BEST PRACTICES
No Project is an Island Part One: External Strategic Partnering
N
one of our construction projects today are
The Strategic Partnering process took place over a three year period
built in a vacuum. We have many others
and included leaders from DSA’s local office and HQ along with the Project
with whom we must work in order to get
management team and senior leadership from the District. It took effort to
projects approved, designed, built and activated.
understand each other’s needs and processes, but over time things began
Strategic Partnering was developed with this in
to become aligned. The graph below shows that as the partnering sessions
mind. You may have internal stakeholders who
occurred, alignment began to happen and the time frame for reviews shrank.
have control over some parts of your project,
Ultimately, DSA reviews averaged 13 weeks and remained there for the
or you may have external stakeholders with
duration of the District’s program.
whom you must get approval or keep happy. The potential impact of internal and external stakeholders on your projects are enormous.
This effort was so successful that DSA struck strategic partnerships all over the state with Districts that had Mega Programs. For more information on the DSA and San Diego City Schools effort take
Today we are going to explore one example of
a look at the IPI white paper entitled “Mega Program Strategic Partnering;
External Strategic Partnering.
A Process for Building Better Schools by Building Better Relationships”.
Under the leadership of Dave Thorman, the CA State Architect at the time, the California
In the next issue we will look at Strategic Partnering with Internal Stakeholders.
Division of the State Architect (DSA) developed a strategic partnering program with those school
DSA Approval Process Time Study with Partnering Session Dates
districts that had Mega Programs. The goal of the strategic partnering was to find ways to ensure that the plan check process would not delay the construction of the District’s schools. In the past the DSA review time was hard at best to predict. By developing a Strategic Partnership both the Districts and DSA understood what each side needed to “speed up” or make the review times “predictable” so that planning was possible. The first DSA/District partnership was with San Diego City Schools. They had a large construction program and were very worried that they would not have money to build all of the schools in their program. They were finding that DSA review times were unpredictable and went as long as 42 weeks. The District’s schedule allowed for 13 weeks in order to complete all of their projects. 8
Partnering Magazine May/June 2014
Date Approved by DSA www.partneringinstitute.com