Pentagon Rebuild Offers Playbook for Compressed Heavy-Civil Schedules
The Pentagon renovation team finished a compressed rebuild ahead of schedule and under budget by using short interval production scheduling and an integrated project delivery model, Construction Dive reports in a look back at the post-9/11 project.
Market Impact
The Department of Defense had already issued a design-build RFP in 1999 for a 14-year, fixed-price renovation of the Pentagon before the Sept. 11 attacks damaged Wedges 1 and 2 and forced the timeline down to 10 years. Hensel Phelps Construction led the design-build team, with Southland Industries handling mechanical and plumbing work across more than four million square feet.
Rather than tackling the full 6-million-square-foot facility at once, the team broke work into 15,000-square-foot increments, demolishing each section down to its poured-in-concrete structure and rebuilding it in turn. Tim Michael, regional president of Southland, told Construction Dive that trades got one to two weeks per increment, with weekends serving as buffer time. “The trick behind any type of SIPS production schedule is more about labor [and] workforce development,” Michael said, noting the approach removed peaks and valleys from staffing needs over the 10-year job. The RFP itself was just six pages, a stark contrast to typical federal proposals running thousands of pages, giving bidders room to propose innovative solutions rather than following prescriptive specs.
What It Means for Subcontractors
- Mechanical, electrical and plumbing trades bidding compressed-schedule rebuilds can pitch phased, fixed-footprint increments (the Pentagon used 15,000-square-foot blocks) instead of full-building sequencing to stabilize crew size and cut idle time.
- Firms responding to design-build RFPs should push for outcome-based KPIs (safety, schedule, cost, cost management, behavior, as used at the Pentagon) rather than prescriptive specs, since it gives subs room to propose their own scheduling and staging methods.
- Scheduling leads on multi-trade jobs can adopt short interval production scheduling (SIPS), locking each trade into a fixed one-to-two week window with weekends as buffer, to give owners and field crews certainty on daily and weekly manpower needs.
- Subs on occupied-building renovations (hospitals, government facilities, data centers) should propose co-located “big room” decision-making, as Southland and Hensel Phelps did from a helipad trailer complex, to resolve field issues same-day instead of through RFI cycles.
- Firms chasing LEED-certified renovation work can reference Southland’s fan-powered induction unit approach, which combined chilled water coils and air valves to meet ventilation targets while raising ceiling height 23 inches for equipment and daylighting.
