Work Smart with the SCA McGraw-Hill Supplement - 24

A SPECIAL ADVERTISING SUPPLEMENT TO NEW YORK CONSTRUCTION HOW ARE WE DOING? onstructive feedback, provided in a timely and consistent manner, is an invaluable tool for keeping projects on track and maintaining a successful working relationship between the SCA and its consultants. Now the SCA is seeking to strengthen the way it manages the consultant evaluation process. Under the old process, consultant evaluations were a oncea-year report card on an entire year’s work. That will change when the SCA introduces CES, the new automated Consultant Evaluation System currently being piloted as a module of the Authority’s new Vendor Access System (VAS). CONSOLIDATED FEEDBACK FROM ALL DEPARTMENTS CES is the product of a collaborative interdepartmental effort within the SCA. Relevant best practices across the nation were examined before developing speci" cations for the new software, with the goal of providing consultants with thoughtful and balanced feedback regarding every aspect of their performance. The " rst phase of the project is being spearheaded by the Architecture & Engineering Department, which manages contracts with a large number of design consultants, and Construction Management, which is evaluating Mentor Program construction managers. All Capital Improvement Program (CIP) and Capacity (or Line) projects are developed in two key phases – scope and design. In the scoping phase, the design team investigates and provides detailed information regarding the scope of the work, identi" es all design issues and makes recommendations. In the design phase, the team translates the scope into a set of drawings and speci" cations that can be put out to bid. CES is programmed to electronically route questions to key SCA participants at critical stages in the process for each project, including scope and design, bid and award, and construction. To ensure that evaluations are fast, fair and constructive, questions are tailored to the involvement of each department and presented in a short questionnaire format. Ratings are clearly de" ned for consistency. Once all responses are submitted, the results are aggregated, reviewed and approved to produce a consolidated evaluation for each project milestone, which can be shared electronically with the consultant for their consideration and comment. EFFICIENT FEEDBACK BENEFITS THE SCA AND CONSULTANTS “Consultants want to know if they’re providing quality service that pleases us, or if they need to perform differently,” says E. Bruce Barrett, Vice President of Architecture & Engineering, “so this system provides a means for the SCA to communicate COMING SOON: AUTOMATED CONSULTANT EVALUATIONS the need for change, provide feedback and recognize good work many times during the year.” The new system will provide SCA staff with a faster, easier method for collecting and summarizing feedback at regular intervals throughout a project. This will give consultants a more complete perspective on the SCA’s concerns and encourage better project management from design through commissioning by identifying and communicating performance issues sooner, so they can be addressed. CES is expected to promote stronger and more productive working relationships between SCA staff and consultants. “The system will allow us to offer consistent and ef" cient evaluations. The idea is not to give people a grade; it’s to give them a constructive learning tool,” says Barbara Gavosto, Director of Contractor Quali" cation. Barrett adds, “One real value of the automatic consultant evaluations lies in the opportunity for individual SCA departments to rate the consultants on their performance as it impacts the success of that department’s work. This will allow " rms to understand and respond to the full range of concerns that arise.” The new system will also allow the SCA to quickly and effectively identify cross-cutting issues and trends as they emerge and to make relevant comparisons through analysis of data that spans all of its consultants in support of the Authority’s continuous improvement efforts. “The system will help us eliminate paper, conduct meaningful management reporting, educate our consultants and evaluate workload – theirs and ours,” says Gavosto. Providing information at the click of a button, CES will increase transparency, provide more information, include more people in the evaluation process, and store consultant evaluation data in a single, central repository accessible to all who need it. “This new consultant evaluation system allows us to be very proactive, as you can quickly see who is excelling and in what areas,” says Beatriz Castaño, Chief Accountability Of" cer. “It provides proper constructive criticism, which creates dialogue and will inevitably improve overall performance. One of the best attributes of the new system is its capacity to help us identify our top performers, which gives us the opportunity to assign projects accordingly.” Testing of CES is currently underway, and the Authority expects to begin implementing the " rst phase of the system early in 2010 for design consultants and construction managers, followed shortly thereafter by other contract types until all consultants are part of the system. ■ 23

Work Smart with the SCA McGraw-Hill Supplement

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