The year-old public library in the center of town is about to receive its second major award. This one—a national award from the journal Building Design and Construction—will be bestowed next month. Earlier this year, the library won a preservation award from the Massachusetts Historical Commission. More awards may well be forthcoming.
It’s all pretty impressive, considering the $7 million project was managed by three town residents, two of whom headed a volunteer building committee that shepherded the project to completion on-time and on-budget in April 2007. There is nearly unanimous agreement in town that the new library has been a success—a rare achievement of design and construction that preserved the distinctive character of the historic old Bromfield School building and seamlessly matched a new building to it, right down to the slate roof and pointed roof lines. Given the almost universal perception of public projects as being bogged down by cost overruns, delays, and poor quality, the Harvard library project’s success was no small achievement.
A few months back, I had an opportunity to interview Roy Moffa, Peter Jackson, and Mary Wilson, the project’s three citizen managers, for a research project of my own on how to manage public projects successfully. Sitting down in the library’s elegant first-floor conference room, Moffa, Jackson, and Wilson had a lot to say about how they were able to make the library project succeed, and the most enthusiastic of them all may have been Moffa, a retired software company executive and entrepreneur, library trustee, avid bicyclist, and longtime Harvard resident. It was a big shock to all of us to find out a few days later that he had suddenly passed away, at the age of 65. I’m glad he was able to realize the biggest dream of his retirement and to know it was a success.
Moffa had long championed the idea of moving books from the cramped, existing town library to the historic old Bromfield School where there was plenty of room and opportunity for expansion. It was an idea that gave rise to a multi-year effort to finance, design, and build a new town library consisting of old Bromfield and a new attached library building. Speaking in our interview specifically about the private funding that supplemented the library project’s public funding (private funding was, in itself, a key reason for the project’s success), Moffa noted: “We raised this money…on the commitment that we were going to build something extraordinary, something that was worthy of their contributions. We’d made a lot of promises: ‘We’re going to take your money, but we’re going to treat the money well and we’re going to communicate with you and show you what we’re going to do,’ and I don’t think we’ve disappointed a donor yet.”
Based in part on that interview, it became a little clearer to me just what Moffa, Jackson, Wilson, the rest of the building committee, and a number of others associated with the project did to ensure its success. Jackson is a former project manager with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and a fellow longtime town resident, who was the other co-chair of the Library Building Committee. Wilson is a former town librarian who became library director in 2002. I have room here to list only a few highlights of the planning, design, and construction process:
First of all, Moffa, Jackson, and Wilson understood the project’s legal requirements, and they went the extra mile in meeting them. For instance, the state’s designer selection law requires that designers be hired through a qualifications-based process. The three were determined to exercise maximum due diligence in making that selection. They personally visited and toured more than 30 libraries in Massachusetts that had been designed by four architects they picked as finalists in the selection process.
In addition to their attention to the legal requirements, the managers attempted to understand, involve, and satisfy the stakeholders in the project.
Jackson noted that at the time that library trustee Joe Frye and building committee member and Selectman Bill Marinelli approached the town for funding for the library project, there was heightened concern on the Finance Committee and elsewhere that a number of other public building projects had exceeded their budgets and had stretched the town’s finances. As a result, the library project’s proponents made an important agreement with the town to limit its financial exposure to $2.6 million, no matter what happened during the construction of the new library building. In effect, Moffa, Jackson, Wilson, the rest of the building committee, and the library trustees gave the stakeholders a guarantee that their financial risk in the project would be well-managed.
That promise to limit the town’s financial risk appears to have had a number of important benefits. First, it forced Moffa, Jackson, and Wilson to take a hard, realistic look at the risks they were facing because it meant there would be no public bailout if costs did rise beyond projections. It also ensured that they would make a strong effort to keep actual project costs under control. One decision that resulted almost immediately from the cost cap was a design change to reduce the planned length of the new building by about 18 feet, Jackson said.
In addition to those benefits, that promise to cap the cost to the town also prompted Moffa, Wilson, and Jackson to seek private financing for the library project. The private financing, in particular, proved beneficial because it gave the project managers leeway to make some value engineering decisions that were potentially costly but which went a long way toward preserving the historic character of the project. One of those decisions was to use slate shingles on the roof of the new building, allowing it to match the old one. Another was a decision to install new energy-efficient windows in the old building rather than reusing exterior storm windows.
Moffa, Jackson, Wilson, and the entire building committee stayed involved in the library design process, and they established an effective partnership with the architect, CBT. That partnership was characterized by frequent brainstorming of design alternatives.
One key design change that resulted from an idea put forward by Wilson involved the location of the children’s room in the new library building. Wilson noted that the project design had originally specified that the children’s room would be split in two, with a portion of the room located in the old building and a portion in the new. She said she became concerned that the arrangement would make it more difficult to keep track of adults who might be wandering through one or the other of the children’s rooms for no good reason. She raised her concerns with Jackson and Moffa and ultimately with the architect. The result was that CBT redid the design in order to situate the children’s area on the ground floor of the new building and to maintain it as a single room.
Earlier, a similar collaborative process involving the architect and the project managers resulted in a design change in which a planned elevator was situated in the new building rather than the old.
Moffa, Wilson, and Jackson stayed just as involved through the construction phase of the project. The three attended all of the weekly construction meetings in the trailer at the site with representatives of the general contractor, architect, and project manager. They were at the site so often, in fact, that they got to know all the subcontractors. Jackson believes that their continuing involvement acted as a “glue” that helped bring the general contractor, the subs, the architect, and others together in a partnership to get the job done successfully.
“No one wanted to be the weak link,” Jackson maintained. “It was kind of like the Celtics, where everyone, including the bench, wanted to be on the winning team.”
A key characteristic of good project planning is that it eventually does come to an end and that the actual construction begins. Moffa, Wilson, and Jackson understood the importance of keeping the process going and making quick decisions in order to avoid delays.
“We frankly got some people angry at us because in a public project you can discuss things forever,” Moffa said.
Jackson pushed hard in support of moving forward with construction in the fall of 2005, rather than waiting until spring when costs, particularly for steel and glass, were expected to be much higher. The brainstorming over the design had to come to an end.
“My words to the rest of the building committee were, ‘It’s time for pens down,’” Jackson said.
The three also developed an effective and quick process for analyzing and approving necessary project changes. Jackson was given discretion to approve changes in consultation with a professional project manager. The process was done via e-mail.
In the end, the undertaking of successful public (and private) projects comes down to effective leadership and teamwork, and it’s clear that was the case with the Harvard library project. As Wilson put it:
“This was the last shot. In our lifetimes, this was the only chance we would have and we wanted to make sure we did it right.”
David Kassel is a Harvard resident and is principal of Accountable Strategies Consulting, L.L.C. (www.accountablestrategies.com)