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CHICAGO—A few days before the beginning of the school year, eight boys from one of the toughest neighborhoods in the city gathered in a sunny room to share their anxieties and hopes. The seniors were worried about applying to college and finding jobs to earn spending money.

The one rising freshman among them was nervous about fitting in to his new school. All of them were amped up about football season, which started that night. But living near Garfield Park on the city’s West Side, the boys also had problems that sounded unlike those of high school students in most other parts of the country. “My older brother was shot in the shoulder yesterday,” said Jarrell, a football player.

“He’s 23.” Another boy spent two weeks in the hospital last year after gang members attacked him. His offense, in their eyes, was going to a restaurant with a childhood friend who’s in a rival gang. Demarco, an 18-year-old senior, was 6 when he saw someone stab his mother. She survived the assault, and today she’s a single mom, working two jobs to support her kids. But Demarco’s dad was murdered seven years ago. “When my daddy got killed, he got shot 16 times,” he said.

In the last year, Demarco also lost his cousin and some friends to shootings. “I felt like I had nobody,” he says. In Chicago, stories like these too often are followed by similar stories of revenge, a pattern that has helped drive the city’s spiraling homicide rate. Last year, almost one in five of the city’s 764 murder victims was 19 or younger. The purpose of the meeting was to interrupt that cycle. The eight boys are part of a program called Becoming a Man, a 16-year-old group therapy and mentoring program operating in dozens of Chicago schools. It aims to help young men like these learn impulse control—to think more slowly as a way of avoiding the reflexive anger that has led to the deaths of so many young people in Chicago—and learn skills and values that will guide them to productive lives after they graduate.

Demarco joined BAM through his high school a year ago. “I got bad anger problems,” he says.

His counselor, Dar’tavous Dorsey, has helped him learn better self-control. “He’s helping me think smarter,” says Demarco.

“He’s helping me hold my actions. If something says something wrong to me, usually I’d just spazz out. Now, I just look at you like, ‘I don’t got to talk to you.’ I just stay in my own lane. I became a better person than I was last year.”. At top, a woman braids a man's hair in a West Garfield Park parking lot. Chicago's West Side sees a disproportionate amount of the city's gun violence -- and the BAM and WOW programs aim to provide its youth with the tools to avoid that violence at all costs. Mark Peterson/Redux Pictures for Politico Magazine BAM and its sister program, Working on Womanhood, are part of a larger national trend.

Urban schools from Oakland and San Francisco to Philadelphia are adopting social and emotional learning based on mounting evidence that kids in high-crime, poor neighborhoods need help coping with the after-effects of witnessing traumatic violence. While officials at the federal level talk about more muscular law enforcement as the solution to urban crime, these programs present a more affordable alternative that’s preventive, not punitive. And studies show they might be more effective as well. Research by the University of Chicago Crime Lab attests to BAM’s effectiveness: the program reduced boys’ violent crime arrests by 50 percent and increased their high school graduation rates by 19 percent. Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel has been a BAM supporter since 2013, when he first sat in on a BAM session. “The counselors stepped into a pair of shoes that hadn’t been filled for these young men,” Emanuel told POLITICO. “It’s something I take for granted, because I still talk to my father every day.

You don’t realize how important it is, because it’s more implicit than explicit, until you see how young men thirst for it and the void that gets filled for them.” Story Continued Below. Emanuel convinced President Obama, his former boss, to visit a BAM group in 2013. Obama later invited that BAM group to the White House, and a BAM participant introduced Obama at the 2014 launch of his My Brother’s Keeper initiative to help young men and boys of color. Now, BAM and WOW are scaling up in Chicago public schools, with funding from Emanuel’s administration—$3.6 million for BAM and $1.1 million for WOW in the 2016-2017 budget—and $10 million in private donations the mayor helped raise.

BAM aims to serve an estimated 6,000 boys this school year, up from 4,100 in 2016-17. It just launched in a second city, Boston. WOW is expanding too, from serving 1,080 girls last school year to about 1,750 this fall. It’s newer, smaller, and less proven than BAM, but internal testing shows it lowers depression rates in girls. That’s an important measurement because girls react to trauma differently: Boys are more likely to lash out, while girls are more likely to take their pain out on themselves.

Can teaching teens to think reduce violence in Chicago? That’s the premise behind the Becoming A Man and Working on Womanhood programs, school-based group counseling programs that teach kids in grades 6-12 social cognitive skills and impulse control. The need is high in Chicago, where 764 people were murdered in 2016. Mark Peterson/Redux Pictures for Politico Magazine “You can really expect, in schools in highly disadvantaged neighborhoods, that all the students are coping with something very traumatic,” says Micere Keels, a University of Chicago human development professor working on a trauma-responsive curriculum for the Chicago Public Schools. “There’s a growing awareness that [those] kids are coming to school struggling with cognitive, emotional, and behavioral disregulation because of stress.” That can make it very difficult for kids to succeed in school, or in life – unless they learn to cope by thinking slower and smarter.

*** The program that became BAM started in 1999 when a young counselor named Anthony Di Vittorio was hired by the Chicago nonprofit Youth Guidance to work with kids who were kicked out of class. Di Vittorio, who goes by Tony D., knew something about this kind of behavior.

Growing up on Chicago’s southwest side, the son of a violent alcoholic father, and surrounded by older siblings who had their own addiction issues, Di Vittorio experimented with drugs and tagged along to watch his peers break windows and steal cars. His home, he said, was “chaos,” devoid of any positive male role models. He channeled his anger into break dancing and managed to get himself through high school and college.

By the age of 30 he had earned a master’s in psychology. That’s where he learned the techniques of cognitive behavioral therapy that he introduced to the angry young men he was now being asked to help. Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel meets with Becoming a Man participants. File photo Di Vittorio started using conventional therapy techniques, including group counseling sessions and reflective listening. He challenged the kids to respond to their own negative thought patterns with positive, constructive thoughts.

He also started a break-dancing club after school and showed movie clips to start discussion. And perhaps most important, he told the kids about his own past.

“I would talk about being traumatized,” Di Vittorio, 49, says, “and what it’s like to not have integrity, and what it’s like to feel anger inside and want to destroy the world.” He broke down the usual barriers between counselors and clients, and the boys responded. “They’d talk about how they’re lacking integrity, how they abuse people, how they have pain and trauma,” he says. Then he’d challenge them. “So now—cognitive behaviorally—what choice do we make? How do we live our life with purpose and mission? How do you have integrity as a young man out there?” “The boys would leave the group and say, ‘Can we come back tomorrow?’” Di Vittorio recalls. “They were starving to identify with manhood.” For a decade, Di Vittorio refined his program, merging clinical therapy, mentoring and rites of passage.

He started the boys’ one-hour group sessions with “check-ins,” where he and the boys reported on how they felt physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. He introduced exercises, modeled off eighth-graders’ recess games, that taught slower thinking and impulse control. He related the curriculum to six core values: integrity, accountability, self-determination, positive anger expression, visionary goal-setting, and respect for womanhood. By 2009, BAM was operating in Di Vittorio’s high school and a few Chicago elementary schools. Word spread about the changes BAM seemed to inspire in young men who’d struggled in school, many of whom had also been arrested.

That year, the University of Chicago’s Crime Lab, which tests and designs programs meant to reduce violent crime, decided to study its effects. Earlier research by the lab on Chicago’s gun violence epidemic suggested that a lot of youth were getting shot during “impulsive, high-stakes situations that went out of control because a gun was ready at hand,” says the crime lab’s associate director, Julia Quinn. Researchers were intrigued by how BAM used cognitive behavioral therapy to change the way kids in violent neighborhoods think.

Instead of fighting back aggressively when challenged, kids in the BAM program were given techniques to help them manage their reactions to others. As part of the study, BAM expanded to 19 new schools in high-crime, impoverished, segregated West Side and South Side neighborhoods.

Boys in the BAM groups were at risk of dropping out of high school and ending up in jail or prison. They had missed an average of eight weeks of school—almost an entire semester—and many had been arrested before. Anthony Ramirez-Di Vittorio, nicknamed “Tony D,” speaks with Philip Cusic, the BAM program manager. Di Vittorio believes that the crucial element of BAM's success is the new conception of manhood to which its students are exposed. Mark Peterson/Redux Pictures for Politico Magazine The study, completed in 2010, found that boys participating in BAM were arrested for violent crimes 45 percent less often than classmates who weren’t in the program; arrests on all charges were 28 percent lower.

The effect on arrest rates didn’t persist after the boys left BAM, but another effect did: the boys were 19 percent more likely to graduate from high school. A second randomized study by Crime Lab researchers and the National Bureau of Economic Research, finished in 2015,, finding that BAM reduced violent crime arrests by 50 percent and overall arrests by 35 percent. “We were surprised by the impacts and how large they were,” says Roseanna Ander, executive director of the crime lab, “especially for a program that’s not super-super-intensive and expensive.” Among programs meant to reduce crime and dropout rates among poor kids, BAM’s results stand out. “Unfortunately, there’s not a long list of programs that have generated really rigorous evidence of impact,” says Ander.

The results are clear, but there’s still some disagreement about which component of the programs makes them so effective. Is it the therapy, the mentoring, the rites of passage idea or all of the above? Interestingly, there’s disagreement between the researchers and the program’s founder on what the most important ingredient is. For the researchers it’s the behavioral therapy, learning new ways of thinking. “It’s necessary but not sufficient to have positive, adult relationships,” says Quinn. Studies of other programs that also have adults engage with young people don’t produce results as dramatic as BAM’s, she says.

The 2015 study seems to back up this theory. Crime lab researchers had BAM kids and a control group from their schools go through a decision-making exercise that made them think a classmate had provoked them and gave them a chance to retaliate. “The kids in the BAM program were physically slowing down, taking time to make decisions about how to respond,” says Quinn. Another crime lab study, of a different CBT program in Chicago’s Cook County Juvenile Temporary Detention Center in Chicago, found that their participants have acquired slow-thinking skills; so did a study of a CBT program for former child soldiers in Liberia.

“We think CBT is helping with meta-cognition, thinking about thinking,” says Quinn. Chicago recently saw its 500th gun death this year. Even the city's criminal justice reformers, like Cook County State's Attorney Kim Foxx, are looking to increase the number of convictions for gun violence. Mark Peterson/Redux Pictures for Politico Magazine Di Vittorio thinks BAM’s effectiveness actually lies in something more culturally driven. “I knew the secret sauce which really makes this program work,” BAM’s founder says. “It’s the men’s work, the rites of passage work.” A typical mentor might tell a 15-year-old boy to stop verbally abusing a teacher, Di Vittorio explains, but a counselor in the role of a rites of passage elder wouldn’t tell him what to do.

Instead, he might ask the boy probing emotional questions about how his mother feels when he’s kicked out of class. “‘What’s it like knowing your mom’s terrified, worried about you?’” Di Vittorio says. “Now that boy starts to go there and starts to feel that pain – and we say, ‘Now you’re doing real work.’ It’s therapy, but it’s done from an elder perspective.

We’re de-mystifying that machoism, that bravado.” Di Vittorio thinks the reduced arrest rate among BAM youth is a sign that they’re internalizing the program’s values, which come to mind in provocative situations. In other words, BAM develops a young man’s conscience.

“There’s something in their gut saying, ‘Man, don’t do this, this ain’t right,’” says Di Vittorio. “That’s a head thing about choice, but deeper than the head thing, the slow thinking, is a gut thing.

It’s an intuitive, visceral process of, ‘I don’t think this is right. This isn’t who I want to be right now.’” *** The eight BAM kids from the West Side left their meeting to go on a mission. Download Autocad 2007 Full Crack Cho Win 8 64bit Download. Lined up by height, the shortest at the front, they walked around a block of homes, single file. It was a trust walk: Only the two leaders, at the front and back, were permitted to look around and give commands. The others had to look straight ahead and follow their lead. Miles from their neighborhood—they had come to Chicago’s South Side for their summer meeting outside school—the kids walked with brisk energy, showing no self-consciousness about doing something so conspicuously uncool in public.

Roseanna Ander, executive director of the University of Chicago's Crime Lab, has been stunned by BAM's success. Mark Peterson/Redux Pictures for Politico Magazine Halfway around the block, rain started coming down hard. Turn around!” shouted the boys’ counselor, Dar’tavous Dorsey, to the boy in the lead. But he couldn’t hear Dorsey over the raindrops peppering the street. The four kids in the back of the line broke off, but the four in front kept going. Dorsey ran forward, still shouting, until the last boys got the word and headed back, laughing and running through the storm. Back inside, everyone’s black BAM T-shirts were soaked, and the boys chattered about how they had decided when to make a run for it.

“In my head I’m thinking, no distractions at all!” Jarrell said. Dorsey ended their circle session with a quick survey—a “check-out” in BAM terminology—asking each boy to describe how he was feeling in one word. He got a mix: Happy. It was a carefree moment, full of camaraderie, and an example of the fun side of BAM, the brotherhood that keeps the boys coming back once every week during the school year. (Chicago schools allow BAM kids to skip one non-core class, such as art or music, for their weekly group sessions.) But the stakes for the boys in this group couldn’t be higher. Eight of Dorsey’s 140 BAM kids were murdered in the past year, he said.

Police and Youth Guidance records partially confirm this: Eight students at the school where Dorsey works were murdered in the past two years, according to the mayor’s office. In the scheme of things, the BAM groups’ one-hour weekly meetings are a small amount of time for the counselors to try to overcome the powerful influences acting on the boys when they’re not in school. “In our neighborhood, it’s mostly killing and gang banging,” said Demarco, the 18-year-old who lost his father to gun violence. “You don’t see no kids want to be successful. Everybody want to be in the streets.

They want to kill somebody. “A lot of people in the ’hood, their dreams get broken,” Demarco said. “Your mom could be strung out on crack. Your dad could be in jail.” BAM, Demarco says, helps kids become successful despite what’s around them through everyday advice and trips outside the neighborhood, including college tours.

“To be a better man, that’s what BAM’s here for. To see different colleges, see something instead of what’s in Chiraq.

We call [Chicago] Chiraq, ‘cause there’s too many killings. It’s killing kids now.”. Dar'Tavous Dorsey, top left, is one of BAM's counselors. Students participate in trust exercises like the ones pictured above in order to strengthen their ties to each other -- and hopefully, then, the community. Mark Peterson/Redux Pictures for Politico Magazine “BAM saves kids’ lives,” said Jarrell. “During spring break, in the neighborhood I’m from, a couple people died.” Jarrell was on a BAM college tour that week, visiting seven states. “If I wasn’t on that truck, that could’ve been me.

They pull you from the hood, they take you different places to see different things. They want your mind somewhere else.” Jarrell has traveled to 17 states in the many college tours Dorsey organizes for the 140 boys and young men he counsels at a West Side high school. (That’s twice as many kids as most BAM counselors, a workload he took on after another BAM counselor left the job.) In Dorsey’s first year as a BAM counselor, about two out of five seniors in BAM went on to college. This past school year, his second in the job, he stepped up the college visits—and all 38 of his graduating seniors went on to higher education. Dorsey, 31, has a master’s degree in social work and a gift for getting kids to open up to him. His skills as a mentor may be more important than his degree.

Though many BAM counselors are psychologists, therapists, or social workers, some are hired for their potential as role models. “They’re men who just have the ‘it’ factor—they’re cool as hell,” said Di Vittorio, the program’s founder. “We knew the youth will imprint upon them, and we can give them some clinical training.” BAM also requires all counselors to go on a weekend retreat put on by the ManKind Project, a Chicago-based organization that dates back to the men’s movement of the 1980s and 1990s. The retreat is a key part of BAM counselors’ “rites-of-passage work,” an ongoing examination of their challenges and character.

Men who won’t make themselves vulnerable, Di Vittorio says, won’t inspire boys to do the same. Dorsey says he doesn’t present himself as a therapist. “What I’ve learned that’s successful for me,” he says, “is not, ‘I’m your therapist. I’m your counselor.’ They don’t want to hear that. They shut down.” Many kids say they see him as a father figure.

“They want guidance or advice. They don’t want it in a brotherly way.” He gives the guys his work and personal cell numbers and email addresses.

The night before the group circle, he talks Jarrell through his anger about his older brother being shot. But Dorsey does use a basic tool of cognitive behavioral therapy: probing questions that get them to examine the choices they have made—like joining a gang—and the impact those choices have on others. Dorsey, left, leads a BAM session. Mark Peterson/Redux Pictures for Politico Magazine “I ask them, why do you feel that because someone eyed you the wrong way, you have to retaliate?” he said.

“Is that acceptable? How would you feel if the shoe was on other foot and that were you?” Sometimes the kids think and respond that it’s not acceptable, but they’re upset. Dorsey keeps up the questions.

“Do you have the discipline to bottle it up? To say I’m going to continue to do what I’m doing because I’m here for a reason?” In June, a graduating senior burst into Dorsey’s office, cursing. A teacher had asked him to put away his phone. He’d resisted, and the confrontation blew up into an argument with two teachers and a dean, who were trying to find a security officer to arrest him. Seeing his rage, Dorsey handed the senior a pair of boxing gloves, then put on mitts himself to absorb the blows. They sparred, the senior still cursing at the teachers who’d challenged him.

Dorsey kept asking him who he was angry. Finally, Dorsey recalled, the senior said: “My dad showed up yesterday.

I haven’t seen him in six years. He was trying to tell me what to do.” “He didn’t realize,” Dorsey said, “that was therapy right there.” *** Chicago’s gun violence has become a national fixation, from Spike Lee’s 2015 film Chi-Raq to President Trump’s frequent tweets about the “carnage” in the city.

Though the country’s third-largest city isn’t its most dangerous (several smaller cities, such as New Orleans, St. Louis and Detroit, have higher murder rates), more total murders happen in Chicago than in any other American city: 764 in 2016, up sharply from 485 in 2015.

That puts tremendous pressure on Emanuel to do something to stem the violence. Crime and policing issues have dogged the mayor—his popularity tanked in 2015 over his handling of the Laquan McDonald police shooting video—and he hasn’t yet announced in early 2019. Critics also argue that Emanuel’s closing of 50 elementary schools in 2012 and six of the city’s 12 community mental health clinics in 2011 may have contributed to social breakdown. (The mayor replies that crime didn’t spike until years later.) Emanuel argues Chicago needs smarter responses to the violence, including highly professional policing, not the aggressive stop-and-frisk police tactics Trump promotes. BAM and WOW, Emanuel said, are part of his strategy to reduce youth violence by giving kids more opportunities; he said he has also doubled the city’s funding for summer and after-school jobs for teens.

“It provides young men somebody they can turn to, to ask questions, seek guidance, and know their own strengths to say no to certain things,” Emanuel told POLITICO. “It creates their own sense of family, and network of friends, who will help them make right choices, not bad choices.” This January, Emanuel announced a new mentoring initiative to serve 7,200 boys.

A projected 75 percent of them will get their mentors through BAM. With city funding and Emanuel’s help with fund-raising, BAM and WOW are growing. BAM and WOW now make up most of Youth Guidance’s $27 million budget: BAM is growing to $13 million this school year, WOW to $4 million. About 60 percent of private donations to Youth Guidance are earmarked for BAM or WOW.

Inside and outside school, adults are noticing BAM’s influence. Chicago police commander Kevin Johnson said BAM members in South Side neighborhoods such as Roseland have also joined block clubs, anti-violence marches and where teens and police officers meet to talk about police encounters. “They seem like a different sort of kid,” Johnson said, “more respectful, more engaged in the community, more positive and outgoing.” In school, BAM and WOW kids are doing better. “I do know from the principals that their attendance in school is up, their graduation is up,” Emanuel said.

They’re also less likely to get caught up in the criminal justice system, the principals tell him. Pastor Marshall Hatch, bottom left right, leads the Maafa Redemption Project, another effort on Chicago's West Side to provide mentoring for young men susceptible to gang recruitment. His New Mount Pilgrim Missionary Baptist Church, bottom right, serves one of the city's most dangerous communities. Mark Peterson/Redux Pictures for Politico Magazine The two programs are an “integral part” of the Chicago Public Schools’ safety strategy, which has moved away from zero-tolerance discipline policies and toward de-escalating conflict and problem-solving instead of punishment. It’s working: Chicago’s schools are seeing year-to-year reductions in suspensions, expulsions, and referrals of students to police. “We attribute a lot of that to programs like BAM,” says Jadine Chao, the school district’s chief of safety and security.

BAM and WOW are also part of a national trend toward social-emotional learning and trauma-sensitive education. In Chicago, the district’s Office of Social and Emotional Learning, founded in 2010, works with Youth Guidance to decide which schools to include in expansions of BAM and WOW. Its 30 staffers train teachers and administrators to adjust their approaches to discipline to consider that kids acting out may be trauma victims who need mental-health support. The office also helps schools set up lessons in classes or homerooms on empathy, decision-making, and conflict resolution. Schools across the nation are also embracing social and emotional education for kids who’ve grown up in violent neighborhoods.

San Francisco schools that adopted a meditation program for teens,, have seen fewer suspensions, better attendance and better academic performance., a Bay Area nonprofit, offers a for kids who struggle with self-control, which it says has impacted 1.5 million students worldwide. The University of Chicago Crime Lab is currently studying a similar meditation program, also called Quiet Time, developed by the filmmaker. Schools from to Boston to Seattle have adopted Second Step, a social and emotional education program for elementary and middle school students. Some brain-science studies have found that many teens exposed to violence experience post-traumatic stress disorder, Keels said. “A kid staring out the window who seems disengaged in classroom activities might actually be having flashbacks of incidents they’ve seen in the neighborhood.

Sometimes in a minor interaction with another student, they overreact very aggressively, [because it] triggers feelings of being unsafe.” *** In 2010, as BAM expanded, Youth Guidance decided to found a similar program for girls. Like BAM, Working On Womanhood is a mix of therapy and mentoring based on core values.

Girls are less likely to be the perpetrators of the violence that grabs headlines, but they are nonetheless deeply affected by the violence they encounter. Gail Day, WOW’s program director, said 84 percent of the nearly 1,100 girls in the program have experienced five or more traumatic events—most of which are acts of violence, ranging widely from being slapped to witnessing a murder. About 30 percent of WOW girls have seen someone else shot or shot.

Youth Guidance, the non-profit that gave birth to BAM, began the program Working on Womanhood in 2010 to serve girls in the same communities. Although less likely to become perpetrators of gun violence, young women in the program experience other forms of violence either directly or indirectly at a high rate. Mark Peterson/Redux Pictures for Politico Magazine “Our girls internalize a lot of those stressors that are associated with trauma,” Day says. “Instead of going out and getting a gun, and shooting someone, they repress it, they internalize it. And then when something triggers it, it comes out in aggressive behavior, depression, and social anxiety.” Trauma can create a vicious cycle: Victims or witnesses can become more likely to act impulsively and aggressively themselves. If you’ve seen someone shot, or someone close to you has been shot, Day said, you can develop anxiety, a lack of trust and hypervigilance.

Last year, WOW had counselors in 21 Chicago-area schools, compared to BAM’s 62. WOW is newer than BAM, and less proven.

No outside researchers have evaluated it yet, though the University of Chicago Crime Lab is in talks with Youth Guidance about conducting a study. But WOW’s self-testing has found that the program improves girls’ mental health. Girls who enter WOW with severe depression were markedly less depressed once they went through the program, while girls with mild or moderate depression improved slightly.

That reflects WOW’s focus on girls’ emotional health. Unlike in BAM, all WOW counselors are therapists with master’s degrees. On the third day of school, 10 girls gathered in a converted classroom at their high school in the near-west suburbs of the city. It was the first time they’d been together since last June. Dressed in purple shirts with Working on Womanhood written on them, the girls played what seemed like a simple concentration game—a girl would say the name of another girl and toss her a ball across the table in between them. Then a second and third ball would be added. Anytime someone dropped a ball, the whole group had to start again.

The girls giggled excitedly as the balls flew around the room; they cheered when they completed a full round. As the buzz subsided, their counselor, Nicole Lemon, got them talking.

“What do you remember from last year’s group that relates to the group juggle?”. Gail Day, WOW's director, observes a session. Mark Peterson/Redux Pictures for Politico Magazine “No matter what’s going on,” says Dasia, a senior, “you’ve always got to stay focused on the task at hand.” “Does anybody remember what CBT is?” Lemon asks. “I know!” says one girl. “You gotta think through what you’re going to do before you do it.” “Say you’re in the hallway and someone bumps you,” says Lemon. “It might be an accident!

What are you thinking?” “Maybe that girl ain’t even thinking about you!” says a student. “That’s the idea,” says Lemon.

“It’s to start to change those negative thoughts.” Girls who’ve gone through WOW say they’ve gotten better at self-control, are doing better in school, and have come to see their counselor as a role model for smart decision-making in stressful situations. Ciana, a 17-year-old senior, jokes that she’s going to get a bracelet that reads, “What would Miss Lemon Do?” Her freshman year, she fought often with her mother and often ended up in the dean’s office for misbehavior. Thanks to WOW, she now talks back to herself rather than acting on impulse.“I’m not that get-in-trouble girl anymore,” she said. This summer, Ciana was working at a movie theater, trying to help a woman who’d bought the wrong ticket when the woman started cursing at her. “I thought in my head, ‘What would Miss Lemon do?’” She walked away, calmed down, and started working with her manager. But the same woman, along with her family this time, found her again. “She’s literally threatening to kill me, jump me, all of that,” Ciana recalled.

She told herself to keep a smile on her face: “Calm down. It’s not that serious.

Guests do this all the time. They’re always mad.” Her general manager later complimented her for keeping her cool, and said she would’ve been written up for discipline had she gotten into an argument with the customers.

“I walked in the next day with a smile on face,” she said. “I was proud of myself.” Ciana’s plans for the next two years include keeping her grades up, as she did last year, and heading off to college—Miami University in Ohio is her dream school. She raves about the effect her WOW counselor has had on her. “Miss Lemon doesn’t care what you did in your past,” she said. “She just wants to make sure your future is secure.” BAM and WOW’s values and self-discipline lessons are built to last beyond high school. Jodeci, now 20, joined BAM in his freshman year in high school.

Now a graduate, he said he enrolled in one of Youth Guidance’s workforce development programs. BAM’s lessons still help him stay in his “highest mind,” he said, focused on his goals and career path. Jodeci said he repeats lessons from BAM to friends and others in his neighborhood. “You’ve got a better choice than this,” he said. “You don’t have to sell drugs to make it, to get a job. Who are you trying to impress? The only person to try to impress is yourself.”.

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The user can design what columns to display as well as what calculations to add between those columns and other cost data to produce the needed cost worksheet. Of course, there is no limit to the different layouts and design that can be created. Capturing Project Communications Similar to any project or even any business, there are many type of communications that takes place during the project life cycle stages. For most engineering consulting offices, the data communicated in those communications are badly managed and captured. Massive volume of valuable data get wasted every hour of every day during the project duration. Informal communications that can add very little value in supporting disputes negotiations and resolutions.

The trend of no transparency and no accountability tend to be the preferred trend with the absence of proper formal communication. Project Management Information System (PMIS) like PMWeb comes ready with the most important type of communications that will take place in delivering projects. In addition to the contract and cost management communications explained earlier, communications such as RFI, Meeting Minutes, Transmittals, Action Items, Daily Reports, Submittals, Correspondence and many others are ready to use out-of-the-box. All of those forms can be improved by adding user defined fields, attach supportive documents, link to WBS levels and workflow can be added to enforce the formal submit, review and approval processes. Additional communications like issues, permits, data collection reports, LEED certification, project SWOT analysis, project functional components, project communication plan, official approval forms for the different design submissions, design review comments, design submissions approval or rejection letters, value engineering savings, no objection certificates, design stages approval, progress reports among many others can be created in any desired format using the PMWeb custom form builder.

Those forms can be created in any desired language as some of the forms specially in the MENA and GCC region needs to be in Arabic. Supportive documents can be attached to those documents and workflow can be added to enforce the formal submit, review and approval processes similar to any other form in PMWeb. Reviewing, Sharing and Commenting on Project Deliverables The many types of project communications might require the design team and other stakeholders to review the project deliverables such as drawings, technical specifications, agreements, bill of quantities among the many other documents. PMIS solutions like PMWeb provides this functionality by either using their own redlining tools or more advanced third party applications.

Those tools usually would allow redlining those attachments and adding comments. Real-Time Single Version of the Truth Projects Portfolio Performance Reporting With all of the projects performance data captured on a single database repository, executives, senior management, project managers and other stakeholders will have access to a real-time single version of the truth projects portfolio performance reporting. Thus, giving those stakeholders the needed information and knowledge to make better and faster informed decisions. It is estimated that organizations who continue to use MS Excel to report their projects performance, waste more than 60% of their most valuable resources time on capturing, combining, analyzing, verifying, presenting and sharing projects’ performance data.

This is coupled with an average delay of at least five working days between the time data was captured and time it was presented. Assigning the Project Delivery Team Most consultants would have functional departments for each engineering discipline that the project delivery might require. The project manager should have a formal process for requesting the project team that will work on his or her project. Using PMWeb form builder, a template for capturing the details of those resources was created. The template can be designed in different form to capture the particular details that an organization might require for the resources assignment form. Keeping Track of Assumptions The project scope, schedule, budget and deliverables list developed by the engineering consultant will be based on the project’s scope of work as stated in the RFP. Nevertheless, the consultant will need to make any assumptions for the many unknowns that the project might have.

Those assumptions will have an impact on the project’s completion date and budget. Therefore, it is a must that the consultant maintains the risk register that not only will identify those assumptions but what response actions the consultant have decided to take. Those details will be recorded in PMWeb risk register. Reducing Risk Exposure by Outsourcing One of the known risk response actions in projects is to transfer the risk to another organization that can better handle those risks. For engineering consultants, this is a very common practice. The consultant might decide to outsource the structural design, electrical, mechanical and other services design, BIM modeling, quantity surveying and other scope of work to other consulting firms. For large consultant organizations, the outsourcing could be to other company owned entities or business units.

PMWeb commitment module will be used to capture the details of all those outsourced contracts. Again, it is highly recommended that the line items of those contracts are aligned with project’s WBS and deliverables. This will ensure full project scope alignment and less likelihood of encountering the scope creep risk. Enforcing Efficiency and Accountability in Project Delivery An emerging trend with engineering consultants is to use the same approach of project scope outsourcing with their own project delivery team. For each resource that will be involved in the project delivery, there will be an agreement between that resource and the organization. The agreement will list the number of man-days that this resource was budgeted to spend on the project.

Those man-days are the full-time effort (FTE) that was estimated for delivering the relevant deliverables of the project scope. The resource’s performance appraisal and bonus scheme will be related to how efficient that resource was in not exceeding those estimated man-days for the original scope of work. Any additional man-days on what was estimated, means that the actual cost have exceeded what was estimated for.

Assessing the Actual Efficiency in Delivering Project Scope Although the above practice will help in enforcing accountability and promoting efficiency, the engineering consultant needs to better understand what was the actual man-days spent on delivering the scope of work and what were the reasons for those variances. To achieve this, each resource must maintain his or her weekly timesheets. The PMWeb timesheet helps in capturing the hours spent every day for labor and non-labor resources and whether those resources where spent during normal working hours, after working hours or weekends. Again, hours will be captured against each project’s deliverable. Capturing the Details of the Agreement with the Project Owner What was presented above mainly focused on the cost for delivering the design project.

Nevertheless, the consultant will be receiving revenue from the project owner when those project deliverables are done and formally approved. PMWeb contract module will be used to capture the details of this agreement which usually would have the stages of the project as outlined in level 2 of the WBS. Some agreements could be detailed to deliverable packages.

Similar to the challenges that will face a contractor when it comes to managing a construction project, the engineering consultant is no better when it comes to manage the design stages of a project. Not only the engineering consultant have obligations to deliver the design deliverables within the agreed milestones, but also need to ensure that his cost for delivering this scope is within the approved contract budget.

The engineering consultant is also responsible to ensure that contractual obligations for delivering the project’s design deliverables are fulfilled. Unlike contractors who are required to deliver the project scope based on pre-agreed drawings and specifications, the engineering consultant need to capture owner requirements to come with the needed deliverables.

In other words, the risks of scope creep, delays and going over budget are much higher during the project design stages. Therefore, the engineering consultant must adopt the project management best practices to reduce the likelihood of encountering those risks. The availability of project management information system (PMIS) like PMWeb enables engineering consultants to better adopt the best practices of project management to increase the likelihood of delivering projects on schedule and within budget. The PMIS technology will help in reducing the massive knowledge wasted by those engineering offices by failing to capture the data generated from the different project management processes that takes place on their project every hour and every day during the projects delivery life cycle stages. Defining the Project Scope Similar to any project, the work breakdown structure (WBS) for the design stages need to be well defined and agreed on.

The WBS would usually have the design stages as level 2 while the project will be level 1. The WBS can be further detailed to improve the level of control on the design stages. Developing the Project Schedule The WBS will help the engineering consultant to have a complete and better integrated project schedule. The schedule needs to project deliverables oriented, that is to say the schedule needs to ensure that all deliverables are listed and properly sequenced. For example, the design schedule would list the different drawings, specification sections and other deliverables as task.

The tasks of creating the deliverable, reviewing and approving the deliverable will be part of the activity duration. The actual review and approval process details will be captured in the deliverable submittal review and approval process to be detailed at another part of this article.

Creating the Project Budget The project budget represents the amount the funds that the engineering consultant must not exceed to ensure that the project is not in loss. The budget is usually based on the detailed cost estimate done by the consultant for delivering the project scope of work.

It should include all direct and indirect cost as well as the contingency reserve for all accepted project risks. It is highly recommended that the budget line items are aligned with the project WBS levels.

For some, the budget can be detailed to the project’s deliverables level for the ultimate cost control. Back in the early 80s, I have to admit that I was fascinated by the extent of planning reports that Turner used to request contractors to provide before construction works can commence. It was during the Kuwait Amiri Diwan project where I used to be the contractors’ project controls consultant that Turner used to ask for four very important documents. The first was the resource loaded detailed schedule using Primavera Project Planner (P3), the cost loaded report to map the bill of quantity line items to the schedule activities, the submittal report (E1) and the procurement report (E2). With the absence of today’s available technology, those were done using Lotus 123, an application that is very similar to MS Excel.

With the improvements in planning and scheduling software, the cost loaded schedule and procurement schedules have now better done using those tools. Nevertheless, the majority of organizations involved in delivering engineering and construction projects continue to use MS Excel to develop their submittal schedule.

In other words, they continue to use the same old technology we had used 30 years ago in developing the submittal report (E1). Those organizations continue to waste the massive knowledge and improvement that they could bring to their business if they take advantage of what is available today. What Are Submittals? Submittals are the contract documents that require the contractor to prepare, review, approve and submit to the Engineering Consultant for review, approval, or other appropriate action.

The use of today’s available project management information system (PMIS) like PMWeb, has brought massive improvements when it comes to managing those submittals and capturing the knowledge gained from performing this process. The PMWeb submittal module allows defining the complete list of the submittal log include the relevant specification section, title, supplier, subcontractor WBS level, project schedule activity ID, lead time to procure among others. In addition, PMWeb allows creating unlimited number of attributes with list of values that can be used to better describe the submittal and use to report and analyze the performance of the submittal process. Avoid Submitting Non-Specified Material Another highly recommended practice, again from the Turner days, that for each submittal item, the content of the relevant specification section to be copied and pasted to the submittal form. This will ensure that the contractor is submitting exactly what was stated in the contract’s specification.

Should there be any deviation, the contractor is obliged to clearly state those deviations. PMWeb Clause Module is used to capture the details of all contract specification sections to enable the contractor to drag and drop those relevant submittal sections to the submittal form. Ensuring Submittal Quality and Compliance Another good practice is to have a checklist for each submittal item that is aligned with the project’s specifications. This could be viewed as a quality assurance for the submittal to ensure that is correct and complete.

This is needed to avoid rejecting the submittal by the Engineering Consultant due to missing details. The checklist would also include the submittal certification statement which usually states that “ By this submittal, we hereby represent that we have determined and verified all field measurements, field construction criteria, materials, dimensions, catalogue numbers and pertinent data and we have checked and coordinated each item with other applicable approved drawings and all Contract requirements.” Again, this effort is usually done once where all projects getting executed now and even in the future will benefit from. Attaching Documents to Be Reviewed Another requirement of any submittal, is the drawing, material sample, catalogue and other items that need to be submitted and reviewed. Those documents will be usually uploaded in PMWeb document management repository where they will be attached to the submittal item. This will enable the Engineering Consultant and other stakeholders who need to review the submittal to access and view those attachments anytime, anywhere using any device.

In addition, hyperlinks to suppliers’ websites and online catalogues are possible to ensure complete access to all what needs to be reviewed. Viewing and Redlining Documents Comments, stamps and other review remarks can be added to those documents using PMWeb redlining tool. PMWeb will keep a log of all those comments by the individual who did the comments and the date. This is needed to maintain audit trail of all those comments and remarks.

The PMWeb redlining tool as allows linking PMWeb records to specific locations in the document being reviewed. Those could be for example an RFI, another submittal item, meeting minutes among others. The Submittal Review and Approval Process The above steps will ensure that the contractor has developed a complete and comprehensive submittal log that covers the submittal review and approval requirements of the project. Each submittal item will be linked to the submittal workflow that was created depending on the submittal review and approval requirement of the contract.

Having said so, submittals might be subject to different review and approval process depending on the specification section, submittal type, whether it is a substitution, whether this substitution has time and/or cost impact, the amount of this impact among many others. The PMWeb conditional workflow can comply with all those scenarios by incorporating conditions and branches that will use the default and user defined attributes of the submittal. This will ensure automation of the submittal review and approval process.

It is very common on any engineering and construction project that submittals might not be approved from the first submission process. The engineering consultant might return the submittal marked with one of following classifications: APPROVED: Requires no corrections, no marks. APPROVED AS NOTED: Requires minor corrections.

Items may be fabricated as marked without further resubmission. Resubmit corrected copies to the Engineer. APPROVED AS NOTED – RESUBMIT: Requires corrections. Items not marked may be fabricated. Resubmit entire submittal following original submission with corrections noted.

REJECTED: Requires major corrections or is otherwise not following Contract Documents. No items shall be fabricated. Resubmit entire submittal following original submission with corrections noted. INFORMATION ONLY: Items specified by Contract Documents. PMWeb workflow engine will accommodate those actions and allow the organization to define how the submittal item will be routed when one of those actions are taken. The automation of the submittal review and approval process not only helps in enforcing transparency and accountability in performing this process, but provide real-time status of all submittals and their possible on the project’s objectives. Formal Submittal Document Template As submittals are contractual documents that need to be formally submitted to the Engineering Consultant, the output copy needs to be designed in a format the fulfils the formal submission requirements as well as the branding for the project owner.

An application like PMWeb provides the advanced reporting tools to design those forms. Below are examples on how the submittal form on the same project could vary depending on the submittal type. Of course, many other project owners might opt to have a single output form for submittal types. Submittal Log PMWeb provides the project stakeholders with real-time status of all submittals regardless of their type or status.

The report can be designed in any desired format to display the information needed by the report reader. The report could include filters to select submittals by status, by type, specification category or section, by supplier and any other attribute that was captured in the submittal item. The log can also provide hyperlink the documents that were attached to the submittal item.

Another business intelligence report is the report that analyzes the time elapsed for reviewing and approving submittals. The report shows the average time, at 95% percentile, it took to review and approval submittals with the shortest and longest duration. The report can be grouped by submittal item type, submittal specification category and section, submittal reviewer among others. This report is very important to highlight the efficiency of the submittal review process which will help to identify on possible options to improve the process.

Are Your Projects Not Getting the Right Submittal Management Solution? To conclude, the submittal review and approval process is one of the many other processes that need to be managed in engineering and construction projects. Organizations who continue to use the 30-years old technology of spreadsheets as their trusted project management information system, should be ready to face the “Watermelon Syndrome” where the performance status being reported does not necessarily tell the true and real-time status of how this specific process is performing.

They also need to understand that more than 60% of their most valuable project team effort is being wasted on capturing, updating, verifying, preparing those reports that many would not trust. This is of course not forgetting that the data captured from the different project management processes are stored in different silos that they still need to integrate and migrate to provide an overall non-real time status of their projects health and performance based on data that lacks any verification of transparency and accountability. The list of why you should not continue to manage your project submittals in the old non-efficient way is extensive, and we believe that we are all aware of it. We are also aware that how many times organizations failed to win claims and disputes to the lack of having such data to support their position. The decision is yours. Continue wasting the valuable knowledge while increasing the risk of your projects delivery, or take the right action that will help in realizing the benefits that others organization have got by using the right technology to manage their submittal management process among others. Having a daily report on construction projects have always been a contractual requirement even before the days where technology was available.

I remember the days back in the early 80s where the contractor used to send the daily reports for the week at the weekend when they had the time to do it. Although this defeats the main purpose of a daily report but at least, we as a project owner, had some kind of documentation on what has happened on the construction site. Nevertheless, contractors would only understand the damage that can be caused by not having properly submitted daily reports when they are in dispute situation where there is a need to assess the extent of idle labor or the productivity or efficiency rates actually achieved during disruption periods. In addition, they understand the damage it will cause by failing to prove what has happened on those days among others. Today, no project management information system (PMIS) would exist without having the daily report module as one of its default modules. For example, PMWeb Project Management Information System Daily Report module is designed to allow capturing the detailed particulars of each day events as reported by each contractor on the project.

There is a growing trend that even for a single contractor, multiple daily reports can be submitted by the different site areas or zones managers or by those accountable for specific project’s scope of work which is usually determined by the project’s Work Breakdown Structure (WBS). Capturing General Details of The Day Accordingly, the first thing that a daily report should capture is the details on who is submitting it, is it for specific WBS level, daily report date and the weather condition on that day.

Those would include weather condition, temperature and rain precipitation amount. Capturing Details of Work Produced or Work in Place The next important data to be captured in a daily report is the work or activities performed on that particular day. For each entry, the daily report should identify the location of the work completed for which all locations and zones are usually pre-defined in the Location Breakdown Structure (LBS) by dragging and dropping that particular location.

Next, we need to provide a narrative description of the completed work, done by which company, classification of the work done, quantity of work completed, unit of measure for completed work, cost account number associated with this work, additional notes to better describe that completed work and pictures or any other document type that needs to be attached to that activity. There is no limit on the number of events that can be added on each day. The capturing of the work done during the day and the week in full can also be reported in what is known as the weekly work production form which can be launched from within the daily report.

This form which is similar to the timesheet concept but instead of capturing resources it captures the work that was produced during a specific week. This work is usually aligned with the contract’s bill of quantity that this work is part of. The weekly production report will be reviewed by the project owner or his/her authorized representative to approve what was reported.

The content of the weekly production reports will be imported to the monthly progress invoice that the contractor will submit to get paid for the work completed and approved during the past period. Capturing Safety Incidents On the same page of the work completed during the day, the daily report form in PMWeb allows the organization to record the details of all safety incidents that were reported during that day. Of course, this does not eliminate the need to use the safety incident form template to report the complete details of the safety incident and associated hours lost, rectification among others.

In addition, the daily report template allows linking other project records that were created in PMWeb. Those could include the safety incident template, RFI, meeting minutes, submittals among others. Capturing the Details of Resources Spent The next important data is the resources, labor and equipment, that were present at the project site on that particular day. For each resource which has been pre-defined in the resources repository, the daily report writer needs to assign the cost account number associated with this resource the project schedule activity or task that the reported resource hours need to be linked to, the percent complete of this activity, the start and end working hours for that resource on that particular activity with the option of separating normal working hours from overtime or weekend working hours, description of the work done and additional notes need to be added for the work completed by that resource. Similar to the weekly production report and in the case of time and material contracts, the contractor can launch the weekly timesheet template to report the actual hours spent for labor and non-labor resources. The hours for each resource will identify the hours spent during normal working hours, overtime hours and weekend hours. This is needed as the rate for each hour type is usually different.

Similar all timesheet practices, a workflow can be assigned to formalize the submission, review and approval of the submitted timesheet. The actual reported and approved hours will then become part of the progress invoice that will be submitted for the resource hours spent. What Other Data and Information a Daily Report Can Capture The PMWeb Daily Report template allows the user to add different groups of attributes that are designed to capture data relevant to the daily report of predefined list of values. For example, those could include details if there were major disruption events that have occurred on the project on that particular date among others. Nevertheless, the most important of all are the documents that will be attached to the daily progress report. Those could include progress photographs or videos, drawings and other type of documents. Those documents regardless of their type will be stored in PMWeb document management repository to maintain the complete records of the project history.

Analyzing the Captured Daily Report Data The data captured in the daily reports can be subject for detailed analysis and review. For example, a report can be produced to capture the reported weather conditions during the complete project life or for specific periods of time. The same could be done for work in place and resource hours spent. Actually, the data from those three sources can be used to analyze if the weather conditions or other reported incidents have affected the productivity rates on the project. This is a very important source of information for those who are preparing a claim that involves labor efficiency loss by identifying what is known as “Windows of Productivity” to add the actual productivity rates achieved during periods with no disruption events and actual productivity rates achieved during periods that had disruption events.

This comparison will enable the claim team to assess the lost efficiency attributed to those disruption events. One of the key challenges in delivering projects, and in particular engineering and construction projects the massive volume of knowledge that gets wasted by failing to formally document this knowledge to enable other project team members to use and take advantage of this knowledge. It is no wonder that the engineering and construction industry is considered one of the least efficient industries compared to others where knowledge is better captured. This lack of knowledge sharing represents a major threat to the engineering and construction industry specially when we see the increased trend of experienced resources drain who have this knowledge due to retirement, being laid off due to business slowdown, relocating to other companies and locations among many others. Nevertheless, the most challenging of all is the unwillingness of many experienced resources and other team members to formally share their projects’ knowledge.

This could be attributed to a number of reasons but for many, knowledge represents power and for them they are not willing to give this power easily fearing that it could impact their value to the organization. For them, this represents the value that they have earned over the many years and where their current position and financial compensation is directly linked to.

There are three types of knowledge sharing, active, passive and reactive. The active knowledge sharing is the knowledge the will be formally captured in predefined form templates to create the organization’s knowledge management repository. It should be noted that 70% of knowledge comes when the details of any specific knowledge have been written down rather than kept in our minds. The passive knowledge sharing is the knowledge that can be extracted from the different project management processes when they are captured in pre-defined form templates. Examples of those could include request for information (RFI), meeting minutes, change orders, daily reports, request for inspection, non-compliance requests, punch lists among many others.

The third type of knowledge share is the reactive knowledge share. This the knowledge share where the knowledge from the project team members is extracted using questionnaires and different type of interviews to capture this knowledge. Active Knowledge Sharing To enforce active knowledge sharing, project intensive organizations should include this requirement as part of the project team member appraisal. Similar to other key performance indicators (KPI), the organization need to set the minimum number of knowledge items to be shared by each team member per period.

To ensure the quality of the shared knowledge, predefined form templates should be used by all team members regardless what project they are involved with or what stage the project is. This is required to formalize this knowledge sharing process. The Knowledge Share form shown below which was created using PMWeb Project Management Information System is an example of what knowledge details need to be captured.

The header of the form provides the general attributes like any other project communication record like project, issuer, date and status. In addition, it details the project phase, work category, specification reference and others.

The form could have included fields for the project management knowledge area, project management process and the many other attributes that will enable having more better structured shared knowledge. The custom form builder enables creating the different type of fields and attributes needed for this form. To ensure the credibility and value of the shared knowledge, all those knowledge sharing forms need to be formally submitted to the designated Knowledge Management Officer (KMO) so he or she can review and approve the shared knowledge before it can be shared with others. The PMWeb workflow module will be used to define those workflow steps and for which the KMO will be given the privileges to invite and involve other project, PMO, organization or third party team members to review and analyze the shared knowledge. The KMO and the knowledge management team can be used this captured knowledge to improve the capturing of projects data, creating checklists for the different project management processes, develop training material to educate new project team members on those best practices among others. Passive Knowledge Sharing Passive knowledge is the knowledge that can be extracted from the different project management processes that are being used on the project. Of course, this need having a Project Management Information System that enforces project stakeholders and team members in provide the needed data for each process in the needed format.

That is why many organizations who use PMWeb do not limit the use of PMWeb on the many out-of-the-box form templates that covers most of the project management processes, but use the custom form builder to create form templates to capture the data from other specific processes that they might have. An example of passive knowledge sharing is the use of the Request for Information (RFI) and Change Order processes. If we take each one of those two processes on its own, the knowledge captured in their pre-defined forms can provide the KMO and the KM team with massive valuable information on the reasons for why RFIs and Change Orders were issues, their impact on the project objectives, who have issued them, how long it took to close them, which part of the project did they affect, which project scope of work they were related to, among many others. This knowledge could be of great value to the KMO as it will help the actual causes that have resulted in issuing the RFI and which have eventually resulted in the change order. Those causes could be attributed to incomplete project design documents, old technical specification, unforeseen site conditions, among others.

Identifying those causes, the KMO and KM team can come with recommendations and actions that need to be implemented on all other projects to reduce the negative impacts of those causes. Reactive Knowledge Sharing To enable reactive knowledge sharing, the KMO or the Project Management Office (PMO) who are responsible for capturing projects knowledge needs to assign team members who will become responsible for performing those interviews. Predefined document templates need to be created to identify the questions those surveys will include and the possible answers for each question. There could be templates to capture knowledge on the performance of contractors, quality management practices, health, safety and environment (HSE) practices, project schedule review and analysis, project team performance appraisal among others.

Templates could also include questionnaires to capture the feedback of each project team member on his or her views on how the project is performing and any challenges they need to report. The document template below is a sample of a template that could be used to assess the performance of each contractor or vendor working on the project. The questions are drafted to identify the type of knowledge that the organization wants to capture to help them to better select the contractors and suppliers who could be considered for future projects. Similar to all other forms in PMWeb, attachments to further support that data captured can be attached to the form. In addition, the form could be assigned a workflow process to formalize the steps for submitting, reviewing, analyzing and storing this knowledge. The captured data will become available for the KMO and KM team to analyze and identify the newly captured knowledge. For example, the data captured in the staff appraisal forms can help in identifying the knowledge and skills of the project team members.

This will enable the organization not only to identify the training courses that the team members should attend to improve their current skills but also who could be the best project team that could be assigned on certain projects. The dashboard shown below is an example on how Business Intelligence (BI) tools have used the data captured in PMWeb to analyze the performance of the project team. In summary, organizations who understands the value that capturing, documenting and sharing their projects delivery knowledge will bring to their business, needs to formalize their knowledge related processes. There are two type of processes, active and passive knowledge sharing processes.

As for the passive knowledge sharing processes, organizations need to enforce the use of project management information systems which will insure that the particulars of each process are captured in the right format, by the right team member at the right time. As for active knowledge sharing, similarly there should be a predefined process for sharing that knowledge but more important it should part of each team member appraisal. So Maybe the question that organizations should ask, for those project team members who are not willing to share their knowledge, is it better for our organization to do without them? For projects-intensive organizations, the practice of outsourcing part of the project overall scope is a very common practice. They do that to transfer the risks associated with this scope of work to other organizations who have the better know how, skills and experience in managing those risks. Nevertheless, failing to have a formal process for managing the deliverables of those contracts could result in new risks for those projects-intensive organizations that could eliminate the benefit of outsourcing this scope of work. Of course, those organizations need also to have a formal for pre-qualifying the companies that could be considered for the outsourced work as well as have proven processes for inviting those qualified companies to bid, analyze and award the contracts to the successful bidders, contract administration and contract closeout.

The point to remember is that procuring contracts is intended to reduce the project’s risk exposure and therefore the project owner must ensure that this is what is being implemented. Deliverables Based WBS The Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK) defines the work breakdown structure as a “A hierarchical decomposition of the total scope of work to be carried out by the project team to accomplish the project objectives and create the required deliverables.” A work breakdown structure element may be a product, data, service, or any combination thereof. A WBS also provides the necessary framework for detailed cost estimating and control along with providing guidance for schedule development and control.

For example, PMWeb Project Management Information System (PMIS) allows creating the Work Breakdown Structure (WBS). It also allows importing the WBS from MS Excel, Oracle Primavera P6 and MS Project. The important point is that there should be one WBS for the whole project to be used across all project management processes. Contract Deliverables When a project has a complete WBS, this will help in ensuring that all deliverables are defined and agreed to by the project sponsor. For the project scope that will be outsourced using contracts, the contract deliverables need to be aligned with the project WBS. For each deliverable, the amount to be paid for each deliverable needs also to be identified. For example, when the project owner decides on outsourcing the project design scope of work to a qualified engineering consultant, the contract should specify what are the deliverables for each stage of the design stage and what will be the value or weight of that deliverable.

PMWeb commitments module will be used to capture all those outsourced contracts along with the details of each contract deliverables including the value of each deliverable. The Deliverables Submittal Schedule In this article, the type of deliverables that will be discussed are those deliverables that need to be formally submitted for review and approval before the project owner will accept and pay for. Of course, in many other projects specially in construction projects, most deliverables completion status will be assessed at the end of each progress period on their percentage complete of work in place. For example, roof slabs are one of the construction project deliverables that will be assessed at the end of each progress period to determine how much to pay the contractor based on the approved work in place. This work will also be subject to the site inspection review and approval processes to ensure that it has been delivered in accordance to the contract agreement and specifications. It is recommended to include the project deliverables as activities in the project schedule as not only this will ensure having a complete integrated project schedule, but also will provide the realistic expected dates for completing those deliverables. Organizations might use different tools for producing and managing the project schedule.

Some organizations might select Oracle Primavera P6 while others might select Microsoft Project or PMWeb Scheduling module. The PMWeb Scheduling module can also import the schedule created in Oracle Primavera P6 or Microsoft Project. Deliverables Submittal Log Nevertheless, and as stated earlier, this article focus on deliverables that need to be formally reviewed and approved before they can be accepted as being complete. Therefore, there will be a need to capture the formal process for reviewing and approving those deliverables which might be subject to multiple review processes when deliverables are not approved from the first submission. Further the review and approval of each deliverable might vary depending on the type of the deliverable. The PMWeb deliverable submittal log will be used to capture the details of all deliverables that need to formally submitted and approved for each contract in a project. The second report analyzes the actual time taken to review and approve the project deliverables by deliverable type.

This will help to analyze the reasons for this delay as could be due to quality of deliverables submitted where they have to go multiple review cycles for them to be accepted or there is an issue with the deliverable review team who might be delaying this approval process with no valid reasons. The point is that without having the right and trusted real-time data, the project team cannot have the right insight for them to better understand their project’s performance status as well as issues whether it was related to project deliverable or any other project management process. Real estate continues to be one of the most preferred investment options in the Middle East in general and Gulf Corporate Council (GCC) countries in particular. Nevertheless, the current credit crunch and increased competition on similar type of real estate products, had resulted in a relative slowdown of new real estate investments. Private equity and other capital investment firms can play an important role not only in reviving this sector but in improving the current return on investments as well as become more responsive to customer needs. The Middle East and GCC regions have growing needs for real estate investments in healthcare, education, affordable housing, hospitality and entertainment and logistics centers including warehouses.

In addition, there is need to invest in infrastructure projects to meet the population growth demands as well as replace the ailing infrastructure. Further, the growing trend of moving the responsibility for delivering those capital asset projects from the public sector to the private sectors, creates new lucrative type of investments. PE firms can play a perfect role not only in delivering these projects but for reaching out for the institutions who will be keen in owning and paying for those facilities when built. Those PE firms know the size of opportunities those investments will bring to them and their investors who always demand for better return on their investments. No organization understands the value of investment and the need to exist of an investment at the right time and at the right return like private equity firms do.

They understand that they need to look for investments with the desired return on investment and a risk exposure that they can manage. They also understand that there should be no personal strings attached to the investment and will be ready to exist at the right time and price.

In addition, they know that they have access to different sources of funding at preferred rates that others do not have. Further, they know that they have access to a wide variety of customers for their investment products that others do not necessarily have. Nevertheless, what Private Equity (PE) firms might not be best at is managing the design, tender and construction delivery stages of a real estate project.

Although no one expects that a PE firm will play the role of the architects, engineering consultants, contractors and vendors but for sure, they need to play the role of the project manager or the investment fund manager. To able to play this role successfully, a PE firm needs to have the right project management team members, the right project delivery processes, right project management technology and the right business unit to ensure the sustainability of all those right actions. Having the Right Project Team Members Managing projects successfully is no different than any other business function of any company including PE firms.

Those are the resources who have proven track record in managing engineering and constructions and are fully aware of the industry best practices. They need to have track record in project management, contract administration and negotiation, project finance, risk and issue management and some understanding of engineering and construction projects.

They also need to possess excellent personal skills particularly in communication, team building, motivation, stress management and problem solving. The project management team must lead their projects to ensure that they are getting the most of the project stakeholders. Similar to the other business units of the PE firm, there should be a fully documented job description manual that not only details the different project deliver roles and their key responsibilities aligned with the project life stages, key relationships between the Project Manager and each of the appropriate project stakeholders, skills and Key Competencies aligned with the relevant project management knowledge areas, performance criteria among others. In addition, there should be periodical assessment of the performance of the PE Firm project management team to identify any performance improvement needs and readiness to grow their role and responsibilities. Having the Right Project Delivery Processes All business functions needed documented policies and procedures to ensure that all stakeholders and parties involved in delivering a project investment are performing their tasks in accordance to what the firm have adopted as their standard. The standard operating procedures for managing the project delivery should identify the project stages and associated stage gates along with the deliverables of each stage.

In addition, the procedures should detail the different project management processes to be used along with the document templates and reports used to manage and report the performance of those processes. For each process, the workflow steps for submitting, reviewing, sharing and approving each project management process should be well documented. The procedures should also identify the key performance indicators that will be used to measure the performance of those processes. Having the Right Technology Platform The PE project management team needs to have an effective monitoring and evaluation solution to provide the insight to make better and faster informed decisions. This is possible when a Project Management Information Solution (PMIS) is implemented which will enforce project’s governance, transparency, accountability and traceability by automating the project management processes. This will ensure that the right data is captured by the right project team member using predefined input forms each has pre-defined workflow for submitting, reviewing, sharing and approving the relevant process. Using a Project Management Information Solution (PMIS) like PMWeb will enable the PE Project Management Team and other organizations in the project to use a 100% web-enabled platform to capture all types of projects data.

This could include cost estimate and budget, schedule, risk, issues, inspections, permits, contracts among many others. The online document template will also allow attaching all supportive documents and link to other relevant project records and emails. When this data is submitted, the pre-defined workflow steps will ensure that this data and associated documents are forwarded to the right project team members to review, share and approve. The online document template that will be used to capture the needed project management process will include all the needed attributes to make it meaningful for the decision maker, regardless what type of decision he or she needs to make. For example, the document template shown below is for the contract agreement between the PE firm and the different organizations that have been contracted to deliver part of the project scope of work also known as bid packages. The document template has complete details of the contract along with all supportive documents, change orders regardless of their status, monthly progress invoices for completed works, actual payments made for invoiced work among others.

This formal data capturing will enforce not only the best practices of project management but will also enforce governance, transparency and accountability in getting this critical projects’ data. In addition, this will also ensure that the PE project management team have real-time single version of the truth on how their projects investments are performing. The data captured in the PMWeb PMIS using all of those document templates will become available for creating tabular and graphical reports to report on the performance trends for each project management process. The data from the different but related project management processes like for example budget, contracts, change orders and progress invoices can become part of a dashboard that provides the overall project financial status. The same could be done for risks and issues, the different type of project communications among others. Similarly, the same data source can be used to create a dashboard for the overall project’s status and performance or a dashboard for program of projects performance, projects portfolio performance or all of the PE firm projects. The most important thing to remember that all of those reports and dashboards are based on the same real-time data source.

There will be no data silos to worry about or MS Excel templates to question if what is being reports is true or not. Having the Right Project Management Office (PMO) To ensure sustainability of successful projects delivery including hiring, developing and retaining the best qualified project management resources, ensuring the adoption and continuous improvement of standard operating procedures and maintaining a dynamic project management information system that ensures important projects data, information and knowledge is available when needed, a business unit needs to be created to take ownership of those assets. This unit is usually known as the Project Management Office (PMO). The roles and responsibilities of the PMO could vary depending on what the Private Equity firms needs from this PMO. The PMO can play the role of supportive or center of excellence PMO, controlling PMO or directive PMO. The PE Firm can also create their own PMO by blending the different roles and responsibilities of those PMOs to come with the PMO that is best suited for their project investments delivery. The High Cost of Project Failures The challenges and changes happening in the real estate industry in the Middle East and Gulf Corporate Countries (GCC) can bring new and lucrative investment opportunities for Private Equity firms.

Nevertheless, it is always known that high return on investment opportunities are usually associated with high risks of failure. Investing in projects is an example of those opportunities which as per the Project Management Institute (PMI) 2016 Pulse of the Profession report, organizations continue to have the high risk of losing more than 12% of their investments due to project failures. Project failure extends beyond the scope of any individual project. When project is late, over budget or when intended project goals are not fulfilled, disturbing demands are placed on project resources. This boils down to wasted money that your company may never get back. Regardless of your project size, type, location and delivery method, meetings will always exist. Meetings are scheduled gatherings of individuals for stated purpose, to discuss and act upon matters of common interest.

Meetings serve valuable purpose in the project to effectively communicate information, report progress, exchange ideas, render decisions, resolve issues, coordinate work, prevent problems among many others. Actually, it is estimating that project management team members spend around 50% of their time in attending meetings, taking actions or being informed on what was discussed in meetings among others. Therefore, failing to manage meetings effectively will not only result in wasting this expensive effort of the project management team members but could result in major claims and disputes. Since most project meetings involve attendees from the different parties of the contract, failing to act in a correct and timely manner on meeting actions could result in delays to project’s milestone date, incur additional cost, lack of coordination, redo of completed work, site accidents, delays to site access among many others. No one can deny that digital transformation for the project management industry has not only improved the efficiency of managing projects’ BIG DATA but it has helped to bring the transparency, accountability, governance, traceability and real-time single version of the truth reporting for project’s performance and status. Similar to the many project management processes that have benefited from this digital transformation, managing project meetings have benefited a lot of digital transformation. The use of Project Management Information Systems (PMIS) like PMWeb have provided the insight for managing meeting minutes that project management team members have always missed.

Requirements for Effective Meetings Since meetings could have different purposes for which each could require different participants who are appropriate for issues that will be brought during the meeting and have authority to act on those issues, there should be different meetings subject. For example, there could be meetings for project kick-off, design review, value engineering, stage gate review, site mobilization, progress review, safety, interface and coordination, submittal review, closeout among many others. Each one of those meetings should have it is purpose well defined and the list of participants agreed on. In addition, they need to pre-scheduled not only to ensure that the authorized participants are attending but also to avoid overlap with other meetings that could involve the same participants or even to ensure the availability of the meeting room.

Setting the Meeting Calendar Setting the meetings calendar usually available by default in all Project Management Information System (PMIS) software applications like PMWeb which are used to manage the complete projects’ data across the complete life cycle stages. The screen shot below details how to create the meeting calendar for the projects that will be managed by the organization. Those meetings can be held once, when needed or recurring on weekly, monthly or any other desired period. It will require setting the planned start and end of the meeting. Documenting Meeting Minutes A key requirement for each project is that the minutes of each meeting held to be formally captured in what is known as the Meeting Minutes. Those would include the description of all information, decisions, commitments and actions shared and communicated during the meeting. It is highly recommended that a single project team member is assigned to each one of those meeting items.

This will enforce accountability when it comes to taking the needed actions to close what was agreed on. Of course, there should be a date assigned for closing each specific topic to avoid possible project delays. That is why, there is a growing trend to assign the project schedule activity that it is start date could be affected by this meeting item. To enable better understanding of the reported meeting item, it is highly recommended to attach all supportive documents to the relevant meeting item. PMWeb PMIS will be used to capture those meeting minutes along with all the needed details and attributes.

It will also allow updating the status of each reported item and when it was actually completed. This will ensure that the complete history of each action reported in the project meeting minutes. In addition to the details of all items discussed during the meeting, the meeting minutes should include details of the project, meeting topic, project WBS that the meeting belongs to, location, date, timing, list of meeting participants that need to attend and those who have actually attended, details of the next scheduled meeting among others. Of course, the agenda for the next meeting will be generated from the current meeting where all meetings actions completed will be removed from the agenda. Meeting Minutes History Capturing the history of meeting minutes for all meetings types and sessions across all the projects managed by the organization creates a massive wealth of information and eventually knowledge that no project intensive organization or their Project Management Office (PMO) can afford not to have. The data captured in those meeting minutes not only of great use to analyze trends in managing meeting minutes but are critical and vital when it comes for supporting or defending a project claim or dispute.

The data captured from those meeting minutes are needed not only during the project life cycle stages but for many years after the project completion. For example, the new law issued by the UAE government have made it a requirement for organizations to keep records that could have financial implications for 15 years. Therefore, the history of meeting minutes should not be limited to active projects but also projects that were completed. Business Intelligence (BI) for Meeting Minutes The major development and adoption of what is known as self-service business intelligence (BI) and data visualization software like MS Power BI, Qlik, Tableau among many others has provided project team participants and PMO members the ability to dice, slice and analyze the BIG DATA captured from the different project management processes to have better insight on the projects’ performance. For example, the meeting minutes captured in PMWeb can be used to create a dashboard to assess the status and performance of meeting minutes reported during the project life. It is also possible to create dashboards to analyze the frequency and trends of specific meeting minute subject as well as closure trend for raised meeting actions. Today and more than ever, there is a growing trend among project owners to deliver projects that are sustainable.

Projects that are not only delivering the project scope with the desired quality, within budget and on the needed delivery date but will also help in achieving the United Nations 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) to end poverty, protect the planet, and ensure prosperity by the year 2030. About the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) On September 25th 2015, the United Nations set forward 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) to end poverty, protect the planet, and ensure prosperity to achieve by the year 2030. Sustainable Project Management Delivering sustainable projects require the EPMO, in addition to senior management commitment and support, to adopt the emerging best practices of sustainability when it comes to delivering projects. Similar to other project management knowledge areas, the EPMO needs to develop the document templates, governance workflows, logs and reports, and performance dashboards that need to be used to ensure having a successful sustainable projects delivery. Managing sustainable projects requires managing the areas of environment, society and economy in addition to the common project management areas of schedule, cost, quality, safety, risk, procurement, human resources, communications, stakeholders among others. The P5™ Standard for Sustainability in Project Management (PRiSM) by GPM Global addresses those additional areas to be managed and details how to monitor and control the three additional measurable elements to sustainability; Social aspect (People), Environmental aspect (Planet) and Economical aspect (Profit). Capturing Project’s Sustainability Compliance The EPMO needs to create the document template that will be used to assess and score each one of three measurable elements to sustainability: Social aspect (People), Environmental aspect (Planet) and Economical aspect (Profit).

The document template which will be created using PMWeb PMIS custom form builder will include the areas that need to be assessed in accordance with the relevant sustainability measure. For each measure, the assessment could have a score that could range from 5 (high positive compliance) to 1 (high negative compliance). That is to say, the higher the score is, the better the project is complying with the sustainability objective being assessed. This assessment will be conducted on predetermined periodical periods to measure how good the project is complying with those objectives.

It should be noted that the 5-point scoring was selected to make it compatible with other performance scoring used by the EPMO. Organizations might opt for 10-points scoring as well as what is known as the golf handicap scoring, which will have a range of +3 to -3, where +3 indicates high negative compliance and -3 high positive compliance. In other words, if the lower the value the achieved score, the better is the compliance. Calculating the Project Sustainability Score The EPMO needs to coordinate with the organization on the weight for each of the three perspectives of sustainability being environmental, social and economical. For example, it could be 30% for economical and environmental and the balance 40% for social. In addition, under each perspective, each measure will also have a weight fir which again the total weight of all measures within a sustainability perspective should equal 100%. This will enable doing the calculation to get the weighted score value for each measure which will be displayed in the dashboard.

Sustainability Development Goals (SDG) Performance Dashboard The data captured from the sustainability document template will provide the organization, EPMPO, project manager and other stakeholders with a real-time status of the project’s performance as it relates to achieve the desired sustainability goals. The dashboard displayed below provides the overall sustainability development goal (SDC) compliance score as well as the score for each sustainability perspective. The scorecard provides the achieved sustainability compliance score for each measure at the end of each quarter or any other desired period. The same comparison could be have been across projects that are being managed by the EPMO.