Scheduling is a critical project-planning element that directly impacts budgets. For many owners, on-time delivery is the difference between a successful and unsuccessful project.
Delays can affect everything, including organizational operations, day-to-day processes, and your team’s well-being. Late completion or hang-ups in turnover for certain spaces can weigh on teams and create frustration as you wait to move into your new space.
Construction project phasing is a collaborative scheduling strategy that owners, architects, construction managers, and trade partners strategize to preserve project timelines and drive value.
Construction Project Phasing Empowers Timely Delivery
Project phasing is a collaborative construction scheduling strategy that breaks up critical project elements and scopes into achievable milestones.
From preconstruction planning to completion, the project team works together to ensure each phase flows into the next, with clearly outlined expectations. Factors like the design schedule, bid packages, and material selection inform these phases.
As the project team completes each phase, they stay in close communication, working toward the collective goal of successful, on-time completion. In occupied spaces, careful phasing factors in the organization’s needs, ensuring essential spaces remain usable as construction progresses.
Breaking these phases out allows the project team to complete scopes in line with specific project needs, whether it’s keeping specific areas functional during occupied renovations, getting a head start to avoid winter weather impacts, or overlapping scopes to contribute to early completion.
Creative Phasing Drives Value in Timelines
Creative phasing intentionally aligns and optimizes specific scopes to help ensure on-time delivery.
For example, scopes may be shifted and scheduled in a specific order, and your construction team may recommend early bid packages to ensure materials and trade partner availability, avoid winter weather conditions, or turn over key areas for move-in.
At Baxter West Dodge Pointe, four buildings—an Audi, Volkswagen, and Subaru dealership, and a detail shop—were constructed simultaneously using a strategic phased construction approach. Design work was completed first for the detail facility, which enabled our crews to begin concrete work for that project as design was finalized for Audi, Volkswagen, and Subaru. Once the foundations for the detail shop were complete, we shuffled our expert foundation crews to the Audi site while building construction began on the detail space, and the remaining projects followed in succession. This deliberate phasing empowered us to drive value into the schedule through staggered workforce scopes and enabled a more competitive bid process.
Rather than having four separate teams completing the same work on each space, by strategically phasing the project, we were able to move teams from one site to the next, driving value in the schedule and budget.
Long-Term Planning Brings Client Visions to Life
Project phasing can also play a profound role in delivering long-term project visions. As a committed partner, we are dedicated to serving organizational and community needs beyond one project—it’s why many of our partners choose to work with us across multiple facilities.
DC West Community Schools wanted to consolidate operations across the two locations in Waterloo and Valley, Nebraska, into a single cohesive campus. Through consistent communication, creative thinking, and proactive planning, with the District, architect, stakeholders, and community, we partnered on a series of phased renovations, additions, and new construction across multiple projects to bring this vision to life.
As part of this long-term phased approach, the District immediately needed classroom space. We leaned into our occupied renovation planning expertise to ensure a strategic solution. Rather than installing portable classrooms until funding was secured in a later phase, we built the shell for a future planned athletic facilities space and temporarily outfitted it with classrooms. Once funding was secured, the classrooms were relocated to the new, dedicated, permanent location, and the athletic spaces were built.
This collaborative, innovative, and phased approach created significant cost savings for the District and proved the power of long-term partnership. The District now enjoys a cohesive campus where students, faculty, family, and the community can unite.
Power Your Project Timeline With Phasing
Creative, strategic construction project phasing can make a world of difference in ensuring completion while protecting your project timeline and aligning with your space’s goals.
Whether you need specific spaces to remain accessible throughout construction, dedicated project portions to be turned over early to ensure organizational functionality, or want to uncover opportunities to drive value through staggered scopes, it’s important to choose a partner who will partner with you and the entire project team to deliver.
Discover how Boyd Jones helps ensure success through expert construction management scheduling and phasing before breaking ground.
