Driscoll: We need leaders, risk takers

            After four decades in the construction industry and two decades after helping to found CMAA, Tom Driscoll of URS Construction Services still sees plenty of work for the association—and for the skilled, ambitious individuals on whom the profession depends.

            Driscoll has indeed been part of CMAA from the beginning: He was one of the association’s founders in 1982 and helped launch the CCM certification program shortly after that. He also wrote a key chapter in the Capstone course that candidate CCMs rely on to prepare them for the certification exam.

            He’s seen a lot of change over the years, but also some consistency. “In 1982 we had an urgent need to define Construction Management,” Driscoll says. “CM then was like a quiver of arrows.  The CM could play different roles at different stages in different projects.”

            Over time, CMAA helped define the professional practice of CM, and to re-define the profession’s role in construction.  “Originally the association looked at CM as a project delivery system,” Driscoll says.  “Today, we’ve come to view CM as a service that relates effectively to all delivery systems.”

            One thing that hasn’t changed, though, is the central role of the individual in the success of both a project and a firm. “The individual accounts for more than half of the basis for the choice of a firm,” Driscoll says. Strong relationships with individual CMs lead clients to choose the same firms repeatedly, while weak or interrupted relationships undermine this loyalty.

            For the individual, the lesson is clear: “You need to master the skills of project delivery, how to recognize, avoid and manage risks.” Driscoll and the other initiators of the certification program opted not to bestow the distinction on themselves first, seeing the program as more future-oriented. Today, he says, “we should strongly encourage every young person in the industry to pursue certification.  It’s really a standard-of-care issue, and certification enables the owner to know what to expect from individuals and firms.”

            Individual progress is also critical in facing what Driscoll sees as the industry’s most urgent current problem.  “We have a leadership crisis in our industry, and in our country,” he says.  “We need risk takers. We all need to be leaders in our companies and for our projects.”

Thomsen: Specialization fuels demand for CM

            Professional Construction Management plays a critical role in today’s construction industry largely as a result of trends that began taking shape a century and a half ago, says Chuck Thomsen, FAIA, president of 3D/I.

            Thomsen, though trained as an architect, was a pioneer in CM, helping to found CM, Inc., in 1971.  It was, he recalls, the first professional services company dedicated to Construction Management.

            “Back in the mid-1800s,” Thomsen notes, “buildings began to get a lot more complicated than they had been before, and design became a separate discipline, separated from construction.”

            This period, Thomsen adds, saw the founding of the American Institute of Architects and of America’s first school of architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. State and local governments also got involved in construction for the first time, by creating the first government licensing requirements and processes for engineers and architects.

            “Today,” he continues, “the level of specialization in the construction industry is just enormous.  Moreover, the main body of technological knowledge today is concentrated among subcontractors and materials suppliers, more than among architects and general contractors.”

            Result: Thomsen says “the industry is in bad, bad need of someone to integrate all of the players, not in a dominating way but in a collaborative way. Most institutional and organizational project owners simply don’t have the knowledge. Will we pick up the baton?”

            Filling this leadership void is a big key to the profession’s future, Thomsen says. In turn, continuous improvement in the knowledge and skills of Construction Managers will help the profession step up and assume the leadership role.

            “Certification is going to become increasingly important in the years ahead,” Thomsen says. With the right combination of knowledge and attitude, the CM can indeed fuse all of the specialists on a given job into a single highly productive project delivery team.