National Academy of Construction

Recognizing Industry Leaders in Engineering and Construction Since 1999

All Executive Insights

All Executive Insights

Accelerating Project Delivery

Startup-Driven Design

On capital projects, the value created by efficient design and construction execution can be quickly destroyed by a delayed or inefficient startup.

Modularization Design

This Executive Insight focuses on the design of modules. Modularization and preassembly are construction techniques in which all or part of sections or facilities are prefabricated or assembled in one location and then transported to the site.

Parkinson’s Law

Parkinson’s Law states “work expands to fill available time for its completion.”

Modularization

Modularization and preassembly are construction techniques in which all or part of sections or facilities are prefabricated or assembled in one location and then transported to the site.

Owner-Procured Materials

Through an owner case study, this insight will share the benefits of owner-procured materials that support front-end planning and procurement to accelerate delivery.

Partnering and the Need for Speed

Construction projects often have a huge number of players involved in innumerable interactions and reliance on others to complete tasks properly as predecessors to many follow-on activities.

Improving Work Flow Reliability on Projects

PARC was a national oil company’s refinery revamp, a $1.2B project in 1994 dollars. Just one year away from scheduled completion, the project was well behind schedule, and the construction manager.

Construction Driven Design

Management of Engineering in Design/Build

Design/build project delivery changes the nature of the relationship between the project’s constructor (design/build contractor) and the engineer. This changed relationship has a myriad of legal, commercial, and risk implications. Importantly, it changes the very nature, sequencing, and emphasis of the design process.

Design-Build Advice

Design-build is a growing project delivery model especially in the delivery of large complex projects.

Construction Execution

Alternative Project Delivery Methods

This Executive Insight focuses on alternatives, encompassing site selection, financial analysis, and project delivery methods while briefly addressing each of the other points of potential confusion.

Knowledge Management

Knowledge management is the process of creating, sharing, using, and managing knowledge and information.

Construction Execution

The planning and management of construction execution is a key driver of project success. It begins with project initiation and arguably earlier at the proposal stage.

Factors Affecting Productivity

Previously, an Executive Insight entitled Barriers to Productivity provided a view on some of the barriers to productivity that exist, especially in large complex projects.

Construction Productivity

Productivity is a measure of the rate at which work is performed. It is the ratio of “outputs” divided by “inputs.”

Earned Schedule

Earned Schedule as described in this Executive Insight complements traditional earned value measurement.

Construction Turnover

This Executive Insight focuses on the roles, responsibilities, and general scope of construction turnover.

Out of Sequence Construction

Out of sequence work is both a source of labor inefficiency (low productivity vs. plan) as well as a telltale sign of a troubled project.

Dispute Prevention and Resolution

Unfair Contract Provisions

Unfair contract provisions and one-sided contracts are topics for which almost every construction executive has strongly-held views. In fact, the term “strongly-held views” is an understatement.

Prime Contract Management

Faced with the challenges of administering what at times may be a burdensome prime contract, experience has shown that the addition of a Prime Contract Manager (PCM) to the project team will reduce the contractor’s exposure, especially as it relates to timely notices.

Estimating Project Cost

Escalation

This Executive Insight looks at escalation, which affects both current and yet to be issued construction contracts.

Event Contingency

Event contingency is an event, such as an emergency, that may―but is not certain to―occur. This Executive Insight focuses on this important element of an engineer’s or a constructor’s price.

Project Cost Estimating – Introduction

The purpose of the Executive Insight is to increase understanding of the critical importance of cost estimating in capital project development and delivery processes.

Scope Development to Support Cost Estimating

Preparing accurate and timely cost estimates requires a clear statement of project scope. At one extreme, this scope can be described as a single parameter facility cost driver.

Early Project Cost Estimating for Decision-Making on Project Execution

Decisions must be made throughout the project development and execution process as more information becomes available. Effective decision-making requires high-quality information on which to base a decision. Perhaps one of the most critical project decisions is the approval of a project’s cost or budget.

Pricing Work for a Profit: Developing a Construction Estimate

A contractor's cost estimate serves two purposes: 1) it defines the probable cost associated with performing the required items of work; and 2) it defines the risk of performing the work according to the contract requirements, the specifications.

Minimizing Engineering Cost Overruns

This Executive Insight looks solely at cost overruns in engineering projects. In design/build and EPC projects where engineering and construction are tightly integrated, engineering performance is a leading indicator of later challenges faced as construction begins and progresses.

Indirect Field Costs

This Executive Insight focuses on indirect field costs (IFC). It does so in the context of all possible indirect costs that a project may experience.

Diseconomies of Scale

Bigger is not always better. In this Executive Insight, diseconomies of scale are examined.

Contingency

This Executive Insight focuses on contingency in capital construction projects.

General

Improving Large Project Delivery

The current theory of project management was developed at a time when projects were more readily decomposed and well bounded.

Post-Disaster Engineering & Construction

The post-disaster environment changes engineering and construction requirements as well as the framework within which the rebuilding and reconstruction efforts will be undertaken.

Large Complex Projects

Rethinking Interface Management – Bob Prieto

Today’s infrastructure and facilities are “smart.” These “smart” facilities transcend any given sector and bring new challenges to the engineering and construction industry.

Giga vs Traditional Projects

There is a tendency to think of the essential difference between mega/giga projects and more traditional sized projects as one of scale.

Pitfalls of Mega/Giga Projects

The history of large complex projects is strewn with significant cost overruns and schedule delays. Using basic cost and schedule criteria, benchmark data indicate nominally two-thirds of such projects significantly fail.

Coupling in Large Complex Projects

The relationship between complexity and modularity of “systems” mirrors that of nature, where complex systems reward modularity and its ability to limit the effects of perturbations while at the same time recognizing that excessive modularity exposes the system negatively to the effects of even stronger, more systemic perturbations. The same is true for large complex projects.

Owner Readiness

This Executive Insight looks at some of these elements and suggests that formal evaluation and scoring by owners may prove to be a useful tool to assess their progress in moving toward project execution.

Flows in Large Complex Projects

This Executive Insight focuses on the “flows” present in all projects. The emphasis here is on flows that large complex projects experience. We will briefly review the “theory of projects,” define the concept of “flows,” and provide examples.

Foundations for Success

Large complex projects require strong foundations if they are to be successful. Arguably, these are the same foundations any project would require, but experience suggests otherwise.

Large Complex Programs as Open Systems

This Executive Insight looks at large complex programs from a systems perspective, recognizing that such programs are not as well-bounded as classical project management (PM) theory (as espoused by Taylor, Gantt, and Fayol ) would have us believe.

Contingent Execution

Large complex projects require an increase focus on “flows,” those tiny arrows we see on various charts connecting the 50-100,000 activities typical for such projects.

Leadership

Sound Asset Management

Life cycle asset management is an area of growing focus and importance across all industries.

Trust

Trust is the currency of relationships and, by extension, the management of people.

Leadership Wisdoms: Learn from the Masters

The following wisdom-based leadership competencies were collected from a survey of NAC members. The foundation is to define leadership through the most widely held wisdoms and their underlying logic. Wisdom is gained through experience, understanding, insight, common sense, and intelligent reflection.

Effective Project Review Meetings

The regular review of projects by individuals outside the direct project execution team is a core aspect of effective project management. This core management process and its objectives are essential to deliver the client’s outcomes contractually committed and the anticipated company profits expected when the contract began.

Why Succession Planning Matters

While many executives and their boards give lip service to succession planning, the conversation they are actually having is about ensuring that a trusted lieutenant will step in immediately after a personal emergency has taken place (the bus has finally been hit, someone’s accepted an offer to serve the country, a spouse has a remarkable opportunity) to make sure the troops don’t go AWOL.

Organizational Leadership―It’s About People, Not Process

For the first 20 percent of my career, I believed engineering and construction was a technical career. Then a revelation took place: I realized engineering and construction is all about people. This is the “Holy Shift” when you recognize it’s not about technical skills, it’s not about you. It’s all about your people. Your people are the one sustainable competitive advantage your business has.

Leadership – Win Work, Do Work, Make Profit

The phrase “win work, do work, make profit” can be used to describe the engineering and construction business, but perhaps simplifies what can become complex. The purpose of this Executive Insight is to help guide the business process when there is a risk of losing sight of the simple fundamentals expressed in the phrase.

Leading the Decision―Making Process

Making a decision on your own is relatively straightforward. You already know the answer and will decide about the best course of action or you will research the problem, consult with subject matter experts, reflect on your options, and then decide about the best course of action to take. In either case, the decision is yours and yours alone. You live and die by the consequences.

Leadership – Challenge, Opportunity, Imperative

Leadership is one of the greatest challenges and opportunities facing engineering and construction managers. It is an industry challenge but equally a challenge for each of us and our firms. Its time is now, as we face growing challenges of complexity and scale as well as an uncertain external environment. Productivity remains lackluster; this is not the hallmark of a leader.

Owners’ Program Management Contracting “Rules Of The Road”

This Executive Insight briefly looks at owner's "rules of the road" to ensure that a program management contracting (PMC) approach on large, complex programs delivers expected results. It is primarily focused on activities which should occur prior to and immediately after program initiation while addressing fundamental management challenges during the execution phase.

Behavioral Changes in Metrics

Behavioral change is just one change dimension associated with organizational transformation. Other dimensions include new tools, new process development, and new skill training, all which happen in parallel. In addition, each has influence. These, in turn, are effected by the behavioral change dimension.

Bravo Company: Lessons Learned in Project Management

A team building session was held with about 120 members of the management team. While highly successful in achieving its primary objective, the lessons learned by one “Company” are instructional with respect to many of the attributes of good project management.

Governance Under Program Management

Governance is the structure and process to control operations and changes to performance objectives. In large programs governance is separate and distinct from management thinking and practice.

Lessons Observed

The expression goes that “we learn through our mistakes.” But do we? Equally important, do others learn through our mistakes or is “history destined to repeat itself”?

Member Viewpoint

Reflections on Trends Likely to Accelerate

With a President-elect recently declared in the U.S. to conclude the 2020 election, I thought it now appropriate to reflect on four tends that are likely to strengthen or accelerate.

People

Creating A Knowledge Sharing Culture

Knowledge management (KM) focuses on how an organization identifies, creates, captures, acquires, shares, and leverages knowledge. Systematic processes support these activities, also enabling replication of successes.

Cross-Cultural Factors

This Executive Insight looks at some cross-cultural factors that are encountered in the conduct of business and are written from a US perspective.

Listening

One of the keys to strong client relationships, starting with marketing and selling and continuing throughout the project life cycle, is having a clear understanding of the client's wants and needs.

Empathy in a Remote Working World

The current COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated a reinvention of business, creating a home-based reality. The social contract with employees is being modified as well as the economic model of business.

A Failure of Logic

This Executive Insight looks at the failure of logic, or maybe better said, logical fallacies, in the conception, management, and execution of many large complex projects.

Dirty Dozen

This Executive Insight will show the suite of human factors to be considered in large complex projects is much broader, takes on increased importance, and requires even more attention because of project size and complexity.

Procurement and Supply Chain

Managing Materials During Engineering — Civil/Structural

This Executive Insight looks at the management of materials during the various engineering phases and engineering support to construction. Responsibilities, activities, and workflow are described for the civil/structural discipline.

Materials Management

Materials management is focused on the planning and control of both the quality and quantity of materials and equipment procured and installed on a construction project.

Procurement and Supply Chain – Introduction

This insight includes observations and experiences accumulated over forty years of working in the engineering and construction capital project industry as an engineer and procurement professional.

Supplier Quality

This insight includes experiences, lessons learned, and recommendations accumulated over 45 years of working for a supplier of steel and fabrication and an engineering and construction firm on major projects as a manager of quality (inspection) and as a vice president professional.

Owner-Procured Materials

Through an owner case study, this insight will share the benefits of owner-procured materials that support front-end planning and procurement to accelerate delivery.

Procurement Management in Large Complex Programs

Procurement in a program management organization represents a focused effort to improve overall program capital efficiency by seeking to capture the opportunities of leverage embedded in the program scale.

Logistics

This Executive Insight looks only at one element of the supply chain: logistics. It does so from a procurement and construction perspective.

Project Design

Business Basis of Design

This Executive Insight focuses on achieving improved capital efficiency in large capital asset projects through the adoption of an expanded basis of design that considers all aspects of a capital asset’s life cycle. In many projects today, the basis of design (BOD) largely encompasses the engineering parameters required to meet the owner’s project requirements (OPR).

Design Review

Design review ensures the effective transformation of the owner’s project requirements (OPR).

Quality

Continuous Performance Improvement Process

This Executive Insight defines the Continuous Performance Improvement Processes (CPIPs) and is complemented by a series of Executive Insights that provide flowcharts for each of the various processes employed as part of a Plan-Do-Check-Act approach.

Continuous Performance Improvement: Detailed Work Processes – Do

This Executive Insight provides a detailed look at the Do stage of Continuous Performance Improvement Processes, complemented by a series of Executive Insights providing flow charts for each of the various processes employed as part of a Plan-Do-Check-Act system.

Ensuring Project Quality

Project quality management consists of three primary components: quality planning, quality assurance, and quality control.

Redefining Quality

This Executive Insight looks at defining quality within the design, engineering, and construction industry, moving beyond the textbook definitions.

Quality Transformation

This Executive Insight examines the process and challenges of transforming an engineering and construction organization to a quality aware and focused one.

Risk and Opportunities

Corruption

This Executive Insight focuses on raising awareness and reinforcing attention to corruption, which may be one of the most corrosive factors impacting the construction industry.

An Overview of Correlation

This Executive Insight looks at correlation in project and program risk assessments and some of the impacts of a failure to adequately consider such correlation in project risk assessments related to both cost and schedule.

Fragility

Fragility in systems, including project execution networks, is defined as the ability of the system to remain stable after perturbations at the “edges” of the project or to the internal network structure.

Changing Risk Managers’ Perceptions

This Executive Insight attempts to change some risk managers’ perceptions about large complex projects and the risks they face as well as some of the sources of those risks.

Laws of Improbability

In this Executive Insight, the lenses described by Hand are used to look at large projects and their unacceptably high failure rates.

Considering the Uncertainty for Large Projects

Recently a $15 billion project, one of the largest and most sophisticated U.S. public infrastructure projects ever undertaken, was completed in New Orleans in response to the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina in August 2005. The project was necessitated by the failure of a Hurricane Protection System (HPS) that could not withstand.

Modeling and Mitigating Project Complexity

Whether the interest is megaprojects or more generally large projects, the consensus is that projects all too often fail. The reasons put forth vary depending on the project, but in general, we can agree that they fail because outcomes do not match expectations.

Folly of Averages

The growing inflationary pressures now emerging in the U.S. (and that are likely to be exacerbated by the emergence of trade tariffs) cause me to reflect on (1) the impacts of inflation on large complex projects and, more importantly, (2) how we assess and plan for them.

Fat Tails

Large projects are complicated and often sophisticated endeavors and we seek to improve the quality of our time and cost estimates by accounting for certain quantitative uncertainties in our estimates. Clearly a step in the right direction, but as the results of large project performance would suggest, not good enough. Perhaps we are unwitting victims to some of the laws of improbability, and maybe even the Law of Selection impacts our best efforts to address the uncertainty of estimates in our own risk analysis.

Assumption, Risk Driver, and Constraint Tracking

Assumptions are an inherent part of risk assessment and contingency planning in the engineering and construction industry. In short duration projects, these assumptions are usually considered to have some reasonably well-defined mean value and a standard deviation or uncertainty.

Opportunity Analysis

Large complex projects are about meeting the challenges of scale and complexity, but also about capturing the opportunities of leverage. Every major program, as well as the projects within the program, are subject to a detailed and rigorous risk analysis.

White Space Risks

White space risks are those risks that fall in between well-defined organizational, policy, process, and scope elements (for example, discrete projects or tasks).

Safety

Safety Through Design

We have examined some of the factors that drive a changed risk environment for large engineering and construction programs and some of the new tools and risk assessment approaches that must be added to our standard risk management techniques. Concomitant with this changed awareness.

Safety by Design Suggestions

This Executive Insight builds on the NAC Executive Insight entitled “Safety through Design,” which provides a top-level view on the importance of hazard elimination at a project’s design stage and lays out a number of guiding precepts. It can be found on the NAC website.

How to Create a Zero-Injury Culture

A safety program that yields a zero-injury result is composed of three distinct parts: content, process, and a culture. This Executive Insight integrates these three elements.

NAC Safety Position Papers from 2005 – 2020

This document is a compendium of safety position papers from 2005 to 2020 addressed to American CEO’s and others. The intent of these papers was to enlist and inform the users and leaders of the American Construction Industry to embrace zero injury techniques and improvement in safety culture to improve their safety performance. Keywords: safety performance, zero injuries, safety culture

Safety Culture Series

Understanding Safety Culture

Assuring safety in construction is difficult. It starts with “Safety in Design” and an understanding by corporate leadership of the business case for safety, of risk, and of hierarchy of controls, and a deep commitment to the goal of zero incidents. These concepts are covered in more detail in other Executive Insights.

Safety Culture Series – Job Safety Analysis

This Executive Insight discusses the importance of a well-conducted Job Safety Analysis as part of a safety management system to help create and maintain a zero-injury safety culture.

Safety Culture Series – Safe Work Practices

This Executive Insight discusses the importance of well-written Safe Work Practices as part of a Safety Management System to help create and maintain a zero-injury safety culture.

Sustainability

Sustainability Utilizing a Program Management Approach

Large, complex engineering and construction programs may be found in all industry sectors. Such projects range from extractive industries such as oil, gas, and mining to infrastructure programs for transportation, water, and power.

Technical Fundamentals for Design & Construction

Design and Construction of Structural Steel Work

The technical fundamentals described in this Executive Insight provide a foundation for an increased rate and depth of learning related to the design and construction of structural steel work.

Earthwork Design and Construction

Properly modified soils are the most economical solution for many constructed facilities. To meet structural support requirements, soils at some project sites may require treatment such as the addition of water, lime, or cement.

Design and Construction of Concrete Structures

The purpose and scope of concrete work differs for various types of constructed facilities. In the case of infrastructure work, the main applications of concrete are highways, bridges, canals, dams, and tunnels. For buildings, footings, columns, beams, and decks are often constructed of concrete.

Technology and Innovation

Innovation Cycles and the Engineering and Construction Industry

This Executive Insight focuses on three broader innovation cycles (not engineering and construction industry specific), their impact, how the engineering and construction industry has capitalized on each cycle, and whether the industry was a leader or a laggard.

Fostering Open Innovation

All firms struggle with innovation, whether that innovation be incremental or revolutionary. In part, this struggle is due to the use of traditional, closed innovation systems.

Systemic Innovation

Periodically it is necessary to question whether a current paradigm will suffice into the future.

Managing Innovation

This Executive Insight reflects the author's experience as a member of engineering, construction, and industry organizations focused on innovation within the E&C industry.

Proper Reliance on Artificial Intelligence in Project Management

The interest in the deployment of artificial intelligence (AI) into the management of projects, especially large complex projects, is growing. Other NAC Executive Insights1 highlight some of the limitations, cautions, and transparency required while at the same time outline the benefits available.

Cybersecurity in Engineering and Construction

This Executive Insight looks at the cybersecurity landscape facing engineering and construction and is intended to provide a framework for discussion and action by engineering and construction leaders.

Construction 4.0

This Executive Insight looks at the emerging nature of Construction 4.0.

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