Management Guide for the Broadcaster (Part One)

It seems that it is no longer enough for you to face year after year reductions in personnel and reduction of budgets, in addition to the overtime that you must dedicate to integrate into your facilities a technology in permanent renovation, struggling at the same time to prolong the operation of your old equipment for another year.

As if that were not enough, the lease is about to expire and it is time to look for a new situation of all the operational assembly in a new site and with a new contract.

Since you have handled most of the company's major acquisitions and capital projects, you are tasked with moving the facilities. This, of course, in his spare time...

You may be serving as general manager, programming director, operations manager, or chief engineer. Today, the internal project manager for a company-level construction task can be any of these positions.

In any case, you are called upon to take responsibility for a major transformation of your organization, during a period of tremendous change. Chances are, you've never been trained for such functions.

Probably, after the latest staff cuts, there is very little institutional memory, if any, in your organization that you can take advantage of based on previous experiences. The good news is that there are several proven decision-making methodologies and processes, which you can use to ensure the most profitable results of the budding project.

In this document we will address several areas: from how to elaborate the project and get the property, to how to manage the budget and schedules; In addition, we will offer you some ideas about the design process.

Take a large-scale capital project, such as starting a new ephemeral business. Ephemeral, because this operation aims to last just long enough to make a single product. Business, since it is a high-risk internal project of the company. New, because your mission is substantially different from your company's core business. And in its beginning it is like starting from scratch.

For you, the mission of this business will be to plan, design and build your new facilities. His role is to be the president and CEO of this company. You will need to form a work team and, in addition, devise a business plan.

The formation of the project staff will include a Board of Directors, composed of representatives from different departments of your organization. Usually, the Chairman of the Board will be the corporate manager. The Board's role will be to dictate policies and provide guidelines to guide the day-to-day activities of line staff, i.e. what we call the Project Team.

The rest of the group will typically be composed of contractors and consultants hired for the duration of the project. These consultants are brought to the Board in order to leverage their respective talents with those of the people who make up their organization. The best product will often result if these consultants have an ongoing "partnership" relationship with your company. In this way, sometimes it is possible to obtain from external sources the way to maintain an institutional memory.

A team of people with experience in projects such as the one you manage can contribute to yours with considerable added value. It can provide long-term observations about the existing change scheme in the industry, as well as the advantage of its own continuous research, translated into design solutions that express such changes.

If you do not have a complete team that meets these qualifications in your area, then it is vital that you at least find an architect and a television system designer who can contribute such expertise to your project.

Key members of your structural and mechanical/electrical engineering team include the architect and consulting engineers, your real estate agent, your real estate attorney, your broadcast systems designer, and your construction manager or general contractor.

Each of these representatives will decide on the corresponding interests in the project. For you, one of the most challenging tasks will be to guide and assist the architect in his role of balancing these sometimes divergent interests and focusing them towards a single, coherent vision for the future.

Remember that, throughout this process, you will most likely continue to have your traditional responsibilities within the company. Your success will depend on your ability to coordinate your own needs, and then manage the efforts of others to achieve the desired results.

A key role he will play is to link the Project Team and its internal "Board of Directors" within the company. It is essential for the latter to involve and obtain their support as well as their sense of belonging to the product as it evolves through regular reviews of the project.

The Construction Company's "business plan" will be what you will call its "Program." The essence of this is to translate your organization's business plan into a statement of the physical implications of how your organization conducts its business.

Some technical aspects of this document will be generated by your consultants. Reviewing their business plan, they will establish, among other considerations, performance guidelines regarding the area and volume of spaces, mechanical and electrical systems, project budgets, schedules and criteria regarding leases.

Most of our past clients have not had an up-to-date business plan at the time of starting their projects. Therefore, your professional designer must have the ability to guide you through the process of establishing the policies that set the guidelines for the success of the project.

A key component of our methodology in project compliance is that if the concepts that set the project success guidelines are carefully defined, the consequent specific details will come soon.

If from the beginning a broad consensus is not built regarding these success patterns, or if the participation of the full set of interests of the participants is not achieved, all this can accumulate against your project.

There's an old adage from a carpenter that says, "Measure twice and cut only once." It is at the time of conceiving your program that you are measuring your organization. This work establishes the "genetic code" that will provide the information about the multiplicity of decisions that your project requires.

This effort requires more than listing a number of physical measures. Just as a business plan should coordinate the values and principles that underpin sales goals and product definitions, so a program should be not only qualitative but quantitative.

What work environment are you committed to creating for your staff? What is the image you want to project to visitors to your company? Is your organization hierarchical or horizontal? Will each person have their own office? Will no one have an office of their own? What have you learned from your current facilities, which you want to repeat (or not repeat) in the new company?

How do you envision your organization 10 years from now? (Well, at least three years from now) How will your organization take advantage of this opportunity to transform and integrate modifications in this time of change?

When you begin to understand the complexity of the process you are undertaking, you will begin to appreciate the need to establish clear lines of responsibility and communication. The construction industry has many standard means of communication—programs, meeting minutes, requests for proposals, change orders, and many more. There is no need to re-invent the wheel.

There are all sorts of reasons to prevent the creation of a new Tower of Babel. What is required is to delegate responsibilities to handle this flow of information. Likewise, it is important to record which team member is in charge of each of the multiple responsibilities that must be coordinated to bring the project to a successful conclusion.

Other tools that are gaining importance are email and a standardized menu used by the entire team in general. After all, all the products of our company are in the form of electronic files.

The ability to attach them to an email message and instantly distribute them to all project team members for development and feedback greatly accelerates our work.

A typical construction project consists of seven stages: pre-design; schematic plane; design development; construction documents; offers and negotiations; construction

In the pre-design stage, you constitute your work team, write your program, establish a preliminary budget and schedule and start the search for the property.

In the schematic plan, the team explores schematic design options regarding possible spaces, assists in the negotiation of leases and, finally, approves a schematic plan corresponding to a chosen space.

In design development, the approved schematic design is deployed, exploring the various systems, and finalized with greater detail, perfecting the design and more accurately defining the initial idea of a realistic budget and schedule.

Once the design is perfected, we proceed to the construction documents stage: the work team converts the approved design into an industry standard format, including drawings and specifications. These documents will be used for bids and acquisitions of the project in the market, and will serve as a guide to the contractor during the construction stage.

During the bidding and negotiation stage, the construction documents will go on the market, and as a result a market price will be obtained. Your team will help you complete the final number of Project Team members including the subcontractors who will perform the construction in practice.

The construction stage is largely self-explanatory. Sometimes some time is saved before embarking on this stage thanks to advance purchases of items that require a long period between order and delivery, such as HVAC equipment, lighting elements and imported materials.

One stage that often does not receive adequate attention is that of start-up. In this phase, the various systems are initiated and adjusted, and the members of your organization receive guidance about the new spaces and their respective systems.

The established operating plans and manuals are filed, and the maintenance contracts corresponding to the systems that need them are initiated. This period also represents an opportunity for the final report that is delivered to the work team of the Construction Company and to proceed to dissolve it. In this process of information there is much that can be learned to add to the institutional memory of your company.

Its program is an invaluable tool in the search for the new property. It is surprising to see how many clients come to us with signed contracts, but without having developed a program according to which the convenience of the properties chosen to take for rent is judged.

The program is the means that serves to sift only those possibilities that truly suit your organization. The very process of asking all the questions that make up the program will prepare you to have a better intuition about the corresponding value judgments.

Another common mistake is to select the space strictly based on the cost of the lease fee and the physical area. Properties of the same size are not the same.

It is essential that the professionals of the project team evaluate each of the buildings to see if they offer the required services, such as the appropriate supply of electrical energy and the respective acoustic separations and if, in addition, they comply in the most effective way with the distribution plans of areas and personnel and the contiguity. necessary between departments obeying a certain configuration.

The hidden costs involved in running these services according to your needs can make a big difference in the viability of seemingly similar land. It is also essential that your architects make a preliminary floor plan of any space that may constitute a viable second option.

(In the second part, expect advice on contracts, budget management, schedule management, and balancing time, costs, and quality.)