In 2005, MGM/Mirage, the premier hospitality service provider operating in Las Vegas, Nevada, embarked upon the $6.9 billion development of City Center, a gigantic construction project in the heart of the Las Vegas strip. With only 48-months to bring the project from concept to fruition, the MGM Mirage Design Group selected two firms to augment their 25-member in-house team of architects and engineers to deliver this massive project. One of those firms was Tishman Construction Corporation.

At the height of construction, the project employed over 10,000 workers and constructed more than $250 million of work-in-place per month. MGM Mirage DesignGroup recognized that the undertaking of such an enormous project in an unusually short period of time would necessitate a comprehensive approach to solidifying the diverse individuals that needed to come together to achieve such an ambitious task.

In order to organize the project around a single delivery strategy, MGM/Mirage tasked Tishman with the responsibility of establishing standard project protocols, systems and procedures that would solidify the 500-member management team into a cohesive unit. The Tishman organization brought in Mark Bodner to lead Tishman’s work on the project and assume responsibility for delivering the specified objectives. Prior to an 18-year stint with a competitor, Mark had served as the Vice President of Advanced Systems for Tishman.

Tishman needed to determine the best approach to creating a unique culture for the project by identifying and utilizing the best-practices of each of the four main entities involved in the project, namely the Owner, Architect/Engineer, Construction Manager and General Contractor. This could only have been done with an“off-the-shelf” SaaS business process workflow software platform that was easily and rapidly configurable. Such a software platform had to:

• Provide the ability to create consistency and clarity of individual roles and responsibilities across the delivery team.
• Break down silos of information that needed to be shared across job functions;
• Aggregate meaningful management information reporting from the reams of data the project’s administrative activities produced.
• Afford the team visibility and accountability; and
• Establish itself as the single source of truth in a “real-time” objective “project record”

Additionally, the right software solution had to offer the following functional requirements:

• Flexibility in configuration to enable the team to “work” the way they chose to work (i.e. a workflow application)
• Easily configurable forms for custom definition and function of all information gathering “fields” on each step of the workflow.
• Conformance with written procedures (i.e. the project’s codified General Requirements which defined the administrative requirements, roles and responsibilities of the individual entities and functional staff positions);
• Conformance with the project’s cost accounting and reporting requirements; and
• The option to implement the system either in the “cloud” or ‘self-hosted”

At the end of the solicitation, “Unifier” (an Oracle PMIS solution) was selected, having stood out because of its ability to act as a self-sustaining entity. In other words, the software was configurable without custom development that would have necessitated going back to the vendor for modification of program code. It also offered the option to self-host, was competitively priced, and could be implemented in phases.

Because the project was on a fast-track schedule (i.e., design and construction were proceeding simultaneously), the project administration would have been disjointed, chaotic and essentially a free-for-all with members of each of the four main entities doing things differently, if the Unifier solution had not been found and implemented in a timely manner.

Unifier provided the tool that leveraged expert project and portfolio management knowledge with innovative state-of-the-art technology that went well beyond the original intended scope of strictly budget and cost control. Initially conceived as a tool to support 50 users performing work in 13 Business Processes on budget and cost control tasks, the application grew to over 1,300 users performing all sorts of project management tasks in over 150 Business Processes. Despite this growth throughout the project, the technical team supporting the application stayed steady with only one Technical Specialist and an Assistant Trainee. Once configured, implemented and adopted, the Unifier solution promoted MGM/Mirage’s ability to be self-sufficient in many other information requirements of the project team.

Unifier brought real world benefits to the MGM/Mirage City Center project, including Cost Management, Schedule Management and Document Management. A variety of additional Business Process designs were implemented. Some of the other capabilities it provided were:

• Centralized, accurate and real-time project data in a trusted system of record;
• Streamlined and improved processes and communications;
• Owner-defined business rules for Field Reporting and Quality Control;
• Easily created and configured workflow processes via workflow designer tools for tracking retention release requests; and
• Standardized and structured approvals for subcontractors to work on the project across the entire program

When Owners require the following project management qualities, they would be well served to consider using Unifier:

• Accessibility, accountability, and auditability;
• A highly flexible, configurable platform that facilitates team collaboration;
• A robust web-based information system with an intuitive user interface; and
• Established values and techniques that enable visibility, standardization, measurement and process improvement.

During the contract close-out phase of City Center, Unifier provided a clearing-house of information required to close-out contracts (it was the irrefutable system of record). Unifier also presented the ability to access project-related documentation in real-time with an impeccable audit trail. This proved to be invaluable, as it allowed MGM/Mirage to always be minutes away from finding what was needed in a database of millions of documents.

The MGM/Mirage project manager’s perspective was that the Unifier system provided information to track payments to subcontractors (as the trusted source of information) to enable the Owner to establish a range of values (by Subcontractor) to accurately forecast the final cost of the project. Unifier also provided the tool that allowed the Owner to hold the Contractor accountable for fact-based failures, because it provided the required documentation to support or refute the Contractor’s Change Order requests. The Ball-in-Court (BIC) and audit features of Unifier were vital. Unifier’s workflow functionality provided an irrefutable record of actions taken by the project participants. In other words, the system kept an audit trail of who initiated each record (e.g.an RFI or Change Order request), its content, and when it was initiated, reviewed, edited, and acted upon (e.g. rejected or approved). This information was extremely effective in defeating arguments floated by any of the parties that were not based upon the factual project record.

Post-construction claims resolution was supported by the Unifier system. The Unifier system provided the basis of facts for the Owner’s project management and legal teams to evaluate the scope and value of the work performed by each Subcontractor. The Unifier system was efficient in gathering information for the attorney’s argument because all project information was in one place. The system eased access to project record information for disclosures during discovery. Unifier also enabled MGM/Mirage’s legal counsel the ability to place the opposing counsel into the position of accepting the veracity of the system as the system of record. During the litigation discovery phase, the system was accepted as the official communication platform amongst the Owner, design team, and construction team and was relied upon by all parties. As an example, it allowed a simple query of the database that enabled the Owner’s counsel to easily determine, without question, that an RFI over a disputed item of work was never raised.

The legal team’s perspective was that the project records were very well-organized. The Unifier system allowed the information required for litigation to be prepared in “packets” of confidential communications, which was critical to the resolution of problems. It also resulted in over $1.7 million in cost savings, saving up to 12 man-days of effort for document organization, review, and compilation and deposition preparation, because the data was already organized and retrievable. This enabled MGM/Mirage and their legal counsel to focus on strategies and tactics months earlier than would have been possible without the Unifier system’s effective, efficient, and highly-advanced organization of the City Center project’s data.