Tishman Construction Corporation of Florida was awarded a construction management contract by Disney in 1978. The assignment had Tishman performing as Owner Agent on this $800M theme park. Opening day was October 1, 1982.

The project set a precedent for delivering more than 27 distinct venues with a coordinated effort by more than 20 Tishman project managers, multiple general contractors and innumerable subcontractors, specialty contractors, suppliers and vendors; not to mention the team of architects and engineers that designed the park.The design of EPCOT was overseen by famous Disney Imagineer, MartySklar, of the Walt Disney Imagineering team.

Tishman established a team of project schedulers, led by Mark Bodner, Chief Scheduler, that was responsible for managing a coordinated master project schedule that combined input from all general contractors and others engaged in the project. The team ensured that contract requirements imposed on contractors to provide accurate and up to date scheduling information was collected, collated and made coherent before being distributed to the executive management team on a regular basis.

The effort to coordinate a consistent approach to reporting cost and schedule status/trends for proactive decision making by the executive team, that all entities could conform to, got off to a difficult start as it was described as “like herding cats” by Disney’s project director. The responsibility to work with all project managers was assigned to Mark Bodner who established a standard reporting format and edited each project manager’s input to ensure consistency. PM’s became acquainted with the established rules and issued reports monthly, on time, to enable a facilitated oversight by the executive team.

Establishing standards, documenting systems and procedures and training all entities involved in project delivery is critical to the ability to aggregate information for executive management pro-active decision making.