The Challenge

The Draper Approach

Results Realized

The Challenge

The Georgia Institute of Technology's Technology Square is a lively mixed-use development that places the Institute's business-oriented education and service programs in the midst of Atlanta 's emerging technology business sector. Located off Atlanta's I-75/I-85 downtown connector, the $179 million state-of-the-art technology facility provides a home for the university's Dupree College of Management and Economic Development Institute, executive education and interdisciplinary technology centers, a global learning center, 252-room hotel and conference center, a 1,500-space parking garage (600,000 gsf), a 50,000 gross square feet (gsf) Barnes & Noble bookstore, and 20,000 gsf of retail space, including a Starbucks, mini-grocery, ice-cream parlor, hair salon, and numerous restaurants.

In early 2000, the Georgia Tech Foundation selected Draper & Associates to serve as the Owner's Agent for the university's Technology Square project. This fast-track project included a demanding schedule and strict timelines that would guarantee the facility to open by the fall 2003 school year.

The Draper Approach

Draper & Associates began by reviewing the Master Developer agreement and offered consultation on the:

With programming and schematic design having begun in September 2000, and a phased construction start in mid 2001, Draper & Associates was also responsible for reviewing construction documents to ensure compliance with the program and budget, analyzing bid packages, and monitoring the performance of the Master Developer, Master Architect and the General Contractor. Issues relative to the project schedule and budget are integrated between the Owner and Master-Developer by Draper & Associates.

Liaison services also provided by Draper & Associates included: preparing briefings for the Owner and distilled, summarized and prepared recommendations for the Owner. These recommendations included; validation and verification of Design/Builder's adherence to contractual requirements, verifications of adherence to programmatic requirements, to accept, reject or modify change order requests and review of payments, pay requests, and invoices.

Draper & Associates worked closely with the Office of Budget and Finance to regularly review the unexpended plant funds; amending and modifying the capital program as necessary to meet the current conditions, and to provide Georgia Tech with a strong audit trail for various capital and infrastructure projects.

To support legislative funding initiatives, Draper & Associates illustrated the correlation various factors, e.g., the number of stations/room, the faculty/student ratio, number of degrees offered, schedule, etc., have on the utilization rates of classrooms, lecture halls and lab space. We developed a space-scaled, time-sequenced planning graphic (Nozar Chart) to illustrate how 109 various departments and user groups relocations within one million new ASF and 300,000 ASF of renovated/adaptive reuse spaces over five years.

Additional Georgia Tech projects for which these services have been provided in the last four years include but are not limited to, the $45 million Campus Recreation Center , the $32 million U.A. Whitaker Biomedical Engineering Building and a number of other buildings including research laboratories, office buildings, etc.

Results Realized

Draper & Associates is proud to say that of the projects it has been associated with at Georgia Tech over the past 15 years the cost of none them have exceeded its final budget. Because of the use of the design-build delivery methodology on many of the Georgia Tech projects undertaken in more recent years and the judicious incorporation of sufficient but not excessive contingencies in the initial budgeting of all projects, change order experience has been much less than would typically be expected. On most of the design-build projects there have been no change orders, thus for all projects over the past four years change orders amounted to 2% of project cost. On projects where change orders were encountered they ranged from 5% to 19% of project cost.

Project schedule performance is of key importance in an academic environment. Projects are typically planned such that construction is completed allowing furnishing, move-in and occupancy at the start of the school year. If this targeted completion date is missed, a higher education facility typically sits relatively idle until the start of the subsequent semester. As such, schedule monitoring is of paramount importance. Of the Georgia Tech projects for which Draper & Associates has provided a program management role, none of the academic facilities were completed behind schedule, in fact on average they were completed a month ahead of schedule. This is not to say that all these projects ran smoothly from start to finish. In several instances, great concern was raised on projects as much as a year in advance of their targeted completion date due to contractor performance, weather, or unforeseen condition impacts. In all these cases on the academic buildings, recovery solutions were implemented such that the projects were completed timely.