Education · New ConstructionCompleted 2022

Technical College Electrical Training Center

Grant funding depended on the first cohort starting on time. Then switchgear lead times doubled.

LocationJacksonville, FL

ClientConfidential

LocationJacksonville, FL

SectorEducation

Value$31M

Size60,000 sq ft

DeliveryDesign-Build

Duration16 months

StatusCompleted 2022

Why it mattered

Campuses run on dates that do not move: the first day of school, the start of term, the opening game. We plan backward from those days and tell boards early, and plainly, whether they will hold.

The challenge

A state college partnered with industry to build a dedicated electrical trades training center. The grant behind it required the first cohort to enroll by a fixed semester.

Mid-project, lead times for switchgear and lighting roughly doubled. Waiting out the supply chain would have carried opening past the grant deadline, so the real question became which substitutions were worth their risk.

Our role

Schedule Updates Time Impact Analysis (TIA)Look Ahead Planning

Schedule at a glance

The whole program, on one line.

Start to finish, as the schedule tells it. For work still in progress, the bar moves with today's data date.

StartMar 2021

Duration16 months

HandoverJul 2022

Progress—

Fix the finishRetire the unknowns earlyReport in plain languagePlan move-in as work

How we held the date

Our approach, phase by phase.

The same disciplined sequence we bring to every engagement, shaped around what this project needed most.

PHASE 01PHASE 02PHASE 03PHASE 04

PHASE 01Fix the finish

The academic calendar set as the immovable completion, with every milestone worked backward from it.

PHASE 02Retire the unknowns early

Ground conditions, permits and long-lead items confronted in the first sixty days, while there is still time to react.

PHASE 03Report in plain language

Monthly updates and one-page summaries written for boards, faculty and donors, not just for builders.

PHASE 04Plan move-in as work

Furniture, technology, labs and faculty move-in scheduled as a critical sequence of their own.

What changed

The difference we made

Measured the only way that matters: whether the date and the budget held.

Result 01First cohort enrolled

Students began training in the planned semester, and the grant was protected.

Result 02Decisions modeled before they were made

Alternate equipment was qualified early, with a time impact analysis behind each option before the college committed.

Result 03A schedule worth teaching

The college now uses the project schedule as a case study in its construction management courses.

Services engaged

What we brought to it

2.01.06Schedule Updates

Disciplined periodic updates that capture verified progress, explain every movement and keep the schedule an instrument of command rather than a record of hope.

2.04.02Time Impact Analysis (TIA)

Prospective and contemporaneous TIAs that show, with a clean fragnet and a statused update, exactly what an event does to completion.

2.01.13Look Ahead Planning

Rolling look-ahead plans that translate the master schedule into ready, resourced, constraint-free work at the workface, where productivity is won or lost.

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