question archive a) How much over the bid was the final cost? b) Was the project successful? Why or why not? c) What were tradeoffs in the project? d) Why were cost estimates inaccurate? e) Was there a better way to implement the project? f) Is overtime always valuable? Why or why not? Stellar Performer: SAFECO Field Fast-Tracking a Baseball Stadium Baseball is full of surprises
a) How much over the bid was the final cost? b) Was the project successful? Why or why not? c) What were tradeoffs in the project? d) Why were cost estimates inaccurate? e) Was there a better way to implement the project? f) Is overtime always valuable? Why or why not? Stellar Performer: SAFECO Field Fast-Tracking a Baseball Stadium Baseball is full of surprises
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a) How much over the bid was the final cost?
b) Was the project successful? Why or why not?
c) What were tradeoffs in the project?
d) Why were cost estimates inaccurate?
e) Was there a better way to implement the project?
f) Is overtime always valuable? Why or why not?
Stellar Performer: SAFECO Field Fast-Tracking a Baseball Stadium Baseball is full of surprises. In 2001, the Seattle Mariners won a record-tying 116 wins in regular-season play. But they were eliminated during the American League playoffs , so the win- ningest team in baseball didn't make it to the World Series. That up-and-down feeling character- ized the building of SAFECO Field, the Mariners state-of-the-art stadium that opened in July of 1999. The stadium's classic design and 11-acre, three-piece retractable roof made it an exciting project for the contractor, joint venture team Hunt-Kiewit. But the biggest challenge was the accelerated schedule. In August of 1998, the project was plunging forward on a fast-track schedule when J. C. Brummond, project manager for the new baseball complex, took time to explain how the intense schedule was affecting the project. Prominently displayed in Brummond's office was a simple chart comparing the normal 50-month schedule for a ballpark of this size and the fast-track, 34-month schedule for SAFECO Field. “This chart tells the whole story," said Brummond, a 25-year veteran of the construction industry who has built everything from an island at Prudhoe Bay to bus tunnels in Seattle and freeway bridges in Hawaii. As with most fast-track projects, the speed of construction came with a price. "There are a thousand reasons why the cost of this project is climbing, but they all come back—in whole or in part—to an aggressive schedule," said Brummond. (See Figure 9.7.) Fast-tracking, the practice of beginning construction before design is complete, is inherently risky because it opens up the possibility of wrong assumptions and subsequent rework. At SAFECO Field, fast-tracking led to many cases where design modifications and detail drawings were released the same day concrete for that part of the structure was poured. Brummond emphasized the unusual situation, "We accepted drawings up until the time of pour. I called it just-in-time design." Amazingly, the project stayed on schedule. But the relentless pace was bal- anced by predictable, but unavoidable, cost increases. OVERTIME From the start, the men and women on the site worked overtime. Ten-hour days were common, and work often continued over weekends. With the average overtime rate at time and a half (50 percent more than the regular wage) it's easy to understand why these costs increased. INEFFICIENCY OF OVERTIME The theory of overtime is that one person can accomplish 80 hours of work by working either two 40-hour weeks or by working 12 hours a day, for seven days straight . The reality is different, par- (Continued) (Continued) Typical ballpark 50 months Base building design Tenant program Incorporate tenant design Construction Safeco field Site selection 34 months 9/96 Base building design Opening 7/99 Mariners tenant program Incorporate tenant design Construction FIGURE 9.7 Fast-tracking a baseball stadium. ticularly when it's physical labor. “Bricklayers are a good example," Brummond explained. "Brick- laying is exacting, hard work. You can't speed brickwork with overtime, because you wear out the laborers. The law of diminishing marginal returns applies to everyone on this site. So all the extra overtime helps the schedule, but the overtime hours aren't as productive." LATE DESIGN PRODUCED MORE CONCURRENT WORK "Ideally , we would have started with the most complex part of the structure, the area behind home plate," explained Brummond, "and then worked both left and right around the park, meet- ing in center field.” But with design still in progress, construction began in center field instead. Then last-minute changes to the scoreboard design forced construction to begin in right center field and proceed clockwise around the park in one direction only. "There are limits to how many peo- ple you can stack on any part of this park before they start to get in each other's way. If we could have worked two directions at the same time, there would have been many more opportunities for (Continued) TEAM LING - Live, informative, Non-cost and Genuine ! 22 IE PLANNING PROCESS (Continued) efficiency. Concrete for instance. We could have had the pouring and finishing crews alternating between the two sides of the stadium, keeping both of them busy and out of each other's way." SCHEDULE PRESSURE CUT TIME TO PLAN FOR COST SAVINGS Normally, the engineers and architects have an opportunity to scrub the design for constructibil- ity issues—modifications that make the structure more efficient to build. With the intense sched- ule pressure, many constructibility issues weren't identified until they had already become obstacles on the job. For example: • The computer-assisted design optimized every concrete beam in the stadium, designing each one to the minimum size for its structural requirements. While that reduced the total amount of materials (concrete and reinforcing steel) needed to build these beams, it resulted in over 900 beam sizes, some of them only fractions of an inch in difference. "They should have standard- ized all the beam sizes in the design stage because standard sizes make it more efficient to build the forms," said Brummond. “In this business you focus on labor to cut costs." Again, a fast-track schedule called for building part of the structure before design for other parts was complete leaving out the time necessary to reevaluate the design for constructibility cost savings. • The anchor bolts used to tie the structural steel to the cast-in-place concrete structure had a similar problem. Again, the concrete columns, beams, and shear walls were optimized for materials, producing a design where the reinforcing steel was so tightly packed there was barely room for the lag bolts that stick up from the tops of the columns, beams, and slabs. This made it impossible for the craftsmen setting the lag bolts to put them in exactly the right placea problem that became apparent every time a crane lifted a piece of structural steel to be attached and its holes didn't match the bolts. “So then you have a bunch of steelwork- ers standing around while the old anchor bolt is cut off and a new one is installed in the right position. We hit this problem over and over throughout the erection of the steel.”
