Planning a Construction Project?
By: Nena Groskind

The anticipation part of this trinity requires careful thought — as Dennis Hopper advises in those ubiquitous and somewhat annoying television commercials: “My friend, you need a plan.” The larger and more complex the project, the more comprehensive and detailed the planning should be.
Consider the planning required for a project that industry executives are still talking about: Removing and replacing the entire exterior envelope of a 68-unit association – four mid-rise buildings, 20 town-homes and two community buildings. That effort, with more moving parts than a NASA shuttle lunch, cost $13 million and took five years, not counting the three years of planning that preceded the construction. Steven Dannin, CMCA, AMS, PCAM, principal in Massachusetts-based Dannin Management Corp., who oversaw the project, says he managed the stress by becoming an exercise fanatic. “It did wonders for my waist line,” he says.

“A Marathon, Not a Sprint”
Construction projects should be approached “as a marathon, not a sprint,” David Levy, CMCA, PCAM, proprietor of Sterling Services, Inc. advises. That advice applies clearly to Dannin’s monster project, but it applies equally to projects much smaller in scale and scope. Like professional runners, who develop a strategy before a race, managers and association boards must develop a strategy that addresses every aspect of a construction project, from initial planning through final walk-through. You want to start with a “macro” view that envisions the project as a whole, then break the project down into components, determining how those different pieces interact.
Some liken the planning process to a game of pick-up sticks — before trying to move one stick, you have to identify other sticks that will be affected by the move. You don’t want to do anything that will have to be undone or redone in order to do something else. Don’t repave the driveway this year if you know you’re going to have to replace a nearby retaining wall soon; don’t repaint the walls this month if you know you’re going to replace the carpeting or the floor six months from now.
Try to schedule the work logically and strategically. You can’t control the timing of an emergency – if a tree falls through the roof, you can’t wait six months before repairing it. But absent an emergency, you can and should schedule exterior work for sometime other than the dead of winter. And that will require advance planning, Dannin points out.
“If you are going to be doing a window replacement project in 2011,” he says, “it’s not too soon to be thinking about it now” so you can solicit bids, arrange the financing, line up the contractor, and be ready to start work in the spring.
In thinking about the schedule for your construction project, assume that everything will take longer than you hope or expect. Obtaining bids, getting permits, revising architectural plans – all will occur on someone else’s schedule, not yours. Permit decision-makers will go on vacation at inopportune times and with no advance warning, the paint or concrete applied in one phase will have to dry or cure before the next phase can begin and the weather will never cooperate. The simple window replacement will become more complex (not to mention, more expensive) when the contractor discovers rot behind a wall.
“If you think something will take two weeks, plan for four, and expect delays beyond that,” Hugh Shaffer, PCAM, president of Massachusetts-based RoBeck Management, Corp., who agrees that all construction projects should carry this warning: “You never know what the contractor will find when they open a wall. When you pull on one string,” Shaffer adds, “the whole suit unravels,” erasing your carefully planned construction schedule in the process.
“You can plan all you want,” Pat Brawley, CMCA, AMS, PCAM, a community association manager and consultant, agrees. “But if you don’t anticipate,” she warns, “you’ll be flying by the seat of your pants.”

Experience Helps
How can you anticipate twists, turns and unexpected detours that are, by definition, unpredictable? “It helps to have done these projects before,” Brawley says, because an experienced eye may spot concerns that might otherwise be ignored. But even with years of experience, when tackling an unfamiliar project, Brawley says she often contacts managers who have handled similar projects, asking them to describe problems they encountered or details they overlooked. “There will always be little things you didn’t think about.”
The goal is to eliminate as many of those “little things” as possible by asking and answering every question you can conceive at the outset:
• If materials are being delivered to the site, where will they be stored?
• Where will owners park while the parking lot is being repaved? Where will construction crews park when on site?
• Where will dumpsters and port-a-johns be located during the construction process?
• Will you need a police detail at any points to manage traffic?
• Will the contractor have access to a water supply and any electrical connections required?
• Will the contractor need access to passenger elevators? If so, how will you accommodate the needs of owners?
• Will crews need access to owners’ units? If so, how will that work be scheduled and how will related security concerns be addressed?
• How will you communicate with owners before and throughout the construction project?

Communicate, Communicate, Communicate
The latter question may be the most important on the list. Every manager who discusses construction projects emphasizes the importance of explaining the project to owners at the outset and keeping them informed from beginning to end.
“You can’t over-communicate,” Levy insists, a point with which David Abel, CMCA, of First Realty Management Corp., wholeheartedly agrees. “Communicate until you’re ready to throw up,” he advises, “and then communicate some more,” using every reasonable means  flyers, notices on bulletin boards, e-mail, snail mail, newsletters , periodic meetings and sky-writing, if necessary  to convey essential information to owners. And make sure you document all those communication efforts, so when owners insist that they weren’t informed (as some almost certainly will), you can pull out 25 flyers, reams of e-mail messages, and the minutes from half-a-dozen special meetings to demonstrate otherwise.
Robert McBride, CMCA, AMS, PCAM president of The Dartmouth Group, Inc., AMO a Massachusetts management firm, also suggests that boards set aside time during their regular meetings for project updates “so when trustees are accosted by owners in the parking lot, they can respond knowledgably.”
Many managers describe regularly going an extra mile  or an extra thousand miles to keep owners informed. When a community he describes as “under-managed for a long time” undertook long-delayed and costly renovations, Levy organized a special meeting with a bi-lingual translator on hand to explain the project and outline the bids the board had received. When a group of dissident owners insisted subsequently that they had found a contractor to do the work for much less, the board held another public meeting to let them make their case. It quickly became evident to board members and other owners attending, Levy says, that the dissidents “weren’t trying to save the association money; they were trying to drive business to their friends.”

Out With It!
The need to secure and maintain owners’ support for a major project is obvious, but it is important to avoid under-stating the inconvenience it will produce. If owners are going to be living in the equivalent of a dust bowl for three months, if the elevator is going to be out of commission for two weeks, if the grounds are going to be a mess, if buildings are going to be encased in ugly scaffolding for a year, if the contractor has discovered hidden problems that will double the construction cost – say so. You might want to join the witness protection program first, but don’t withhold bad news (it won’t become better with age) or downplay it. Information sugar-coated at the outset will turn into a bitter pill the board will have to swallow in the end. That was true of a $1.6 million project Abel oversaw that “went beautifully” he says, until the board moved to levy the special assessment required, and discovered that one of the trustees had led owners to believe that no assessment would be needed.
A large part of the manager’s job, Abel says, is to persuade trustees to overcome their inclination to withhold difficult information from owners or to release it in small doses to avoid upsetting them. The result is what he calls “creeping incrementalism” where trustees keep insisting they “don’t know enough yet” or aren’t sure enough about the details to share them with owners. “Suddenly eight months have passed,” Abel says, and while the board has had plenty of time to become comfortable with the project, they haven’t told owners anything about it. At that point, instead of conveying news owners were expecting and prepared to hear, the notice that construction is about to begin comes as a multi-million-dollar shock.
Sharing information with owners is important not only for the obvious reason (they need to know if a special assessment is coming – or if the water is going to be turned off), but also because keeping owners informed is a way of keeping them involved . Owners are more likely to support a project – even an expensive, messy, inconvenient one – if they feel they have been part of the decision-making process.

With that goal in mind, Abel has found that a well-orchestrated “dog-and-pony show’ at which an engineer or another professional (not the manager or the board) explains why the project is necessary, what at will entail and what it will cost, is essential. A detailed explanation of the project, he says, goes a long way toward overcoming opposition to it. “Owners are still concerned and upset about the cost,” he says, “but it’s like letting the air out of a balloon – all the anger goes away. This works all the time,” Abel has found, although, he admits, there was one community where it wasn’t effective. “But those owners were crazy.”

Picture This
When describing an architectural design or color scheme, industry executives say, it helps if owners can visualize the plan. “A picture really is worth a thousand words,” notes Shaffer, who says he regularly tacks strips of fabric colors and paint chips on story boards with pictures of light fixtures and carpet samples, “so owners will have an idea what the finished project will look like.”
In one of his projects, Abel had the contractor put up shingle strips in four different colors on four different quadrants of a wall, so owners could see the different color choices next to the building trim. When owners in another community Abel manages were debating whether to use vinyl or clapboard siding, the board had the contractor use vinyl on a free-standing meeting house. Owners saw the effect and decided they wanted clapboard on the residential buildings instead. The meetinghouse “is the only building in the community that doesn’t need any maintenance,” Abel points out, “but the owners reached a consensus and were happy with their decision.”
Managers generally agree that giving owners some input in design decisions is useful, but within limits. “You want them to know the board has considered their preferences,” Shaffer says, “but you also want to make it clear that it’s the board that makes the final decisions.” With that key message in mind, you don’t want to ask owners, “What color do you want to paint the lobby?” But you might want to ask if they prefer blue or green. And if there seems to be strong support for both colors, one manager suggests, “pick a third color instead.”

Surprise!
While boards and managers should do all they can to make sure owners know what a finished project will look like and what the construction process will entail, as a practical matter, they can’t predict everything. “We’re not clairvoyant,” Levy says.
This is something Brawley knows all too well. She recalls a window replacement project that seemed perfectly straightforward, until she saw that the dumpsters intended for construction waste had been filled before the work had begun. It turned out that owners had been using their porches, where the windows were located, for storage. The window installation provided an excuse to clear out unwanted junk, which was filling the dumpsters and spilling onto the sidewalks and into the streets.
Brawley solved the problem by organizing a community-wide garage sale and bringing in rolling containers to free the dumpsters for the contractor, but not before the overflow had attracted complaints from neighbors and a visit from the local health department. “It was a mess,” says Brawley, who had anticipated many other potential problems with the window project—but not the need to organize a garage sale.
If there is anything that can be predicted with absolute certainty about any construction project, it is that even with the best planning, something, and probably several things will go wrong, or at least, not exactly as expected.
When Abel went to inspect the siding that had been applied to one of the buildings in a town home community, he discovered that it was not just a little off but “all wrong. There were bad cuts everywhere,” he says. “I just stood there staring at it. Fortunately, it was on the outside, where we could see it.”
There is a good reason industry executives say, “You get what you inspect, not what you expect.”

Now What?
Brawley got a similarly unwelcome surprise when she went to inspect what she thought would be the successful completion of a well-installation in a cul de sac with million-dollar homes. The purpose was to provide more efficient irrigation for the landscaping and reduce the owners’ water bills. “It was a beautification project,” Brawley says. But what she saw was anything but beautiful: “A God-awful bunch of pressure-treated two-by-fours standing five feet high, with electrical meters attached to them.”
Like Abel confronted with the horrid siding, Brawley could only stare and wonder what had gone wrong. The site manager explained that the electrical code required this installation. But why was it a surprise, Brawley wanted to know. “Did no one explain this to the site manager in advance? Did the site manager not tell me?” In any event, no one had told the owners, who, Brawley says, were anything but pleased with the outcome.
Her thoughts necessarily, turned quickly from “how did this happen” to “what can we do about it?” The solution was to paint the structure green “so it disappeared from the street” and plant some trees and high grass to improve the owners’ view. While this was probably the best solution possible under the circumstances, for Brawley, the experience still rankles. “We thought we were about to unveil a beautiful finished project, and instead, we had this pimple to which we were applying acne medicine. It wasn’t pretty.”
The worst part, Brawley says, was not identifying the problem, alerting owners to it, and devising a solution in advance. Instead, she says, “we were taken completely by surprise; when owners called to complain, we didn’t have an immediate answer. That’s not a position any manager wants to be in.”
If unpleasant surprises are the yen of construction projects, the need to respond quickly and creatively is the yang, as Brawley did here (with the painting and planting) and with the hastily-arranged garage sale for the window replacement project. When Levy discovered that nails dislodged during a re-roofing project were falling through downspouts and onto the streets in one of his communities, he had the spouts covered with socks – “a $5 solution on a $1 million project,” he notes.
These experiences underscore not only the need for managers to be creative, but also the need for them to be deeply involved in a construction project, so they can be responsive to owners and closely attuned to their needs. This is, of course, true of association management in general, but during a construction project, it is true in spades.
If he hadn’t been monitoring the roofing project, Levy notes, he might have dismissed the report about nails in the street as an overly picky complaint from an owner known to be unreasonable, instead of investigating and responding before one owner’s complaint about a few stray nails had become 20 owners’ complaints about flat attires.

Concentrating on the Owners
From beginning to end, the manager’s focus has to be on the owners whose lives are being disrupted and whose homes are being invaded psychologically and sometimes physically, as well. As any association manager who has been involved in a construction project will tell you, a contractor who understands what it means to be working in and around peoples’ homes is essential.
Dannin recalls one project on which 14 contractors initially expressed interest, but only three were willing to bid when the board outlined the requirements for minimizing disruption to the community. And the contractor the board selected withdrew shortly after beginning work. “He said it would be easier to build from scratch,” Dannin explains.
“You have to assess the level of service owners expect and the amount of disruption they will tolerate” and plan accordingly, McBride says. To reduce the inconvenience while a parking lot was being repaved, he found alternative parking at a nearby mall and provided a shuttle bus to transport owners to and from their cars.
“Little accommodations go a long way,” Dannin agrees. When an ancient elevator was being replaced in one of his communities, he designated one day each week as “grocery day” when aides would be available to carry packages to the upper floors.

Taking it Personally
Managers must put themselves in the shoes of owners, Dannin emphasizes. “You have to see what they see and feel what they feel” during a construction project. In the monster building envelope replacement project described earlier, owners looking at the scaffolding enveloping their buildings complained about the unsightly clutter created by tools and other items left behind each day – a violation of the construction contact, which required the contractor to maintain a “neat” site. But from the perspective of the contractor and his workers, Dannin says, the scaffolding was the equivalent of their office, and they thought it was perfectly neat. Dannin had to build a bridge between the two perspectives.
“We had to explain more clearly to the contractor what we meant by ‘neat,’ he says. But he also had to persuade owners to reconsider just how “neat” they could reasonably expect the site to be.
In a town home community Dannin managed, owners were incensed by the sight of the charred remains of a residence that had been destroyed by fire. They wanted the structure removed immediately, but the contractor, citing legitimate safety concerns, was moving slowly to clear the site. Dannin’s solution was to install a chain link fence around the site (required for safety), which he had covered in mesh, to make it less visible and less unsightly to owners.
That level of concern and almost obsessive attention to detail are hallmarks of any successful community association construction project. “You have to care,” Dannin says. But managers who care intensely also “take everything personally,” and Dannin admits, “it’s hard to draw the line.” But if you don’t care, if you don’t take construction problems personally, he warns, “you will miss things that are important to owners.” Striking a balance is important, but difficult. If he is going to err, Dannin says, it’s not going to be on the side of caring too little. “You can’t be too wrong if you care too much.”