Preconstruction

Lump sum. Bid and buy. Read and rip. These were the terms that dominated preconstruction before the pandemic. 

“Our industry historically has been driven by the traditional construction manager at risk model, where the owner will start with the architect and begin design before bringing the GC onboard,” said Nathan Lingard, director of design phase at Minneapolis-based Mortenson Construction. “This planning and design phase of the project is a period of time where there is high uncertainty.”

Informed largely by siloed partners and a disjointed handoff, that approach to preconstruction — measured roughly as the period from a project’s initial concept to its groundbreaking — was always fraught with discord and miscommunication between project stakeholders. 

But industry watchers say that all changed when COVID-19 hit. 

As projects shuttered amidst shelter-in-place restrictions and global supply chains collapsed, designers, owners and GCs found themselves collectively back at the drawing board, having tough but ultimately fruitful conversations on how to get things done. 

“The pandemic helped to slow things down in a way where we could focus resources and attention on things that were challenging projects,” said Eric Orquiola, director of preconstruction at Denver-based PCL Construction.

“We are in a much more transparent and open communication dialogue with designers and clients to date, and bringing trades as well as suppliers to the table, too,” Orquiola said. “The movement away from the hard bid model has been about shared communication, shared planning and shared challenges, and it’s something that we are starting to see quite a bit.” 

Earlier starts, closer communication

Since the pandemic, the adoption of more progressive and inclusive delivery models have shown promise in alleviating preconstruction strife. Lean construction and flow scheduling have helped to boost communication and shorten project durations, and integrated project delivery models bring parties together contractually to share in ownership and risk as a way to motivate goodwill. 

That’s a good thing, since when a project goes south, imperfect preconstruction triggers all sorts of plan and drawing inconsistencies, inefficient supply and material purchasing, poor trade coordination and often heavy cost and schedule overruns that only reinforce the animosity between already isolated stakeholders. 

Regardless of delivery model, general contractors say preconstruction project collaboration is happening much earlier, and with greater transparency and communication, than before the pandemic.  

“It starts with the first interview. Now more than ever, the owners want to meet the preconstruction and estimating and project management teams,” said Matthew Verst, vice president of cost planning and estimating at Cincinnati-based Messer Construction. “It’s changed the whole philosophy of what preconstruction entails. Twenty years ago it was ‘Build me a budget and check in when it changes.’ Now the real-time communication of information amplifies what the construction manager can do for the client, and likewise drives what the client’s expectations are from the GC.” 

Shrinking timelines

Increasingly, client expectations are to complete projects faster. Even as generators, transformers, switch gears and other large-scale infrastructure items continue to face year-long supply chain delays, the newfound ability of project team collaboration to overcome supply and scheduling snafus has owners looking at preconstruction as the Rosetta stone for speedier market delivery. 

“Coming out of the pandemic, everything, including delivery in general, has been supercharged and moved up faster,” said David Alford, regional vice president of preconstruction for St. Louis-based McCarthy Building Cos. “But it put us in the fast lane of where we were already trying to go anyway: Bringing GCs on earlier in the game had been something we had been pushing for a real long time.”

He added that getting teams in early to collectively address supply chain challenges has been an added bonus. 

At Mortenson, Lingard estimates that preconstruction timelines have shrunk by a third post-pandemic, putting more pressure on designers, planning and material procurement specifically. “It condenses the window and makes it more critical to really be aligned and focused,” he said. “We don’t do our project teams any favors by delivering a design or plan that is half-baked for them to figure out how to build.” 

Alford agrees, and said preconstruction strategies can help find efficiencies across the design-build lifecycle, even if the preconstruction discipline per se remains somewhat immune to the time squeeze. 

“We don’t want people rushing and producing an output that is not as great,” he said. “Preconstruction is so critical to teeing up a job that is right that it’s better to take a couple more days when you need it most to get a great design that is constructible versus just rushing it.”

This article is one in a series of conversations with women leaders in the construction industry. Click here for past discussions.

Julie Garcia has worked 18 years — her entire career — in construction.

The vice president of preconstruction at Phoenix-based Kitchell Contractors is responsible for projects in Arizona, California and Texas. Precon is her favorite part of the building process because it affords the opportunity to have the biggest impact on a job in a relatively short amount of time, she said.

“Really simply, I balance owner and design team expectations with the budget available for a project to make sure everyone is happy when we start building it,” she said.

Here, Garcia talks with Construction Dive about her career choices, her favorite projects and why details matter.

The article has been edited for brevity and clarity.

CONSTRUCTION DIVE: What led you to choose construction as your career?

JULIE GARCIA: My dad was in the Army Corps of Engineers for 21 years before becoming a professor at Arizona State University’s Del E. Webb School of Construction, so I had quiet but consistent construction influences as a child and teenager. 

I took one construction class — Construction Management 101: The History of Construction — at Arizona State University to appease my dad … and I was hooked! I’ve recently had the opportunity to teach that same class as an Adjunct Professor at ASU — what a joy to be able to give back to the same program that taught me!

How did you get involved in preconstruction?

I graduated with a construction management degree and a business management minor and was hired at Kitchell as a project engineer to work in the Custom Homes Division. Unexpectedly, my first project assignment was working on a hospital bed tower in Phoenix and I found a great sense of purpose and joy in building healthcare.  

After coming back from maternity leave after my first child, I was given the choice to go into preconstruction or to our Custom Homes Division. I was advised that the hours in the Preconstruction Department were more predictable than working on a jobsite, and as a new mama with daycare timeline pickup restrictions, I chose that route. 

Nevertheless, I was fully expecting to hate preconstruction because the only construction class I did not like in school was Precon. I thought all people did in preconstruction was count things … and then price them ... and then count them again. Boy, was I wrong! 

I fell in love with having the ability to affect change and to exceed expectations. I get frustrated when I can’t fix a problem, and so often problems can be rectified if they’re caught early. Working in preconstruction provides me with the opportunity to be part of the solution before a problem becomes a problem in the field.

What are a few of the projects you’ve most enjoyed working on and why?

I really enjoy our higher ed jobs, especially research related. When the space you’re building is focused on changing the way we do something — research, teaching, etc. — it pushes the entire team, including the contractor, to re-imagine the way we design and build, including materials and space configurations. We’re right there with the design team making that vision come to life. 

The Health Sciences Innovation Building at the University of Arizona is a super cool project because the mission of the building was to change the way UA delivered education to its health sciences people such as doctors, nurses and public health workers. Besides this, HSIB functions in a very unique way, it’s just a particularly beautiful building. Anytime we’re on these campuses, it’s just so inspiring because the people we are building for are trying to re-think the world — like how particles bounce in a molecule.  

I have a true love for healthcare projects too because they play such an important role in our communities. Right now, we’re building Valleywise Health Medical Center. It will be so rewarding that the staff and the patients of Maricopa County finally have a state-of-the-art facility that is so desperately needed.

Phoenix Children’s Hospital and all the work we have done on their campuses is also very close to my heart. It’s incredibly special and rewarding to build an environment where kids who are hurting can heal.

How did your background as a project engineer shape your work today?

Starting as a PE helped me understand how our jobsites work. There are challenges you face on a jobsite that you can’t appreciate when you are working in the main office. Every little detail matters in the field.  Every submittal matters. If something is ordered and arrives a half-inch off, the entire job could come to a standstill. 

Learning from my superintendents was instrumental to my continued success in this industry. I had plenty of book knowledge, but I walked into my first job trailer still knowing relatively little about construction. I had to be humble enough to recognize that and I relied on my superintendents and project managers to teach me. 

They taught me to really examine the details, and that experience helps me teach my teams to identify potential problems so they don’t become issues once construction begins.

What advice would you give to young women considering construction as a career?

Find a superintendent who is willing to teach you and learn as much as you can. I feel like women can really add value and bring a unique perspective. We bring different energy, and we ask different questions. 

There will be moments when you’re intimidated. Shake it off. Don’t be afraid to ask what you don’t know. Make sure you understand the answer so you will know it the next time.

Even though preconstruction gained prominence during the pandemic, the impacts of this pivot have been slower to materialize on jobsites. 

While designers, owners and construction managers applaud the new convergence of partners on the preconstruction portion of the build cycle, project timelines and budgets have yet to witness significant improvements. 

According to a 2023 global construction survey conducted by KPMG, 37% of owners and contractors have missed budget or schedule over the past year due to a lack of effective risk management. That’s actually up from 32% in the corresponding 2021 survey and represents half of all owner projects not being completed on time.

“Project performance remains in the spotlight, with only half of owners saying their projects are completing on time and 87% stating that projects are coming under greater scrutiny,” the report found.

Noting that supply chain disruption, high material prices and labor shortages continue to add to costs and hold up projects, KPMG said stagnant productivity and a lack of innovation persist within construction models that continue to embrace fragmented structures, where margin-starved partners have neither scale nor incentive to invest in new technology or delivery models. 

Preconstruction’s push into tech

Nevertheless, technology continues to inundate the construction industry in an effort to solve productivity woes — an aspect the report called “the great innovation race.” On the preconstruction side, visualization tools — from complex reality capture to simple executive dashboards — are getting high marks as designers, owners and construction managers seek to catalyze collaboration. 

For example, at Cincinnati-based Messer Construction, preconstruction teams are utilizing the Join online change management platform for streamlined cost and schedule conversations with ownership groups that have engaged with the GC in value-engineering delivery models. 

“Estimates and plans get dumped in the cloud and offer a great exchange of actionable ideas that we can price up as the target-value-delivery lean construction manager,” said Matthew Verst, Messer’s vice president of cost planning and estimating. “We’ve had mixed engagement on the design side, but the visual component to the owner has proven itself as a valuable visualization tool to see the project evolve and access the total history of decision-making”

Meanwhile, Miller Construction in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, uses building information modeling for clash detection within plan sets that are specific to design, construction and the mechanical, electrical and plumbing trades. 

“Most jobs that we work on, the architects and engineers use Revit, so we request those models from them for clash detection,” said Spencer Green, Miller’s director of preconstruction. “There are a lot of conflicts between the architectural, structural and MEP disciplines that can be easily identified and resolved by just comparing plans.” 

$500,000 in savings

On the industrial side, Miller has also begun experimenting with software from Livermore, California-based Agtek to estimate earthwork costs during preconstruction. The solution has provided some additional precision to budgeting, as well as revealing design flexibilities for literally pulling concepts out of the dirt. 

On a recent $10 million project, for example, the technology helped show how lowering a building elevation by 6 inches could save $500,000 from the total budget to let the project pencil out.

“Earthwork and elevation and fill cost estimates were some of the most challenging, and Agtek was a system our subcontractors were already using for their takeoffs,” Green says. “By analyzing historical costs, we’re getting within a couple of points of where our earthworks packages can be.” 

Data and analytics

As broad data access enabled in part by cloud computing provides preconstruction teams with actionable intelligence, analytics are likely to fuel the growth of new technology solutions and delivery innovations, including feeding data to AI-based systems for analysis and recommendations. 

“Let the data drive,” said Nathan Lingard, director of design phase at Minneapolis-based Mortenson Construction. “Particularly as it relates to streamlining processes and reducing design time, we are able to more accurately predict outcomes from certain sets of circumstances and establish thresholds where we know just chipping away at the design with little cuts is not going to get us there.” 

The ability of emerging systems and AI to quickly analyze the vast complex of historical schematic and financial data to optimize scheduling might have the most promising impact to schedule and cost reduction efforts in construction so far. 

“It’s about resource optimization on a project, and how to use resources to their maximum effect,” said David Alford, regional vice president of preconstruction for St. Louis-based McCarthy Building Cos. “Right now, data and being a data junkie is one of the hottest things.”

 

Though naturally skeptical of new technologies that too often promise more than they deliver, Turner Construction Chief Innovation Officer James Barrett has reason to be optimistic about AI’s ability to enhance preconstruction tools.

“We see a lot of startups with very bold, ambitious, broad claims,” said Barrett, who helped launch Turner's’s virtual design and construction team 15 years ago. “But when people show up and say, ‘Look, I’ve got this very specific problem to solve, and I’m using AI for it,’ that’s more credible — far more credible.”

ALICE Technologies, an AI-powered construction simulation platform that enables contractors to set up projects and “build” them virtually with a variety of different inputs before physical construction begins, is one of the tools that meets Barrett’s credibility test.

“We’re talking to them quite a bit because we like that it can also be used during production, as you’re putting your budgets together,” Barrett said. “By bringing that into preconstruction, we can fix problems as we’re planning a project so we avoid having to deal with them during construction.” 

Preconstruction — the initial phase of a project when contractors plan and schedule a job’s entire scope, estimate costs and analyze needs — has always been a crucial part of the construction process. But only recently have technology developers turned their attention to how it can make an entire project run more smoothly. 

Using cloud technology as well as machine learning, AI, drones and 3D modeling, the new generation of preconstruction technologies improves efficiency and saves time by eliminating the need for manual cost estimating and reporting, reducing errors, improving accuracy, mitigating risk and making curated data available for real-time decision-making throughout a project’s life. 

Connecting with the back office

Many contractors have some catching up to do when it comes to preconstruction technology.

“I think a lot of people still use Excel and very homegrown platforms” for preconstruction, said Michael Boren, chief technology officer for Beck Technology, a preconstruction data lifecycle company that recently partnered with Togal.AI, which offers machine-learning takeoff software, to improve the speed and quality of 2D takeoffs while simultaneously building construction estimates. 

“All it takes is for one estimator to accidentally delete a cell in a spreadsheet, and all of a sudden, nothing’s calculating correctly, but you don’t know it,” Boren said. “Technologies like ours maintain data integrity as you pass it off downstream to the jobsite."

In its quest to be “America’s most skilled builder,” Tempe, Arizona-based Sundt Construction has worked closely with Beck to help create DESTINI Estimator, a one-stop estimating platform that allows contractors to pull reports, execute takeoffs and see cost history on one platform.

“Now, more than ever, we’re chasing more work with the same amount of people,” said Melissa Love, Sundt’s project controls manager. "So, my goal is to make every estimate as efficient as possible."

Collaborative benefits

Faro Technologies helps contractors in the precon phase bring the real-world environment back to the office so that more eyes can collaborate on it without going to a jobsite, said Kyle Tarr, Faro senior business development manager. The Lake May, Florida-based company offers hardware and software that enables high-precision 3D capture, measurement and analysis of projects and sites. 

“The teams on large construction projects are getting bigger and bigger, so being able to essentially bring that real-world project digitally to everybody is a huge collaborative benefit for the contractor,” he said.

At Turner, Barrett said, the preconstruction process is becoming more and more granular. “Some day, we will plan down to the nuts and bolts — everything — because that’s the opportunity.” 

As he’s watched preconstruction technology take big leaps forward over the past five years, he’s grown more optimistic about the possibilities. 

“It’s easy to just fall into the hype and rattle off names of software,” he said. “But I think over the next five years, we’re going to see transformational change come to the industry because these new technologies are addressing real problems.” 

Technology has definitely played a role in preconstruction’s increased prominence in the overall build process today. But many experts see behavioral and process swings spurred by the pandemic at the root of systemic change for the industry. 

“Of course I wish there was a tool that can get us all to where we need to be, but there’s no tool,” said David Alford, regional vice president of preconstruction for St. Louis-based McCarthy Building Cos. “The development of broader trust and cooperation in the base relationship of the partners is what gets you there.” 

That said, when it comes to how projects of the future will be managed during preconstruction — roughly the period from project conception to groundbreaking — there’s not just one established path. 

Building construction “packages”

Even the idea of preconstruction having defined start and end points is starting to vanish as teams look to resource optimization. For example, teams might pull the trigger on certain trade packages (think supply-challenged power mechanicals) even as other portions of the project remain in the design phase. 

“On almost every modern project we are working in packages, from site work and foundations to enclosures and interiors,” said Nathan Lingard, director of design phase at Minneapolis-based Mortenson Construction. “The staging of starts into packaging allows us to advance certain parts of the design even while others are lagging. We almost always overlap construction. Project teams are starting to build while we are finishing design.”

Alford calls package delivery part of an intentional and necessary blurring of the lines that helps preconstruction better reach its paramount goal of optimizing the delivery of project scope on time and on budget. 

“The idea that ‘Here’s traditional pre-con, hard stop, now here’s construction’ is becoming antiquated,” he said. “It’s actually our goal to make it blurry so that you don’t know one side from the other. You just know a project team that works closely alongside the designers and owners delivered an exceptional outcome.”

From pre- to post-construction

Robust data storage within BIM-enabled point clouds and change management platforms that can document decision-making along the way also stretches preconstruction collaboration beyond the construction phase into building operations and facility management. 

“Extending BIM continuity from preconstruction into building maintenance is something we have done on a few projects and expect to see more of in the future,” said Matthew Verst, vice president of cost planning and estimating at Cincinnati-based Messer Construction. “Especially when people start to see the increasing value from preconstruction in driving quality and safety, even for maintenance and operations personnel.”

For Alford, extension of preconstruction collaboration tenets into building ops is another example of the blurred lines that could help dissolve traditional discord and disagreement across full project life cycles, particularly in the first year of use. 

“The experience of a project is always created in how it finishes, and we want our clients to have successful buildings that operate well, that work the way they were designed,” Alford said. “The satisfaction of the experience is significantly higher when you do it right like that.” 

Bumps on the preconstruction path?

The one area for concern shared unanimously by preconstruction professionals as the practice evolves is a human one: the possible lack of stamina amongst subcontractor and specialty trades in adapting to new project delivery models and the onslaught of technologies needed to support them. 

Indeed, many subs are already struggling to staff up crews or even bid on new jobs as they clear pandemic-driven backlogs and pivot to new projects. 

“People think about long lead supply chains, or material cost escalation, but one of the biggest factors that doesn't get enough attention is the impact of that backlog on the subs and their difficulty getting labor,” Verst said. “It is tough to get competitive bids on scopes, so strong subcontractor relationships are going to be a big key to the success of future opportunities.”

Doing more with less

Like many facets of construction, AI and robotics might ultimately help alleviate labor strife and the continued pressure it exerts on project costs and scheduling, as well as other technologies. 

For instance, Miller Construction in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, adopted Agtek estimating software to save $500,000 on one project by lowering a building’s elevation by 6 inches. Meanwhile, Dusty Robotic’s drywall automation tools, used by McCarthy and others, have helped address labor issues on jobs, an example from the subcontractor community as a way to do more with less. 

Those are just two examples of new approaches preconstruction teams have incorporated into the process since the pandemic forced a change in project collaboration and perspective. 

“Technology will change how we do things, and I’ve seen it change things ever since I’ve started in the industry,” said Eric Orquiola, director of preconstruction at Denver-based PCL Construction. “Whether efficiency is found in technology or lean delivery or whatever else is out there, we need to change processes to meet client needs, because we can’t hire as fast as the projects are coming in.”