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Hill International, Inc., with 2,300 employees in 80 offices worldwide, provides program management, project management, construction management, and construction claims and consulting services. The need for powerful project management technology became particularly urgent when Marlton, N.J.-based Hill took on a monumental assignment to serve as the construction management firm on the Comcast Center — located just across the Delaware River in Center City Philadelphia.
The Comcast Center, a $400 million capital program, is a sustainable building designed with the goal of achieving a Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) rating from the U.S. Green Building Council. A 57-story skyscraper — designed by architect Robert A.M. Stern and structural engineer Thornton Tomasetti and completed in 2008 — the Comcast Center includes 1.25 million square feet of Class AA office space and 40,000 square feet of retail space. The structure is the tallest building in Philadelphia, featuring a dramatic 110-foot-high winter garden, two-story glass café, 15 atrium floors, and a four-story sky garden situated 735 feet above the public plaza.
Hill International was tasked with construction and project management services including design review, document control, cost estimating, and scheduling for the Comcast Center. In addition to maintaining and coordinating multiple contractor schedules for the complex project to ensure it stayed on track and met the completion deadline, Hill also managed all project costs, contracts, and changes. In order to effectively manage these obligations and ensure project delivery success, Hill recognized the importance of maximizing efficiency, gaining predictability, and ensuring agility throughout the project delivery lifecycle.
With its experience in more than 5,000 project assignments with a total construction value of more than $250 billion during the last 25 years, Hill knew it would need to address a number of challenges to manage the construction of the Comcast Center successfully.
Attaining efficiency, particularly in the everyday construction processes, was central to Hill’s approach. The potential for latency in the RFI or submittal workflows, or in schedule review and coordination, for instance, can cumulatively move projects badly off-track. Centrally managing and controlling these project management processes and collaborations was essential to reduce turn-around time, maintain efficiency, and keep the project on schedule.
Further, achieving a degree of predictability in project performance allowed the project management team and executives to be proactive to ensure project success and client satisfaction. Metric-driven forecasts based on actual-to-dates that captured knowledge of past performance of the project team members in given situations, as well as detailed risk analyses across several different scenarios, ensured that the project team could anticipate issues to drive the project proactively, and was ready with appropriate mitigation actions when necessary.
It was important for Hill to remain agile throughout the project delivery lifecycle in order to respond quickly to the inevitable changes inherent in any construction program so as to avoid delays, cost overruns, or claims. With clear visibility into project data, from actuals, to status information, to pending cost changes and forecasted performance, the project team remained on top of the entire program, and had the agility to respond quickly where needed with a clear picture.
Specifically, Hill also had to achieve the following:
- prevent sub-projects from being managed in silos, and ensure that important data and best practices could be captured, integrated, and replicated;
- develop and carry accurate project schedules from planning through construction to delivery;
- manage a large master schedule across multiple stakeholders to ensure effective collaboration and on-time completion;
- manage tightly limited funding and maximize the owner’s capital value;
- manage all contracts and contract changes, accounting for original budgeted, pending, and committed costs; and
- analyze risk of submitted project schedules to enable early problem recognition and mitigation.
“Since it was such a complex project, planning and construction of the Comcast Center presented unique challenges,” said Shawn Pressley, vice president of project management systems and development, Hill International, Inc. “The biggest hurdles we faced were making certain that all the different contractors were working in concert with one another and that if change caused one phase or part of the project to veer off schedule, we were able to minimize its effect on other phases and not lose time or money as a result.”
Hill International has been able to work efficiently by implementing and using an integrated technology approach to manage its projects. To address the full program and project management needs of the Comcast Center, Hill leveraged an integrated program management solution including Oracle’s Primavera P6 Enterprise Project Portfolio Management, Oracle’s Primavera Contract Management, and Oracle’s Primavera Risk Analysis.
“Oracle’s Primavera applications helped us gain efficiency and foresight in contract management, as well as follow our plan and hit all of our key scheduled milestones on this complex construction management project,” said Pressley. “It allowed us to look ahead and see what we could expect, then work out a solution to maximize efficiency and budgets.”
Hill used Oracle’s Primavera Contract Management, a web-based project management, document control, job-costing, and change management solution, to manage and track the contract items and costs for 25 major entities working on the Comcast Center project. Hill leveraged Contract Management’s collaboration environment to ensure that key construction and change processes such as RFIs, submittals, and change orders were quickly and accurately executed, and all parties held directly accountable to their commitments. The integration to Oracle’s Primavera P6 solution allowed Hill to recognize the overall schedule impact of delays in any of these processes across the stakeholder group and make adjustments accordingly. Oracle’s Primavera Contract Management also enabled Hill to make all payments on time, while watching the actual and pending costs of contracts and the project as a whole. Oracle’s Primavera Contract Management automatically collected and summarized detailed cost elements from contracts, requisitions, changes, and proposals and dynamically displayed them in one easy-to-read dashboard that could easily be accessed by key stakeholders. With a clear understanding and view of project data from the field and forecasts, including as yet unsigned change orders, Hill had a firm grip on total project costs at each day and at completion.
“With so many contractors and so many moving parts, it was important to be able to see costs and documents in one place,” Pressley said. “And having one dashboard that executives could easily access and understand gave the owners confidence that the project was moving along as planned.”
Hill also deployed Oracle’s Primavera P6 Enterprise Project Portfolio Management and Oracle’s Primavera Risk Analysis to set and manage schedules for approximately 20 contracts, as well as to provide visibility into any potential schedule slippage. Oracle’s Primavera P6 Enterprise Project Portfolio Management is an integrated project portfolio management (PPM) solution comprising role-specific functionality to satisfy each team member’s needs, responsibilities, and skills. It provided Hill International with a solution for collaborating, consolidating, and managing all construction schedules of the Comcast Center so that Hill could effectively plan, schedule, and control this large-scale project. Easy-to-use web-based access allowed stakeholders to update project status directly and allowed management to tab between the cost- and schedule-based views easily, as well as drill down and filter by task or resource.
Hill also benefited from the solution’s ability to adapt to the various levels of complexities within a project such as the Comcast Center. It relied on Oracle’s Primavera P6 Enterprise Project Portfolio Management to help balance resource capacity, allocate resources, and monitor and visualize project performance compared with its plan. Oracle’s Primavera P6 solution was fully integrated with Contract Management, which helped Hill anticipate changes, manage changes once they occurred with a pre-determined plan, and stay one step ahead of challenges that arose during the planning and construction of the Comcast Center.
In addition, Hill used Oracle’s Primavera Risk Analysis to identify common scheduling pitfalls — flagging the schedule for quick and easy resolution. This full lifecycle risk analytics solution integrated cost, and schedule risk management helped Hill determine the need for contingency plans, gauge cost and schedule certainty levels, and analyze the cost effectiveness of its risk response plans.
“On the Comcast Center, we had very tight deadlines,” said Pressley. “By using this set of tools we could pretty much say, ‘We don’t think the fifth floor will be finished at this time, we think it will be two weeks late,’ and from there determine how we should adjust the schedule. Not only could we see errors in our schedules, we could see into the future how the schedules might change. It was like having a crystal ball.”
Hill International was able to bring to bear its full project management expertise, supported by a technology strategy of integrated program management, and deliver this high profile project in two and a half years — on time — and on budget, while meeting the stringent requirements of building sustainably in the heart of one of the oldest cities in the United States.
Richard Sappé is global engineering and construction industry strategist for Oracle’s Primavera Project Portfolio Management. He can be reached at 610-766-3664 or richard.sappe@oracle.com.
