Design-build may look like lack of planning, but isn’t

Is DDOT under Gabe Klein dismissive of planning, throwing caution to the wind as it builds a bike lane here and a streetcar line there? Or does this objection reflect an outdated view of how project planning should be done?

Gabe Klein comes from the business world and has said several times he wants to run DDOT like a business. To understand how he might do that, we should understand what businesses have learned about good project planning.

The traditional, 20th-century view is that project managers hold endless meetings with stakeholders to gather requirements and create a detailed plan as the first stage of any project. This “Big Design Up Front” method went by various names — Design-Bid-Build in construction and transportation, Waterfall in software. And even though the vast majority of major projects are delivered very late, over-budget and lacking many requirements that popped up during the project, we still expect to see projects done this way.

Project managers in various industries have adopted a leaner approach in which the build phase begins before a comprehensive plan is completed. In software, this is becoming known as the “minimum viable product.” A single team of designers and developers designs and builds a product, and seeks to get that in front of users as soon as possible. That works because no amount of feedback to a paper plan is nearly as valuable as observing how people actually use a product. In construction and transportation, this leaner approach is known as Design-Build.

Design-build creates a single team of designers and builders whose constant communication enables certain build stages to begin before the plan is complete. In design-bid-build, designers create a complete plan and then “throw it over the wall” to builders who hadn’t been involved in the design, creating two groups who point fingers at each other when problems arise. In contrast, a design-build team forms a single point of accountability.

Furthermore, the expedited construction means that total costs are lower and feedback to a preliminary working system is received far earlier, while there’s still time to modify the plan. This in turn leads to higher quality. In fact, Design-Build was used in the rebuilding of the I35W bridge in Minneapolis.

DDOT under Klein has increased the adoption of design-build, implementing the “Every Day Counts” initiative from the DOT to reduce the duration of transit projects from the current national average of 13 years, which Klein says is “unacceptable”. The $300 million 11th Street Bridge replacement in Anacostia is the largest DDOT project to date to use Design-Build.

That’s not to say DDOT shouldn’t listen to people. Startup guru Eric Ries, who popularized Minimum Viable Product for tech startups, also talks about the importance of getting feedback from customers. The big difference is that the feedback doesn’t all happen before work begins on the product.

In a tech company, programmers can build a fairly rudimentary version of the product and release it for users to try. DDOT can’t release a rough version of the bridge for drivers to try, but what they can do is to share the designs as the project evolves. With the 11th Street Bridge, DDOT and the contractor may be making changes as they go, but they haven’t been as proactive about getting feedback from potential drivers and residents along the way.

The same is true for the streetcar. The use of the initial streetcar line is essential input into the design of the rest of the streetcar network, far more meaningful than feedback to the 300-page plan that DDOT circulates for stakeholder feedback. As items come up, like the placement of the maintenance yard or technology for minimizing overhead wires, DDOT is adapting to those. Furthermore, the use of the initial streetcars and responses of drivers is also invaluable to DDOT’s traffic engineers. No amount of computer modeling of ridership and driver reactions to streetcars is as informative as observing the actual use and reactions to a streetcar line, because traffic engineers aren’t modeling water in a pipe, they’re modeling people.

Still, until the streetcar is built the “product” is a set of plans which riders need to know about to give input on and help the project evolve. That’s why DDOT needs to maintain constant communication about these issues and share the evolution of the project through the Design-Build process.

So far, with the streetcar, they are. DDOT is releasing a lot of details and plans about the streetcar. The main objection coming back is that people expected all of these details to be decided before a single dollar was spent, and in fact for everything to be decided in advance about the entire 20-year vision. By not doing so, Gabe Klein isn’t being irresponsible. Instead, he’s creating a more agile DDOT that may be a model for other transportation agencies going forward.