Like many other Value Management (VM) professionals, my path to this point in my career was a circuitous one. I was always a problem solver and an optimist, by nature. I also enjoyed helping others, so when I sought a profession within which to focus my energies, I was drawn to education. Of course, the context of the times thirty years ago also limited my options. Few professions outside of nursing, teaching and social work encouraged women. I chose to become a teacher in the heady and uncertain times following the urban riots of 1968, and also committed to teach in the inner city of Detroit. The old ways of “Dick and Jane” readers were off the table, so we had more freedom to invent new, more relevant ways to reach the children.
I learned an enormous amount about cross-cultural communication and its pitfalls. It was intense every day, with unpredictable and mixed signals coming from all directions (sort of like a VM study, in some ways.) I also learned to think “out of the box” and to shift gears as quickly as the children did. After two exciting but also frustrating years of teaching, where there was enormous resistance from the school administrators to any real changes, I reconsidered whether or not this would be my chosen profession. As I tried to sort this out, I put my husband through law school, had a baby, and eventually went back to school for an architectural degree.
It became apparent during those early years that the traditional architectural career was not for me. I looked around for another way to use my architectural skills. I found a job with a private developer as one of a team of Coordinators who managed the complex approvals process for the World Financial Center Project at Battery Park City. There I was working with many talented professionals and many city agencies, and multi-tasking became a way of life for three years. When that design for the four office towers, two bridges, plaza and Wintergarden was complete and in construction in 1985, I moved on and joined the City of New York Office of Management & Budget’s recently established Value Engineering (VE) Unit.
At OMB I found a group of technical professionals who had a mission to ensure that major capital projects would meet their intended purposes and not exceed their funding or become embarrassments to the City. The Unit was fairly new, and had been successful in the first few studies at demonstrating the power of VE, so the Budget Director had authorized an expansion in staff, and a green light to review more projects. It was a challenge to jump in and learn on the job about VE and all the agency projects. My first day, I was assigned to co-manage the Times Square Subway Station Modernization VE Study, being facilitated by Al Dell’Isola. Al was (and still is, thankfully) a force of nature. So my learning curve was short, and the multi-agency participation was the biggest challenge. In 1988, I assumed a leadership role in the Unit, and in 1992, became the Director when my predecessor, Bill Mc Elligott, retired.
Over the past seventeen years, I have been privileged to work with nearly twenty VE firms. Our office has learned valuable lessons about which techniques and approaches work best in our highly interactive agency environment, and which fall short. We have tested the VE methodology against a large variety of projects at all stages of design, and have come to the conclusion that early is better, and that getting the right expertise in the room is half the way to success.
Because the scale of our projects is larger than most other VE users ($30 million is our low end threshold), there is increased visibility and sensitivity attached to these reviews. Careful management of the multiple stakeholders’ interests and expectations has proven critical.
The challenges continue as I shepherd a group of very dedicated and capable technical professionals through a wide range of project studies, aided admirably by six VE firms. The success of the NYC VE Program is largely due to this collaboration, and to the focus on optimizing agency projects with agency participation all through the process.
|