Creative risk management can cheat time

During the end of the 2013 NFL season leading up to the Super Bowl, much of America watched football broadcast from the Denver Broncos' home stadium. Perhaps some of us noticed, as the overhead blimp provided a bird's eye view, the dramatic design of this one-of-a-kind edifice. The entire skyline of the stadium is contoured to resemble the profile of a saddle, in keeping with the Bronco symbolism.

It may come as a surprise to learn that the story of Sports Authority Field at Mile High is nearly as exciting as the games played within. And a couple of management lessons from the triumphant history of this NFL landmark can help those of us who call the plays for our organization, department or team.

The first lesson involves partnering with your adversary. The traditional method of building any large project puts the builder, in this case Turner Construction, and the architect, HNTB, in an adversarial relationship. The architect advocates for the owner and watches the contractor so that all is done according to plan. The contractor has every incentive to find errors and omissions in architectural drawings so that change orders can be requested legitimately. This arrangement has served the construction industry well for more than 100 years.

One problem: It takes a lot of time. The design alone could take a year and a half, putting off the construction date. Both Turner and HNTB could see that making the 36-month completion date mandated by the owner would be doubtful if they adhered to the traditional relationship. But by becoming partners - and building the stadium as it was being designed - the builder and the architect could trim six to eight months off the timeline.

So Turner and HNTB joined forces. The new stadium was the first ever built under a design-build joint venture. This meant that if the blueprints contained mistakes, Turner could not ask the owner for more money; the new partnership would bear the expense. But this very risky arrangement, in retrospect, made the completion date achievable.

This partnership helped foment a second important lesson: Don't wait for expected conditions. As Turner made ready to begin construction, the project management team had the shock of its life: Land parcels had not yet transferred title, meaning that team members were denied access, on day one, to nearly 75 percent of their job site.

City officials told the team that the necessary real estate transactions would require six months, a delay that would make the drop-dead completion date impossible. Turner had to start construction, but how?

Football stadiums always have been constructed as complete ovals, rising out of the ground as one recognizable shape. Turner and HNTB decided to design and build the stadium in a radically different way: as a series of interconnected high rise buildings that would form an oval. This way, they could start immediately on the little patch of land available.

No stadium had been constructed in such a manner before. It was like baking a pie one succulent piece at a time. This risky approach would not have been possible if Turner had not taken the earlier risk of partnering with the architect. Otherwise, the Turner team would have received blueprints to build the stadium in the traditional manner and would have waited for the land to become available.

These two examples of aggressive, creative management can help us meet our own, hopefttlly less dramatic, deadlines. Partnering with a customer or a supplier might be the most expedient way to meet a deadline. And beginning where you stand, rather than waiting, is a good way to cheat time itself.

Beginning where you stand, rather than waiting, is a good way to cheat time itself.

Dan Carrison, a business writer and consultant, has authored or co-authored four management books: Semper Fi: Business Leadership the Marine Corps Way, Deadline! How Premier Organizations Win the Race against Time, Business Under Fire and From the Bureau to the Boardroom. Carrison is a general partner of Semper Fi Consulting and founder of www.ghostwritersinthesky.com. He also teaches corporate communication for the University of La Verne. He can be reached at [email protected].