Live Case Study: The Peaks and Valleys of VDC Implementation on Major Projects

ALEX BELKOFER: All right. Well, good morning, everybody. We're going to start on time here and be respectful everybody's schedule today. Good to see everybody at 8:00 bright and early. Thanks for coming out. So hopefully Chris and I aren't going to bore you too much. We got some cool stuff to show you guys today. We're excited about the opportunity. So, welcome. Hopefully, you're in this class and not another class.

CHRIS CAMPBELL: And if not, we're still glad you're here.

ALEX BELKOFER: Oh, absolutely. Absolutely, yeah. So thank you again. We'll go ahead and kick this off here. My name is Alex Belkofer from McCarthy Building Companies.

CHRIS CAMPBELL: And I'm Chris Campbell, also with McCarthy. We're both out of our St. Louis office. Snowing at home right now, and we got about 5 or 6 inches to welcome us home tomorrow.

ALEX BELKOFER: That's right.

CHRIS CAMPBELL: It'll be good.

ALEX BELKOFER: So, glad to be here today. Two messages before we start. This is an opportunity to share an ongoing case study that we have right now on one of our major projects in St. Louis with one of our great clients at Washington University in St. Louis. But while it's a case study, it's also a great time to take an opportunity to reflect on where we think we are as an industry from a project delivery standpoint. This is a very large project, and we'll get into all those details.

But at the end of the day, this presentation is hopefully meant to be a good status check for us. You know, how are we integrating as an organization in McCarthy with our design partners, with our owner partners, with our trade partners? Are we really doing the things that we think that we're doing in 2018 going into 2019? And so this project will highlight some of the things that have worked well. We'll talk about some things that are still challenges for us and how we're overcoming those in 2018 going into the new year. So thanks for joining us today.

So real quick, Alex Belkofer. My background's in construction operations. I began my career as a project engineer, found VDC later in my lifetime, and now I'm blessed with the opportunity to help McCarthy lead VDC in our central region.

CHRIS CAMPBELL: I'm Chris Campbell again. Come from an architectural background. Latched on to any kind of visualization presentation. And it has taken me to this point to help build a team in our St. Louis office and then manage our team across the country.

ALEX BELKOFER: Yeah. Let's get into it. Let's get into it. So, real quick before you get little bit of background on Washington University. Just so I understand the audience here, who are design professionals here in the audience? OK, Very good. Any owners in the audience? No owners today, OK. And then contractors? All right, what about any trade contractors? All right, good. We've got a couple. OK, good. Good.

So a little bit about Washington University if you do not know them-- founded in 1854, very known for its what they call Collegiate Gothic style architecture. So the campus, as you can see, is very ornate, very articulate with the way that they do their architectural practices. It's a beautiful campus. If you ever get a chance to come stop by and visit us, please come see the project. But this is a great opportunity to build something that they'd never done before.

This project specifically for Washington University, the East Campus Enhancements project is about a $250 million construction project, about eight different components. And as you look at the overall cross-section of what we're doing here, this is the university's largest undertaking that they've ever done as a one-time construction project. So pretty monumental opportunity for Washington University. We're really proud to be a part of it.

So we're construction manager-at-risk on the project. A lot of different components to this project. There's five new buildings. There's one addition to an existing building that we actually did prior, Kemper Hall. Of course, extensive site work. This project essentially is completely ripping up and redoing the entire front entrance to Washington University. So we'll get to some pictures here in a minute.

But this main drive right here-- this is Brookings Drive right here coming into the campus. Right now, this is all torn up and we've pretty much given it a whole facelift, OK? And so this is a major opportunity for them to change the approach and the entrance into their campus, OK? Two big things here, it's 24 acres over the course of three years. The project itself actually will be completed within a two-year construction frame. And then the last leg of it-- the last year is going to be the McKelvey Hall building, which is separate from the job but goes right there where that number 4 is.

One of the biggest challenges here with us, though-- we have over 20 different design and construction professionals that we have to interface with. So as a CM at risk, this is not design-build. This is not IPD. You can imagine the amount of challenges that we probably already faced going into the project. And we'll talk more about that as we get into this.

So, this was the existing state I mentioned, Brookings Drive. This was kind of that straight shot, that view into campus. Brookings Hall is their main building here. This is where the chancellor of the university has their office. And so you can imagine all this parking space and all this vegetation was completely transformed by the new design here. And so, a little bit bigger picture that gives you an idea of what it's going to be come May of next year. And again, the eight components here.

Probably one of the most things that is unique about this is we're putting an underground parking garage in that is one of the most ridiculous parking garages I think we've ever seen. We built-- literally buried a garage 80 feet in the ground. And this is probably the nicest concrete you'll ever see. We got some photos to show you. But they nicknamed this the Garage Mahal on the project job site. And there's a lot of reasons for that.

And then by building. The design of these buildings is meant to be very transparent. Our design partners from several different architecture firms that we're partnered with had this really very transparent style. It's meant to blend in with the vegetation of the new development of the park. There's a couple of buildings, though, that still reflect more of that Collegiate Gothic architecture style, primarily Jubel. Jubel really blends in well. The other buildings, though, are very high transparency-- a lot of glass, a lot of open space to really show off the system designs of the buildings.

And so this will be, at the end of the day, what it's going to be. This is that view that they wanted. So this is-- you know, when you enter Washington University from the main drive there on Skinker-- that's that view they were going for. You still get to see Brookings Hall, which is their crown jewel. And then McKelvey is going to end up going here. Again, separate project. We actually just started this. This one's coming out of the ground as we speak right now.

All right, so let's get into some of the challenges here, right? And this is where we really wanted to start to talk about the essence of deploying VDC on a major scale on a project like this. Scale, I think, was obviously the most important part of this, right? Eight major components to your time frame, 20 different design professionals. You know, that kind of speaks for itself that our overall schedule was going to be something that was going to be a challenge early.

And then, of course, the speed. With all those different people having to make decisions and make decisions timely, we knew that was going to be a challenge going into this. And then, of course, the management of everybody's expectations. And we'll get into more of those challenges as we have to walk through our approach to BIM execution, 3D coordination, putting work in place in the field, and some of the things that did occur early on.

So, some of the key elements. I'm going to speak to communication and expectations first. One of the most important things I think that everybody needs to understand on a job like this with a VDC strategy is that communication piece-- who's touching who, when are they touching them, where these pieces of communication need to fall in line, whether it's cloud-based communication, whether it's by email, whether it's by phone-- all that needed to have a strategy.

And that all went into our early BIM execution effort. I think a lot of people just look at the technology in BIM execution, and they're not thinking about that people part of it. That people part is still critical for us. That still drives what we do. We have this wonderful technology out there. But without the people side of it and having a communication plan that actually goes into the BIM execution plan, none of this works.

And then the expectations piece. Again, at McCarthy, we have about 45 people on this photo on the job site full time for us. So it's all of our managers, our superintendents people really driving work at the point of attack. Outside those 45 people, we have another 300 to 350 McCarthy craft people on the job site, actually putting work in place. And then on top of that, there's expectations, and of course, from Washington University, all their owners, reps, and our design partners.

CHRIS CAMPBELL: So, yeah. And then there's a trust component too, right? Because to deliver a job of this scale in two years, our project superintendents and project directors came to us to say, look, we can't do this without performing in-house modeling of all the concrete, all the lift drawings, so that we can be as efficient as we can on site.

And that puts a lot of trust on our team, both our personnel that were in the office and the personnel that we had on site daily delivering those concrete models. But it's understanding that these aren't a representation of what's being built. These are what's being built, right? And so there is a trust there that we had of what they were telling us, and what they had with us, and what we're delivering to them so that we could execute this project in the time that was given to us.

And that just talks about our teamwork too. It was a one-team state of mind. It wasn't, oh, you guys are the BIM guys out in the middle of nowhere or coming to us virtually. It's, we're going to get together. We're going to work arm-in-arm on this job. And we're deliver a good project at the end of the day.

ALEX BELKOFER: And so a lot of that strategy going into the teamwork piece was our operational involvement as a VDC team with the project at the point of attack. This was not, as we like to say, Batman coming in and saving the day, doing VDC, and leaving. This was definitely a collaborative, hybrid approach. And that's how we like to approach it at McCarthy-- is that operational and VDC hybrid execution.

And so in order to do that, we had to come up with two things, really. It's an early start plan and an early execution plan and set expectations. I'll explain this graphic real fast. I think it's important. The project job site leader, Ryan Moss, our director, came up with this graphic-- this concept to feed the machine. And I'll be honest, the first time I saw that graphic on a poster in the job site, I'm like, man, it seems kind of mechanical. What does that mean, "feed the machine"? It just sounds like a bunch of robots going into work and just turning those wheels.

But the essence of "feed the machine" though is more about understanding what we had to do for our client in a short time frame. We knew that we had to be like a well-oiled machine. And so it wasn't about just being mechanical about doing what we're doing. It's about being methodical and being very intentional about how we do things so that we're not repeating work, so that we're able to work together, to keep that well-oiled machine, which is the whole McCarthy project delivery, going, OK?

And so, early start, right? So, planning and design, site prep and excavation. We'll get into that here in a minute. There's some really cool videos and some photos to show you guys about that. Getting out of the ground early was what was paramount for us. And you think, what does that have to do with VDC? Well, Chris is going to show you guys in a little bit how VDC helped us get out of the ground early.

And then, of course, setting expectations. It was my responsibility to really make sure that our BIM execution strategy at the beginning of this was clear. And we'll talk a little bit more with a couple examples on what was clear and where we lost some opportunity, where we thought we had clear expectations that we had to realign.

CHRIS CAMPBELL: Yeah, so planning on a job like this, although we had a two-year time frame to get the majority of these buildings done, the planning started well before that-- 2 and 1/2 years before that-- because of how monumental this project is in the city of St. Louis. All eyes were on this project, right? And so on top of that, Washington University employs a ton of really, really incredibly smart individuals, much smarter myself.

But that comes with a lot of opinions in the room, OK? Any of you who have worked with campus owners know that they take a lot of pride in their campus. And they have their campus at the top of their minds at all times. And so you have to be accommodating, but you also have to be real, in fact, that we have to get this job done for you guys. And so we bring a lot to the table in that planning effort. And so it was a great partnership. You always have your ebbs and flows, and we'll get to those.

But planning had to start early because we have to accommodate commencements and graduations and summer schedules and the height of the school year. And so there's a lot more-- as any of you who have worked on a massive college campus, when it's a live campus, there's a lot more to it. And so we'll get to the specifics of that. But planning started 2, 2 and 1/2 years before we ever put a shovel in the ground for a job like this. And we probably made 15 iterations of that small crane plan over there just because we were shifting and moving and seeing what would be best to accommodate the schedule.

ALEX BELKOFER: And in order to start a lot of that, we actually started in the modeling environment, right? So while Chris and our team really started to make a lot of these plans, modeling began very early. We had a strategy at beginning the project where we're going to have a model-based approach. And so everything we started to do from day one was model-focused, was model-centric.

So let's talk about that expectation piece of how we're going to employ a model-based approach as a builder on a project like this, right? So, preplanning for execution, right? So, BIM execution meetings. There's a couple of different types of meetings that we do at McCarthy. I usually like to start off with a VDC execution meeting with just our owner and our designers to make sure that we have good alignment, which is a good best practice that we have. We don't like getting halfway down the road and being misaligned. So we usually start off with that. And then we'll do our normal trade coordination kickoff meetings with our trade partners.

But the big part of that, though, is create an execution plan that was effective, but it worked across all eight components. So normally we do an execution plan per building. This was probably one of the rare ones where we did it for all eight buildings together. And so we had a very articulated LOD matrix that talked exactly about what was the expectation modeling content-wise on all the different components. And it talked about our processes and talked about how we were actually to deploy this throughout the two years.

CHRIS CAMPBELL: So our project director came to us and said, hey, everybody is talking about this job. And everybody's talking about bits and pieces. They say Jubel. They say Hub. They say McKelvey. They say Weil. But nobody knows what that all looks like over time. So they said, we need a tool to help communicate quickly to both our on-site personnel, our leadership, and our subcontractors. So they come on board. What this project is going to look like when it all comes together?

So we commissioned this job. And all it is is a very diagrammatic look at these buildings coming together, the crane schedules, over time. So you'll see the bar of information really light on the bottom. And so what you'll see is we've been on-site, according to this plan, for less than five months. And we've already got a 60-foot hole dug in the ground and foundations going in. And so just the breadth of this project was supposed to be communicating. As we developed this and we started to see all these things coming together, honestly it gave us a little bit of a scare. We're like, OK, this is going to be a serious undertaking. OK, all these pieces have come together.

But what it also did was it gave our subcontractors a little scare as well. They're scared right alongside us. And that's actually a good thing, because we wanted people who are going to get on board with us, and they're going to be real with us about, hey, for us to get a job done like this, we got to price it this way. And that's what we want to now. We want to know that these people are with us, that they're going to be with us through the entirety of this job, and they're going to give us their best personnel. Because that's what we need for a job like this. And so the job-- this did what it was supposed to do. But it wasn't supposed to be a super flashy thing. It was just supposed to be, hey, let's communicate what this is going to look like at any point in time so we can stop and see where we're at.

What you'll see next, we start to give some of the campus back. And that was a big part of this. We communicate to the ownership that we're going to give much as back as we could. And then we wanted to give him just a quick, early look. And these were early models, and they have changed a lot. Again, this is supposed give him an idea of, OK, what are these things supposed to look like at the end of the day? So you see, very unobtrusive, yes. We are installing full glass elevators out there. So that's to not obstruct the view of the campus in any way.

I mean, when Alex mentioned that this is their Broadway right here-- I mean, this is the campus right here. This is the entrance to the entire place. That's supposed to be a park-like feeling. It's supposed to be what WashU is known for. And so you'll see that communicated design and all the planning that goes into it.

ALEX BELKOFER: Just to feed on one thing that Chris said-- you know, the scare moment for a lot of the trades, seeing the simultaneous work-- that's a theme throughout this project, people needing to understand how things are happening both in sequence and how things are happening in more of a start-to-start, overlapped-type environment. That became a topic of conversation early on in trade coordination. We'll talk about, you know, people needed to understand that we're coordinating all the buildings at the same time. There was no, do one building and then go to the next and go to the next. It was all happening at the same time. And so resources became a challenge, and we'll talk about that.

CHRIS CAMPBELL: And that's why I put really peppy music to the background of it so people get really excited about that.

ALEX BELKOFER: That's right.

CHRIS CAMPBELL: And so we jumped right in, right? So this was less than one month out on the job site. We're out there. We're mobilized. We got trucks starting to roll. We've got foundation starting get dug in on multiple areas. You can see a lot of those trees have been removed, if not all of them at this point. We're starting to drill piles. We're starting to get our different footings dug. And so we're getting our personnel out there, but they were already out there. They are already moving. We didn't have any time to waste.

And what was an ace-in-the-hole for us and this project is being able to leverage our partners, Castle, who is an in-house contractor for us that got out there and they just rocked this excavation. What you're going to see is this is a three-month-- just drone own video of just the progression from month to month. So we've been going out since the start of this job. And we've been going once a month to just show the massive undertaking that's been going on. So this goes one month later, one month and a week or so, and we're already down--

ALEX BELKOFER: That's in one month.

CHRIS CAMPBELL: Look how far down in the ground. I mean, it was just constant truck traffic. Constant truck traffic backed up, truck after truck after truck after truck. And so these guys got us started. They crushed the excavation portion of this. They got us off to the right start and allowed us to continue to be successful when we started putting our footings and foundations in. So what you're going to see is we'll go from this one-month view. And you'll see just in two months how deep this hole really got. And the excavators being sunk in really gives you the scale of this thing.

But there's a lot more, too. We say, you know, trucks hauling out dirt. OK, it's a massive campus. No problem. Well, the route that they had to go, Skinker is-- I mean, it is right on Forest Park. Anybody who's been to St. Louis-- I mean, that is a monumental road. And everybody uses it, especially campus traffic. And so we had to agree to keep that baby clean, to keep it functional, and to not totally stop that for 2 and 1/2 years, 3 years.

So there's a lot more to it. And that's why the logitistics just took so many years beforehand. But you can see now in two months we're down and we're pouring footings and foundations. So it was a massive dirt undertaking. We'll get into some of the technology we used to make that a successful undertaking. And we can't give Castle enough credit for getting us jumped off to the right start.

ALEX BELKOFER: And so as you can see, the Garage Mahal is starting to take life now. OK. So let's get into the fun part here, right? So I like to look at it as pre-BIMing and BIMing, right? What are we doing before we actually start really creating model content and really starting to dig in with our trade partners? And then what actually happens during the actual story, right? Well, we all know about expectations and reality. The way I like to look at it is this.

We have two roads, right? We have an execution plan. And the road looks pretty straight. We can see the flag at the end. We know there might be a little bit of a challenge here and there. But we think we've got a pretty clear plan. The maximum effort, of course, is always going to be in that middle. We know that going into it that execution strategy is meant to communicate what that challenge is going to be early. We talk about resources. We talk about milestones, substantial completion for sign-off for coordination.

And then you have the actual journey and what actually happens, right? And that effort right there is really part of the story. And that's what we're going to share with you, is we're going to talk about those challenges. Because it's easy to come up and give a presentation that talks about everything that worked well. But we as an industry still have a long way to go. And we want to talk about how we overcame some of those challenges and [INAUDIBLE] on this project together.

So let's look at the pre-BIMing-- all the things that we did in advance to really get this thing going and really make sure that we had clear expectations, right? So starting with 3D coordination, I already talked about those execution meetings-- you know, letting our lead mechanical contractor drive the process. And I'll talk about that for a minute. A lot of different builders and mechanical contractors have different strategies in how they lead coordination.

St. Louis has a great opportunity. We're very blessed with a lot of very robust trade contractors. We have a lot of partners in St. Louis who are used to doing design-build MEP coordination. And so we gave them an opportunity early on to lead coordination for each building. What that means necessarily is they're driving the overall Navisworks process. They're driving the actual clash detection while McCarthy is still facilitating, still leading that though as the builder, OK?

But we had a lot of great feedback early from the trades going into bidding and scope reviews. And they said, we want to take on that responsibility if you'll let us. And we said, OK, we'll start out that way. One of the main reasons why we did that is because McCarthy made a commitment early to self-perform all this work and also model all of it.

Our 35-year superintendent, our senior superintendent, Mike Noll, on this project said we're modeling all the concrete in this building if McCarthy is going to be doing this work. That coming from a guy like that is very powerful. And he wanted to do model-based field layout. Everything was going be done with the digital total station, shot in for accuracy. And so we started down that road. And that's what we did early. We knew what that effort was going to take. That's primarily one of the reasons why we let our lead and mechanical contractors take on that responsibility in tandem with us, OK?

Cloud-based collaboration, of course, is going to be important. So multiple different cloud platforms we're using at McCarthy, so we had to make sure that that communication plan was clear on who's putting stuff where, how often, frequency, and then, of course, our meetings-- in-person, web meetings, you know. There's always a strategy going into trade coordination where people want to be remote at their computer back at their office. We had to emplore more of a hybrid strategy in this project because we had so many McCarthy people at the point of attack, driving this work. We needed to make sure that our trades were engaged with the people that are putting the work in place in the field. And so having a hybrid strategy of meetings in-person and web was critical in getting started out of the gate.

CHRIS CAMPBELL: And so another thing that our 35-year superintendent, as techie as he is, came to us and said, hey, we need a solution so that we have one single source to get all of our information. And so we developed this in house. It's just a simple project dashboard that acts kind of as a hub for all the information our on-site personnel would need. And so we didn't have anything that was working perfect. We were using different solutions for docs. We were using different solutions for our RFIs and contracts and everything. And we said, we need one hub for this project. Already we have six different mini projects going on. We need one area to access everything.

And so there are layers and layers behind this. You can break it out by building, but even down to just having the weather at the click of a finger. We're all about safety on our job sites. And so the only thing they're allowed to have out-- and they're never allowed to be on their cell phone. It's, hey, you got your iPad and you want to be able to have something that has all this information you might need. So we have everything from construction documents broken out by building, the concrete placement drawings, weather, site logistics, and they just act as one way to keep it all there.

And so in the site logistics, in that preplanning, before we ever started digging that massive hole, is we had to come up with these logistics plans. We had probably seven or eight that we went through, but we won't bore you with all of them. But essentially, you can see that this massive area on the right side here-- we essentially take all of it. We don't take it all at one time, but we take most of it.

And what that means is fire safety, entrances and exits for these students, overhead protection-- how's that all going to work, and how's it going to change? So when I say we had seven or eight of them, we had seven or eight because we would do one for fall school year. And then we would do one for summer when we're not as heavy on the traffic. And then we'd do one once kids are back in school. And so all those things had to adjust because of this being an active campus.

And then if we go the next slide, if you draw an imaginary horizontal line through this plan, the other factor that was really fun to deal with is this campus is almost perfectly split into two different fire districts. You've got the city fire district and you've got the county fire district. And you might think that fighting fire is just universal, but apparently it's not. And so they like to approach fire safety in two different ways, and neither of them is wrong. They're both right. But we had to get those guys working together with us to produce some of these plans so that we could be successful in making sure these students were safe in the event of any kind of fire safety drills.

ALEX BELKOFER: Again, big thing-- scale, all model-based, all things that VDC allowed us to do early. So let's talk a little more about these placement drawings. Making a commitment early to model all the concrete on this project-- well, it might sound like an easy task. We knew how much resources it was going to take us to do that internally in-house. Placement drawings are a big deal for a company like McCarthy because we self-perform work. There's a number of other builders out there in the industry that also go through this practice.

But what's important about understanding the way that we do it-- this is meant to be given off to somebody in the field that actually will take this drawing and put this work in place. And so the amount of effort that we put into the information and the detail in these drawings becomes critical for doing things one time and one time only. Making a commitment to make these drawings is trying to save people man hours in the field. And we have some numbers that we'll share with you guys on that with our recent success story we did with our Autodesk partner team.

But you look at making these drawings. What you're trying to do is prevent one person in the field from looking at nine drawings. We want to give them one drawing with cubic yardage, everything they need to put that wall or put that component in place, call the concrete truck, order it, get it there, but also leverage all the points in this drawing from a model-based layout standpoint to actually put this into our total station and shoot it in place.

So this drawing's doing quite a bit. We made 580 of these for the project. So there's quite a bit of work that we had to do as a VDC team. We leverage a lot of different VDC resources internally in McCarthy across our company to make that happen on this project.

And you can see the amount of detail here. And I'm going to show you a picture in a minute. I mentioned the Garage Mahal before, right? One expectation that was not clear at the beginning this project is how much our design team cared about how the concrete looked in this garage. You'll notice here how perfectly all of these form seams and all these tie holes line up in these drawings.

Well, that was not going to be the plan at the beginning. But it became the plan when all of our senior superintendents were out there in the field looking at the early concrete pourers, and the owner came out there and said, oh, well, I was expecting these joints to be lined up. I was expecting all these tie holes to be perfectly lined up. And they said, well, you guys are McCarthy. You guys can do that, right? And we're like, yeah. Yeah, we can do that.

So we had to go back and tweak our strategy for how we were doing these drawings, as you can see the care that went into making that. And it gave us some really beautiful concrete in a building that you will never see. But what's great about this, though, is that when you're in your vehicle, and you pull into your park assist space, and you look way down the row there, you'll see a lot of awesome-looking concrete in a very dimly-lit garage.

[LAUGHTER]

The one thing that is cool though about the care that the design team and the owner did want us to take with this is that it just allowed us to focus more though on our craft. I mean, we take a lot of pride in self-performing work at McCarthy. There are some very ornate tulip walls at the beginning of this garage. The garage, the way you pull into it-- you actually pull in underground from the street. Then you slope down.

They have these beautiful tulip walls, they call them. Basically it's this curved concrete that kind of blossoms like a flower. And that looks fantastic. I will tell you-- we just started pouring those about a couple weeks ago. That right there-- that work makes it worth it for us. So while you'll never see some of these walls, you will see some beautiful concrete when you pull into the tulip wall entries.

And you can see some of the crazy stuff that we're trying to do here. This is one of our more complicated buildings. I think this is Jubel. I mean, you just have some very unique shapes here that, to be honest with you, if I was a tradesperson trying to build this in the field, I'd be looking at probably 30 drawings. And to be able to look at one drawing to do this pour sequence for comes in pretty big handy. So just to give you guys some level of detail on how much work that's going into this.

What's important also realize too is, again, this is not VDC coming in like Batman saving the day. These drawings and this execution only works with our superintendents, our foremen, our craft people checking these things. And we'll talk more about that checking process because this is just not something that happens magically.

So let's talk about the challenges, right? All the pre-BIMing stuff-- we thought we did a pretty good job with, right? Expectations were clear, we had a good approach going into it, early start with excavation. Concrete, self-perform modeling, going awesome. We're rocking it. But of course, things do happen, right? And so understanding those challenges, I think, is important for us in order to get better. We want to be the best. We want to make sure that we have the best execution with our trade partners, with our design professionals.

But scope always becomes a moment of clarity or unclarity early. And we started to see that early on in coordination. We were about three months into the VDC coordination process. And we started to see people not modeling things, right? Things were not there in the model. Even from the design side, there was just some things that were not there that we expected. And so we had to really dig into those things, and they started to uncover themselves.

We did have an early challenge with coordination meetings, and just those meetings not being effective. A lot of project management issues started to creep into those VDC coordination meetings and really made those meetings more ineffective than they were effective, and they got bogged down. So a lot of this happened within that three-month time frame.

And of course, when that happens, what else happens, right? So, people become unfocused. Our trade partners who were leading the coordination on more of the actual clash-detection side of things, were getting very bogged down internally with trying to deal with the design challenges of their building systems, their specific systems, and our meetings started to fall apart from a standpoint of being very focused on trade coordination and being overly focused on project management issues.

So then, of course, we had some model management challenges that came with that-- people not posting things for the right location because they were distracted by doing other stuff. They were spending more time in one area of a building than another. And model content was just not developing the way that it needed to. And so then people got disengaged. And so having meetings on site was a good strategy early, and people stopped showing up. And so we needed to have some tough conversations about that.

Which led to more stuff like this. And so in order to prevent that, we had to hit the pause button. Because, as McCarthy, leading the process, there's some things that started to occur from that list that you saw that was just not going to work with what we promised ourselves and what everybody bought into. And so I'm going to give you something that's very real. And I'm sharing this very intentionally, because we're not perfect.

This is one of those concrete placement drawings undergoing an extensive review with the design team and the owner and many people. What's important about this drawing is two things. Number one, this is a shear wall in one of our first buildings. So it's a pretty important wall. That wall helps the building stand up, right? Well, there's eight major penetrations in that wall, all these guys right here. And you can see everybody's very passionate opinions about those penetrations.

You'll notice this date right here. That's five days. That was put on there for a reason. Because those sleeves needed to be in within that five-day time frame after that review period or else. Because concrete was coming, and Mike Noll wasn't going to stop these trucks. Because this was one of our first buildings. We're killing it early with execution.

Those eight sleeves didn't make it in that wall. That's not good. Why didn't they make it in that wall? Well, because of this process being so convoluted with all these opinions, what happened was the person at the point of attack, the person that mattered the most, didn't have the latest drawing and didn't know where to put those sleeves. And so that person said, we're pouring this wall. You guys can figure it out later.

That right there is not alignment. That is not good. So we had to hit that pause button and really make sure that we had a serious conversation with everybody involved in that process-- everybody. And that's not just McCarthy. That's our design team, our owner team, our tradespeople. Everyone had to understand why this process failed.

The worst part about it is all that was in the model. It was in our trade models. It was in our concrete placement drawing. It was in everybody's drawings, everybody's model. But this drawing, the final one, didn't make it to the person closing in that wall. And that's the person that matters the most. And so we can't forget about those people.

So that was the trade side of it. But I want to talk about the design side too because design intent and construction coordination oftentimes get very confused. That conversation doesn't happen often enough. I think we, as McCarthy, have recognized over the years that having that early alignment with our design team is probably the most critical thing-- to understand that difference and to understand that we have to have synergy and be on the same page with that conversation early.

There was early confusion between design intent and construction coordination. A lot of meetings-- those PM issues I talked about-- there's a lot of conversation early about, well, this is what's in the design model. This is what's not in the model. You guys need to be coordinating this. This area is going to be exposed. A lot of those things just graphically in the model-- it was not coming across that way to us. I think our design team didn't realize early how much we were leveraging the model as the builder. They thought that we were just using the model as a reference. But the model really becomes a driver for us. It becomes that single source of truth. And so having alignment midstream-- that conversation needed to happen.

And then there were some critical members of the design team that gave input a little bit too late in the process. There was people plugged in early the entire time. But there were some people who had very strong opinions about design intent in certain areas, and we had already coordinated some of those areas with the design intent that we thought that we were aligned with. And so making sure that all those key stakeholders, the right people, are plugged in from beginning so we can make effective decisions because of the scale and the speed of a project like this.

And of course, we always came back to one magical question. Because in that first three- to four-month time frame with everybody having a difference of alignment or difference of expectations, we kept coming back to this quite a bit. At the end of the day, what do you want? One of our people on site, one of our superintendents, would often say this phrase. Because he would go into meetings with the design team. He'd go into meetings with the owner team. He'd go into meetings with the trades. And people just didn't understand what they wanted at the end of the day.

Whether it was making a decision on where to move a main, or making a decision on is this going to be exposed or is this going to be concealed, everyone needs to know what they want at the end the day. But they have to be transparent. It can't be hidden in an agenda in a meeting. You have to come out with it. Especially on a project like this with a lot of key stakeholders, they're very passionate about how these buildings are going to look and function at the end of the day.