ann Arbor, Mich. The space management system—which continues to evolve and expand since its deployment in 2008, and recently became a University best practice—increased annual space productivity by 4.18 percent and generates an estimated yearly savings of $300,000 through improved operational efficiencies.

Efficiency measures adopted as part of its 2012-2017 strategic plan are forecast to save the University of Kansas–Lawrence Campus (KU) a combined $5.5 million in the areas of construction, facilities operations, and maintenance in a single fiscal year. Specific changes include consolidating maintenance organizations for better coordination and prioritization, refining best practices in both construction and financial management, and developing new revenue streams.

The University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB) has crafted a decision-making framework based on objective standards to identify and pursue the highest priorities in a massive building boom that has roughly 95 projects valued from $10,000 to $450 million currently under construction. While a large part of that activity stems from the university’s long-range master plan, a significant portion was necessitated by the devastation of Hurricane Ike, which took 1.2 million sf of the medical school’s Galveston campus out of service in 2008. 

NASA Glenn Research Center opened the $20.5 million Mission Integration Center in Cleveland in July of 2014. The three-story, 90,000-sf facility provides collaborative research and office space to accommodate 300 employees. The project has attained LEED Gold sustainable design certification and will use 30 percent less energy and 40 percent less water than a conventional building. Construction began on the facility in September of 2010.