Two years before the Sept. 11 attacks, the U.S. Department of Defense and the Pentagon Renovation Office had issued a design-build RFP to select a lead contractor to manage a 14-year, fixed-price renovation. It would be the first major renovation to the building since it was constructed in 1943. The attacks accelerated the project.
The plan called for stripping each of the Pentagon’s five wedges to its base structure to remove asbestos and add new mechanical, electrical, plumbing and sprinkler systems, vertical transportation, IT infrastructure, security systems and blast-resistant windows, according to a 20-year anniversary look-back by the American Society of Civil Engineers.
While many federal RFPs run thousands of pages, with drawings and design specifications, this proposal was just six pages. The goal was to give companies bidding on the project an opportunity for innovation, the Design-Build Institute of America says in a description of the effort.
The renovation covered more than four million square feet and included the full decommissioning, demolition and replacement of the mechanical and plumbing systems within Wedges 2 through 5, according to Southland Industries, a mechanical design-build subcontractor that signed onto the project on Sept. 14, 2001, just days after the facility was hit by American Airlines Flight 77. Hensel Phelps Construction served as the design-build team leader and general contractor.
The 14-year project timeline was reduced to 10 years after the attacks, according to Tim Michael, regional president of Southland, who was on-site before and after the attack and for the duration of the project.
To start, Southland focused on repairing the damage to wedges 1 and 2, bringing them down to their poured-in-concrete structure as part of the reconstruction effort, known as The Phoenix Project.
“Within a week we mobilized our forces, created a co-located office location,” Michael told Facilities Dive.“It was on the helipad [and then moved to a 20-wide trailer] complex shortly thereafter. We rebuilt the Pentagon from that collaborative workspace [and] there was no waste. Every decision maker that had a decision to be made was in that workspace … and driving towards a solution, which was [reoccupying] the outer ring of the Pentagon one year after the 9/11/2001 event.”
The team worked on a phased approach to complete renovations across the remaining building, portion by portion, he said.
Creative scheduling and workforce planning
The project involved a number of unique challenges. In addition to low floor-to-floor height, which made it difficult to fit systems that rely on air delivery through ducts, Pentagon officials needed the building to remain occupied, with no impact on staff and others working during the renovation.
“As part of the design-build RFP that we responded to, we were responsible to put forward a schematic-level design as to what our solution was,” Michael said. “Our approach to the renovation was to take a 6 million square foot facility down to 15,000 square foot increments.We designed an innovative schedule around taking down, demolishing the Pentagon back to the original concrete structure, and rebuilding it in 15,000 square foot increments.”
This shortened timeline accelerated focus on workforce planning. The project group developed a short interval production scheduling system, or SIPS, which uses five-day workweek blocks that were organized to produce a constant and predictable flow of work, the Design-Build Institute says. The schedule helped provide stability for workers as well as transparency for Pentagon’s facility operators. They could know exactly when they needed to be in a certain area on a given date for startup commissioning and training for each piece of equipment.
“The trick behind any type of SIPS production schedule is more about labor [and] workforce development,” Michael said. “Each trade had a week to two weeks to do their work within that 15,000 square feet. We used the weekends as our buffer time.”
At certain peak resource levels, the team could put in a 15,000-square-foot area and get it done between Monday and Friday, and not a day earlier, “because if you got done Thursday, you had no place to go because your next phase of work started the following Monday,” Michael said.
The tight scheduling provided the team with workforce and labor certainty “around how many resources are really needed once we started stacking the different renovations that were going on at any given time,” he said. Effectively, it took the peaks and valleys out of the workforce plan and allowed the team to draw the right talent and create a quality workforce that could perform the same task, day-in and day-out, over 10 years, Michael said.
He also praised the integrated project delivery method and its ability to bring together stakeholders. The project used what the team called a big room, an environment set up to have every major trade involved in the project, as well as the owner, to make decisions as a team on the fly and trend the cost and the schedule, he said.
“To me, there’s no other way to deliver a project aside from the collaborative mentality,” said Michael, acknowledging they had a unique situation. “Not every project has the ability to stand up a helipad or a 20-wide trailer complex and put all the decision makers in it,” he said.
Pentagon officials also wanted LEED certification, which required environmental, indoor and outdoor ventilation and energy efficiency elements to be incorporated.
Southland got creative in its approach, according to Curt Eisenhower, a principal engineer at Southland Industries who was involved in the project. The team used fan-powered induction units, or FPIUs, along with chilled water-cooling coils and an air valve to supply a constant stream of conditioned outdoor air, enabling the team to raise the ceiling 23 inches to hide systems in bulkheads and increase natural lighting in the space, the company says.
The project ended up being a pilot for LEED for making renovations, “allowing Southland to work hand-in-hand with LEED to help establish the standards for similar facilities moving forward,” Eisenhower said in an email.
A quality RFP sets the stage
From the RFP to the design process and construction phase, Pentagon officials and the renovation team created a scenario with creative, incentive-based contracts that allowed the design-build partners to create, innovate and deliver the best solution, Michael said. “We look at that as the Nirvana state: when we have an owner that’s sophisticated enough to understand that we’re not going to hamstring or limit our design partners and our build partners by being prescriptive in the RFP,” he said.
“They really laid it out there. Safety, schedule, cost, behavior and cost management were some of the five KPIs that we managed to drive the right behaviors,” Michael said. Clearly defining what is most valuable in a project’s RFP can help ensure work is done on time and below budget, he said.
“We get asked pretty regularly what’s the best contract style to use, and I reflect back on that,” he said. “That bled back into the execution side of the business and allowed us to, rather than going through a P6 type scheduling endeavor where we got 15,000 line items scheduled for every wedge of the Pentagon, we got it down to a single 11-by-17 sheet. The folks in the field building it understood where they needed to be on a daily and weekly basis.”
This method, along with the ability to co-locate a team of decision makers who understood the end game — in this case to repair and renovate the Pentagon ahead of schedule and under budget — were driving factors in the project’s success, he said.
“One of the things I really push on any project is to make sure that we understand [how] the owner defines the value and what the desired end state is. Then we design our solution backwards from there,” Michael said. “Those are a couple of traits that I’ve taken from that day, that year … and carried it forward.”
