Increasing Project Planning and Scheduling Certainty for Critical Infrastructure Projects

Capital projects are vital to New York City's growth, evolution, and economic development as evidenced by the City's Ten-Year Capital Strategy for Fiscal Years 2012-2021 in which New York City's Capital Program is expected to reach approximately $11.7 billion for fiscal year 2011. Under this Strategy Plan, the City has allocated for $4.3 billion for the Department of Education's capital program and the Department of Environmental Protection's capital program was allocated over $6 billion for the next four fiscal years. These figures present the vast inflow of municipal funds invested into the City's capital projects, demonstrating the critical importance of these projects to finish on time and on buidget. As with any large-scale projects in term of scheduling and costs, public construction projects face numerous uncertainties at critical decision-making points and regulatory approvals processes in moving from "idea" to "construction" to "completion." Through the analysis of DDC project data as a baseline in developing further analyses of City projects as a whole, the duration of New York City project development and design varies widely, and a better understanding at the start of the project of all of the requried regulations, approvals and development steps will help to create a more accurate project scheule and capital spending strategy to guide future capital projects.

The Capstone project explores the typical processes and timeframes for representative New York City construction projects undergo during capital planning and execution phases and factor in both typical and atypical delays in the City's capital planning strategies and provide durations. Delays in a project's lifecycle not only drive costs up but schedule overruns can potentially delay or deter the initiation of future construction projects. The team has used statistical tools to analyze and interpret the historic timeframes of a sample of DDC completed and in-progress projects over the past five years as the baselinf and subsequently study variances by project type. The Capstone project incorporates quantitative analysis of the DDC data over the past firve years as these projects are illustrative of City projects; qualitative analyses of interviews with key personnel in various City agencies responsible for moving these capital projects forward; literature research to identify relevant information and existing studies on the subject to help develop a proper methodology approach. This approach helped the team to formulate hypotheses and ultimately use all of the all of the above-mentioned mechanisms to achieve the Capstone project's goal in developing the most accurate process mapping framework possible, although with the limtied availability of proejct schedule data, which is reflective of the lifecycles that public construction projects go through. In addition, to better understand the risks and delays a typical new project encounters during each process of its lifecycle, thic project closely analyzes eight case studies of completed projects by translating their different processes onton individual flowcharts and timeframes that could also be used to compare the lifecycles of these selected cases.