people focused on the issue, you can resolve
whatever you are facing. This usually means slowing
down to analyze the issue and evaluate options.
You need to be good at problem solving, or I should
say, good at working with people to solve problems.
There will always be problems and being able to help
find solutions is part of the job. A lot of times if the
problem is technical, you may not have the expertise
to resolve the issue so working with people is
essential. On High Speed Rail, we had teams within
teams. For example, the environmental team had
experts in biology, anthropology, hazardous waste
and CEQA among others. If an issue arose involving
the Blunt Nosed Leopard Lizard or the San Juaquin
Valley Antelope Squirrel, that was definitely outside
of my expertise, but I knew who to call.
More than any technical skill is the ability to work
with people and having good communication and
problem-solving skill—that distinguishes good
construction managers.
What do you make of P3’s (Public-Private
Partnerships) increasingly used to deliver projects?
I haven’t been personally involved in a P3 project,
I think the concept is interesting, but getting the
right balance so that both parties’ benefit is tricky.
The City of Long Beach is using this approach on
building the new Civic Center and from what I hear,
it is going well. I think the approach is useful in the
right circumstances. I think of it as a tool and it
needs to be the right tool for the job. Depending on
circumstances, other approaches such as Design-
Build, CM at Risk or the old standby Design-Bid-
Build might be more suitable.
You’ve been involved in what some might call,
mega-projects. How do you navigate managing
these enormous, complex projects that can total
over $1 billion?
The thing about mega-projects is that they require
you to continually change your focus. You go back
and forth between focusing on the overall program,
looking at how the big pieces that make up the
program fit together and then you find yourself
having to get into the minute details involved with
an individual project. For example, on the segment
of the California high-speed rail that I worked
on we had something like 50 grade separations.
Each one of those was a separate project and
required a detailed design, schedule and plan to
accomplish the work. Each of these sub-projects
had all the same requirements and issues of any
construction project. The overall schedule for that
6
segment had something like 4,000 line items. And
then we would typically break it down further on
the three-week look ahead schedules. You can’t look
at that many activities and make sense of it, so
you need to sort it and look at it in different ways
to see different elements of the work. You may see
all the grade separations on the critical path and
evaluate how each of those subprojects fit into the
overall schedule. You may then need to zoom in on
the details related to one particular project. For
The thing about mega-projects
is that they require you to
continually change your focus.
example, will the formwork and rebar for the east
abutment on bridge number four be ready to pour
before the fourth of July holiday, because if that
pour slips you lose a minimum of 4 days and if that
activity is on the critical path, the bridge slips and
the whole program is in danger of slipping. I have
been fortunate enough to work on a number of these
large projects and the thing they all have in common
is that they require teams of people to work together
closely to accomplish what individuals could not.
Do you see construction slowing down any time
soon in California?
I don’t see it so much slowing down as perhaps
changing. ASCE does a report card on infrastructure
and for 2019 they give the nation as a whole a D+,
while California got a C-. That means a lot of our
infrastructure is past its design life and more and
more of it is failing or requiring more maintenance.
Even in a down economy, at some point you have to
spend money to fix failing infrastructure. Then you
have technology which continues to advance and
create more changes. Right now, the construction
industry is facing a skilled labor shortage, so you
are seeing contractors adopt new ways of attracting
and training workers. There are a variety of ways
to execute a project: Design-Build, CM at Risk, P3’s
Design-Bid-Build. There are also new ways of doing
things. For example, there are companies out there
experimenting with robotic drywall installation and
robotic brick layers. Modular construction is taking
off, cross laminated timber, LEED, Net Zero. The one
constant is that things change and you need to be
prepared for those changes.