Becoming a Construction Manager

By Bruce D'Agostino and John J. McKeon

The must-have guide for anyone considering a career in construction management

Becoming a Construction Manager explains everything a person needs to know to become a Construction Manager—from formal education to getting their first job. This practical guide is packed with useful information for anyone considering or beginning a career in construction management, as well as professional construction managers seeking to work in a specific area. From schedule and cost management to sustainability and technology implementation, all of the important career choices are explained by successful construction managers at top international firms.

• The only guide available on careers in this fast-growing field
• Offers practical guidance in a concise, easy-to-use format, illustrated throughout
• In-depth profiles with construction managers of varying specialties give students and new architects an inside view of the real-world, day-to-day experiences of a working builder
• Includes interviewing tips and up to date information on where the jobs are in the field, along with an extensive resource section on professional organizations and educational opportunities
• Introduction by Bruce D'Agostino, President and CEO of the Construction Management Association of America

Providing an overview of the profession, educational requirements, specialties, and the job search, this is a one-stop resource that supplies the inside track on this rapidly growing profession.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wiley
• Release date: Mar 6, 2012
• ISBN: 9781118122754

Book preview

1

What Does a Construction Manager Do?

The National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois needed a very special building: Designed and constructed to house the world’s fastest supercomputer, the building would require a large machine room with a raised floor, a sophisticated water-cooling system, and an extraordinary electrical load of 24 megawatts. Plus, it needed to withstand tornado winds of 165 miles per hour.

Township Auditorium in Columbia, South Carolina, was on the National Register of Historic Places, and in its 80 years it had hosted performers as diverse as Tony Bennett and the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus. But the old auditorium had seen better days. A complete overhaul transformed it into a thoroughly modern facility with both state-of-the-art staging resources and excellent amenities, while preserving its historic character.

Nearly nine miles of 12-foot-diameter buried pipe and tunnels, passing through some of America’s most sensitive forest areas—that’s what it took to deliver a new water distribution system for the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California. Yet the $400 million project was completed under budget and a full year ahead of schedule.

National Petascale Computing Facility at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, University of Illinois. CM by Clayco, Inc. PHOTOS: ©MSTUDIO WEST|MATTHEW MCFARLAND|WWW.MSTUDIOWEST.COM|760.846.2580.

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Tunneling to deliver a new water system in Southern California. CM by Hatch Mott MacDonald. PHOTOS COPYRIGHT METROPOLITAN WATER DISTRICT OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA.

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Gallaudet University in Washington, DC, serves a unique clientele: deaf and hearing-impaired students. The university’s new Sorenson Language and Communication Center is a groundbreaking, one-of-a-kind visu-centric learning facility designed so that deaf students can be seen to be heard.

The project team included deaf participants, and deaf interpreters took part in every meeting, helping to create one of America’s most deaf-friendly facilities.

Sorenson Language and Communication Center, Gallaudet University, Washington, DC. CM by Heery International. PHOTO: ALAIN JARAMILLO.

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Exterior view, Sorenson Language and Communication Center. PHOTO: ALAIN JARAMILLO.

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Historic Ford’s Theater as renovated for Abraham Lincoln’s 200th Birthday observance in 2009. CM by CH2M HILL. PHOTOGRAPHY BY KENNETH M. WYNER.

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The San Francisco Public Utilities Commission is spending some $4.6 billion on an expansion and seismic upgrade of the pipelines, dams, reservoirs, and water treatments plants that serve 2.5 million Bay Area businesses and residents. The full program will unfold over a period of nearly 20 years.

Ford’s Theater in Washington, DC, is one of America’s most famous and historically significant buildings, and the National Park Service wanted to complete a comprehensive rehab to mark Abraham Lincoln’s 200th birthday in 2009. Extensive changes were needed to bring Ford’s into compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act. In addition, there were extensive modernizations to the lighting, acoustics, theater seating, audiovisual systems, HVAC, and other systems...all conducted while maintaining the building’s historical integrity. The Woodrow Wilson Bridge near Washington, DC, was one of the most complex and ambitious construction programs in the country, replacing an antiquated drawbridge with a pair of new, 12-lane bridges. Yet, through its construction timetable of more than a decade, it remained on budget and on schedule. This program involved a remarkable array of innovations both in construction methods and in management of contracts and interfaces. The real key to its success, however, was the collaboration that characterized the large, complex, multi-player project team.

All of these projects succeeded in large part because they made use of professional construction managers.

Replacing the old Woodrow Wilson Bridge near Washington, DC, involved interaction among four governments, 32 prime contracts, and more than 200 subcontractors. The $2.4 billion, 11-year project was led by Parsons Brinckerhoff through the joint venture Potomac Crossing Consultants. PHOTOGRAPH BY JOSEPH ROMEO PHOTOGRAPHY.

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PHOTOGRAPHY BY EYECONSTRUCTION

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Construction management is a relatively young profession that has already had a profound impact on how America plans and constructs its built environment. That influence is certain to expand as the future brings new imperatives, from tighter budgets to greater environmental sustainability.

Construction management is the practice of professional management applied to the planning, design, and construction of projects from inception to completion for the purpose of controlling time, scope, cost, and quality.

Construction managers (CMs) plan, direct, coordinate, and budget a wide variety of construction projects. According to the U.S. Department of Labor, these projects include residential, commercial, and industrial structures; roads and bridges; wastewater treatment plants; and schools and hospitals. CMs schedule and coordinate all design and construction processes, including the selection, hiring, and oversight of specialty trade contractors such as carpenters, plumbers, and electricians.

A CM rarely does the actual construction work; he or she is the overall manager, the glue that holds the job together. CMs supervise the construction process from conceptual development through final construction, making sure that the project gets completed on time and within budget. They often work with property owners, developers, engineers, architects, and others who are involved in the process.

Depending upon their organization, CMs are sometimes called project managers, construction superintendents, project engineers, or construction supervisors. These titles can be misleading and inaccurate, however, because the scope of work CMs take on—and the education, experience, and skills they possess—go beyond these titles, which also can be used for other positions.

In some instances, the CM may work for the project owner or developer, or for a construction company.

If a project is so large that one person cannot manage it—such as an office building or an industrial complex—duties may be divided among several CMs, mainly based on phases of the job. For example, different CMs may be in charge of (1) site preparation, including clearing and excavation of the land, installing sewage systems, and landscaping and road construction, (2) building construction, including laying foundations and erecting the structural framework, floors, walls, and roofs, and (3) building systems, including protection against fire and installing electrical, plumbing, air-conditioning, and heating systems.

What Makes CM a Profession?

Many CM practitioners would recoil from hearing their work described as paraprofessional. Yet that’s exactly the word used by a noted academic in a 2010 guest column in Engineering News-Record (October 25 column, p. 64):

Trends indicate that the role of CM eventually could be considered simply a paraprofessional who works under the direction of an individual with a state-regulated professional license, the professor wrote.

This column appeared at a time when several initiatives were moving forward simultaneously, all based on determining exactly what professionalism means as applied to CM and what education, skills, and credentials the industry should rely on in identifying true CM pros.

A joint meeting of the Board of Directors of the Construction Management Association of America (CMAA) and the Board of Governors of the Construction Manager Certification Institute (CMCI), held in San Diego in 2010, focused on these topics.

Defining a Profession

The CM profession is largely unregulated, the group noted. Some participants held that One key to the definition of a profession is that it is licensed by somebody. Every profession is licensed. However, it is common for CM to be performed at a high level by individuals holding licenses as engineers or architects, or holding no government-issued license at all.

If a license is not crucial to the definition of a professional, what elements are?

Andrew Abbott, in his book The System of Professions: An Essay on the Division of Expert Labor (University of Chicago Press, 1988), defines a profession as an occupational group with some special skill. Among the keys to a profession’s success is its ability to claim jurisdiction over particular tasks and to determine who is entitled to perform those tasks.

The rise of university education has reinforced this power. Abbott holds that universities have served as legitimators of professional knowledge and expertise. In the same spirit, the joint Board meeting found that CMs today are better educated than in the past, and their scope of work is larger than before, including more social issues. The academic course of study is much more recognized today, and there are more programs than ever before.

Indeed, CM-specific university programs are becoming both more numerous and more accepted. One reflection of this trend is CMCI’s recent decision to recognize, in reviewing applications for the Certified Construction Manager (CCM) program, relevant undergraduate degrees granted by any institution accredited under the Council for Higher Education Accreditation. In the past, this recognition has been extended only to degrees granted by programs accredited by the Accreditation Council for Construction Education (ACCE) or the Accreditation Board in Engineering Technologies (ABET).

Although educational resources continue to grow, a critical element of true professionalism, according to Abbott, is the fact that the profession itself determines what skills and knowledge it requires of newcomers. To be successful, a profession must be able to control who can claim membership. In this regard, Abbott says, a single, identifiable national association is clearly a prerequisite.

The Professional Process

Another key to the definition of a profession is the standard to which a practitioner is held in assessing the outcome of his or her work. The CMAA College of Fellows addressed this topic in its 2010 white paper, Managing Integrated Project Delivery. The basic question, the Fellows noted, is whether the CM is expected to deliver a product or to manage a process.

If, by doing a job in a workmanlike way, a practitioner can be expected to deliver the same product to the same specifications every time, then the standard by which the work is judged is the creation of a defect-free product.

On the other hand, in some cases every job is different, and conditions may be difficult to predict, let alone control. In such cases, the Fellows’ paper says, professionals . . . are in the business of exercising learned judgment, based on experience with a body of knowledge and on situations and decisions not totally knowable or under their exclusive control.

The U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM) makes the same point in different words in its Job Family Series descriptions:

Professional work involves exercising discretion, analytical skill, judgment, personal accountability, and responsibility for creating, developing, integrating, applying, and sharing an organized body of knowledge:

sqbullet Uniquely acquired through extensive education or training at an accredited college or university;

sqbullet Equivalent to the curriculum requirements for a bachelor’s or higher degree with major study in, or pertinent to, the specialized field; and

sqbullet Continuously studied to explore, extend, and use additional discoveries, interpretations, and applications to improve data quality, materials, equipment, applications, and methods.

These two descriptions show that definitions of professionalism tend to focus on three elements: (1) discretion or judgment in executing the work, based on (2) specialized education and (3) an organized, broadly accepted body of knowledge.

Performance Standards and Increasing Scope

Because of the prominence of individual judgment in delivering professional services, and the high variability of job conditions, professionals are measured by a metric different from that of defect-free products—namely, a standard of care.

Under this doctrine, each professional is expected to deliver the same level of care employed by reasonably prudent professionals practicing in the same field in the same area.

The professional’s ability to adapt to changing and unpredictable circumstances is becoming more critical, the combined Boards of the CMAA and the CMCI noted. Often the technical part of a project is a slam dunk, but a large part of the job is on the social side. This observation reflects a key expansion of the CM’s role in recent years.

Increasingly, CMs today are called upon to manage stakeholder relations, sustainability issues, and a whole gamut of other tasks calling for mastery of so-called soft skills. The combined Boards noted that business acumen is often as critical to a CM today as technical ability, and effectiveness in financial management, communication, and leadership often makes a decisive contribution to project success.

Similarly, today’s CM is often called upon to advise owners about many aspects of a project that fall outside of the traditional construction stages. Technical and soft skills are important, but so is the CM’s adherence to an established code of ethics that is recognized by all practitioners.

Keville Enterprises, 2011, PHOTO BY RICH SARLES.

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Credentialing Professionalism

Professional credentials—as long as they are recognized as being fairly earned through demonstrated mastery of an accepted body of knowledge—can serve many of the same purposes as a license. Continuous improvement and enlargement of the body of knowledge through research and practical experience are essential to gaining this recognition.

The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) Standard 17024 provides the means by which personnel certification programs can ensure their transparency, consistency, and equity. The American National Standards Institute is authorized by ISO to accredit certification programs that comply with ISO 17024, and has granted this accreditation to the CCM program.

Yardsticks of Professionalism

In summary, a profession can be identified by these qualities:

Its practitioners exercise independent judgment in response to conditions that vary and are not easily predicted or controlled.

This judgment is shaped by rigorous and specialized education, coupled with a broadly accepted system of standards of practice.

The standards of practice and related body of knowledge undergo continuous review and improvement.

The professional practice is governed by a code of ethics and represented by a single nationwide association.

The Big Picture

Charles B. Chuck Thomsen, FCMAA, FAIA

Why did you want to become a construction manager?

greaterthan I’m an architect and I just got very interested in seeing things built, getting them done and speeding up the process, and seeing a tangible result in the world, not living in a paper world.

What kind of work do you do?

greaterthan I’m retired now, so I consult. But, over my career we managed construction for lots of projects around the world, 20 countries. We renovated the Pentagon; we did quite a bit of work on the Los Angeles school system. We did lots of traditional government work and schools, and our company also did architecture and engineering.

What would you say the most important skills are for a construction manager?

greaterthan A clear view of the process, technical skills to deal with the details of design and construction, and the ability to work effectively with people.

For you, what has been your greatest challenge?

greaterthan Always, in running a company, you have the continuous challenge of ensuring you are doing good work, keeping really good people effectively engaged working together collaboratively, educating clients, understanding their needs, and maintaining that two-way communication.

What is your educational background?

greaterthan I have an undergraduate degree from University of Oklahoma, an intermediate year at the University of Minnesota, and then a graduate degree from MIT. Both degrees are in architecture.

What are some of the working conditions like for a construction manager?

greaterthan Well, it depends on what you do. You might sit in an office, or you might sit in a trailer on a construction site; you might be in the United States in an elegant office building in a downtown urban environment, or you might be in the deserts of the Mideast or in a rainforest, or whatever fi eld conditions or office conditions, or both.

Tell me about some of the people who have infl uenced your work and your profession.

greaterthan The senior officers of the companies I worked with, both when I was young and learning, and who provided leadership to me, and then the bright young men and women who worked with me when I got to be chairman and president and a leader within the profession. And of course in that process you always meet some clients who are very infl uential.

In general, what challenges do you think the profession has ahead of it?

greaterthan The construction industry is extraordinarily large, I guess the largest in the world, and the second largest in the United States; healthcare is bigger. Buildings are extraordinarily complicated, and they are designed and fabricated by hundreds of organizations before you get the project done. They are regulated by a handful of organizations; the owners frequently have an administrative group, a user group, and technical managers to manage the facility. Having all that brainpower plugged into the project at one time is the challenge we face now and will continue to face. You have to get those folks working together effectively at the right time. You still have to think about all those hundreds of organizations and the thousands of people involved.

There is an enormous amount of brainpower, and bringing all that brainpower together at the right time and in the right way so they can all make their contribution to the project effectively I think is the biggest challenge.

What advice do you have for students?

greaterthan Most schools of construction science in the United States essentially think that they are training students to be general contractors. In the process of doing that, they talk about the technical aspects of building a building, how you make a cost assessment, how you schedule design and construction, how you manage homework, how you manage a safety program—all those kinds of things. They don’t spend so much time talking about the complete process of managing design and construction. They’re talking about how you get one brick on top of another, and not how you manage those thousands of people.

I would think you might want to talk about the difference between being a construction manager and being a general contractor. There is an awful lot of gray area there, and a lot of people would argue they are the same thing, but there is a difference in interests. There is what you do during the design phase, and then what you do to coordinate everybody during construction. Well, if you look at the history of the country or the industry, you’ll see that particularly in the earlier part of the nineteenth century, builders call themselves architects and there wasn’t much difference, really. It wasn’t until the middle of the century that architecture and engineering separated from construction, moved in out of the mud and the rain and began to design buildings that were beautiful and functional. At that time, architects were the brains, they had the technical knowledge, and contractors were the brawn. They built what they were told to build by the architects and engineers. Schools then started teaching architecture, and we started being selected on the basis of qualifi cations rather than selling a product. We were selling a service like doctors and lawyers.

In the late twentieth century, the same thing happened to the management of construction. There was so much specialization in some of these subcontractors that the builders who used to lay the brick and put up the timber suddenly were dealing with 75 subcontractors, and the challenge became management rather than putting one brick on top of the other. Just like architects formed AIA, managers of construction formed CMAA. We got schools that teach management design and construction, just like MIT formed the fi rst school of architecture in 1863. Now they are being selected on the basis of qualifi cation, just like architects. History is repeating itself, and schools need to be conscious of this and need to be conscious that the management of the entire process of the design and construction is not just about the technology of building.

Infrastructure projects like this bridge in Greenville, Mississippi, are a prime arena for professional CM. PHOTO CREDIT: JANET WARLICK CAMERA WORK, INC.; COURTESY OF HNTB, INC.

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Construction Managers Are Logicians, Hirers, and Organizers

CMs determine the best way to get materials to the building site and the most cost-effective plan and schedule for completing the project. They divide all required construction site activities into logical steps, estimating and budgeting the time required to meet established deadlines. Doing this may require sophisticated scheduling and cost-estimating techniques that rely on computers with specialized software.

CMs also manage the selection of general contractors and trade contractors to complete specifi c phases of the project—which could include everything from structural metalworking and plumbing to painting, installing electricity, and laying carpeting. CMs determine the labor requirements of the project. They sometimes oversee the performance of all