Community college districts: program management across campuses

A community college district with three campuses and a voter approved bond has a program, not a project. The program might run twelve years, include thirty buildings, and pass through two chancellors and three boards. A program management firm sits between the district and the construction managers, and each campus has a dean or a facilities lead who wants their building done first.

The risk in a structure like that is not any one GMP. It is that the record of each GMP lives with the program manager, is formatted the program manager's way, and is not fully the district's. This post is about where the GMP record should sit in a district program and what the district should insist on seeing.

Three layers of owner

On a fictional $420 million district bond program, the board of trustees approves the GMP amendments. The district's facilities office, often two or three people, administers the contracts. The program management firm does the daily work: reviewing pay applications, processing change orders, tracking contingency. The campus users make the decisions that drive allowances and owner scope changes.

Each layer reads the GMP differently. The board sees the program total against the bond. The facilities office sees each contract against its amendment. The program manager sees the monthly movement. The campus sees the building. The record has to serve all four without being rebuilt four times, which means it has to be structured around the GMP line items and the causes, with the program and campus views computed from that rather than maintained separately.

Who owns the record when the program manager is a contractor

Program management firms bring their own tools and their own way of keeping the books. That is part of what the district is paying for. It also means the record sits in the firm's system, in the firm's format, under the firm's contract. When the program management contract is rebid after five years, the district has to find out whether the record transfers, in what form, and whether anyone on the district side can read it.

The district should own a ledger of its own for every GMP in the program, structured to the amendment, with the contingency log, the change order register and the allowance register in a form the district controls. The program manager can maintain it on the district's behalf. The point is that when the firm changes, the ledger does not, and the citizens' oversight committee's questions can be answered from the district's own record.

The oversight committee's questions

Bond oversight committees ask the same questions every year: how much has been spent, how much is left, what changed and why. The third question is the one that the program total cannot answer. It needs change orders by cause across every GMP. A district that has classified every change from the start has a one page answer. A district that has not has a research project.

Comparing campuses without misleading anyone

A program report that ranks campuses by contingency remaining will cause trouble in the next board meeting. A new science building and a parking lot resurfacing are not comparable on a percentage. What is comparable is the structure: each GMP with its original amount, its current amount, its contingency exhaustion date against its completion date, its change orders by cause, and its anticipated final cost against its board approved budget.

Presented that way, the board can see that one campus has a design gap problem and another has an owner scope problem, and that neither is the same as a contractor problem. That is the conversation the district wants to have, because the answers are different. A design gap problem goes to the architect. An owner scope problem goes to the campus dean. A contractor problem goes to the construction manager.

A district ledger next to the program manager's tools

The program manager's software stays. The construction managers' Procore stays. The district's financial system stays. None of them hold the district's reading of each GMP contract in a form that survives a change of program manager and answers the oversight committee directly.

Costwitness is that ledger. Each GMP is frozen as a baseline and versioned. The contingency, change order and allowance records are kept against it, with causes and audit history. The program view across campuses is computed from the contract records, so the two always agree. The program manager keeps it current. The district owns it. The rules raise flags, and the people in the facilities office decide what the flags mean.

In the product

GMP baseline, Change order register, Monthly owner report. Free tool: Change Order Exposure, Contingency Runway.

Keep reading

Earlier: Municipal owners: city halls, public safety buildings and the GMP. Later: Your first GMP contract: a reading order for first time owners. All articles on by owner type.