2020 CMAA Project Achievement Award
Education: Construction value greater than $50 Million
Collin College Wylie Campus
Owner: Collin College | CM: AECOM
When AECOM was hired by Collin College in Spring 2017 to be their Program Manager for a $600M bond program, they faced a daunting challenge – manage the procurement, programming, design, construction, commissioning and start-up of two greenfield campus projects and open them by Fall 2020 with a client that had never undertaken a major capital improvement program. The Wylie Campus is one of those projects.
Early in the pre-design phase of the program, it became apparent that a conventional design-bid-build approach would not work on the Wylie project due to the 2020 opening time constraint and that an Integrated Project Delivery method would work best. Unfortunately, being a state entity, Collin College is not allowed to use an IPD contract, so AECOM advised the College to use IPD “Lite” principles in conjunction with their CM-at-Risk contract. This decision permitted open communication between all key stakeholders during all phases of the project and allowed for the Architect and CMAR to be under contract before the design phase formally began on the project.
Even with this plan in place, further steps were needed to deliver the project on-time. AECOM, in conjunction with Collin College, made the decision to go to a GMP contract with Skanska from 50% construction documents. In order to achieve this, meetings were held with AECOM, Collin College, Skanska and Page (“the Team”) every week during the 9-month programming and design process to review design documents, project constructability and projected costs. This was achieved because Skanska brought in their field project staff to work with their pre-construction team during the design process.
An itemized list of contract documents deliverables was developed by the project team with required due dates that were needed in order to achieve accurate pricing before execution of the GMP contract. With the Team working in a truly collaborative manner, it only took 9 months from the start of design to the completion of the 50% documents. Adding in 2 months for bidding, contract approval and 21 months of construction time, it only took 32 months from start to finish for an entire college campus.
