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In an industry famous for delayed deliveries and surpassing budgets, Michael McCormick has answers for how to bring big projects to completion despite all the obstacles builders face. The vice president of facilities management and development at California Polytechnic State University (CalPoly) has spent his career finding solutions.
After earning a degree in architecture at Ball State University, McCormick gained experience and exposure to the industry working at design firms in Indianapolis. “What hit me is that there are a lot of really important decisions that affect the outcome of the projects, and the architect is not even in the room,” he says. “With that realization, I said, ‘Well, let’s try to find where those critical decisions are being made.’” So, he went to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to study building technology and project management.
“My goal is in all of this is to change the industry so that we end up with better results and a better built environment.”
Michael McCormick
According to McCormick, the problem lies in the fragmented nature of the industry. “At the end of the day, we have a bunch of relatively small companies that build our buildings. It’s not just the architect, it’s not just the contractor or the subcontractors—it’s all of them together, and they don’t typically work as a team,” he says.
The result is an industry that is always facing inefficiencies. And it’s not just the timelines at stake. Contrary to popular belief, competition between these companies does not drive the price down. “The reality [is] the bidding process is a transfer of risk, and every level where that transfer of risk happens, the cost actually goes up instead of going down as people hedge their risk,” McCormick says.
After graduating MIT, McCormick briefly worked as a consultant before earning a full-time role in 2000 with one of his clients: Brown University. “I started off as a planning director focused on setting the projects up for success, but then moved into running the whole capital program. We started doing research in integrated project delivery (IPD),” he says. “IPD was just coming to the forefront at that point. The idea is to create a collaborative team out of the entire delivery group. The contractor, the architect, the owner, [and] the subcontractors should all be on the same team with the same goals, shared risk, and shared reward if everything goes well.”
Using that strategy at Brown, everything went well. “The projects that we did were a fantastic success,” McCormick says. “They were under budget, ahead of schedule, winning design awards. We all thought, ‘Oh my gosh, I think we found the secret sauce.’”
One might think that level of achievement is only attainable for a private wealthy institution like Brown University, and that IPD contracts wouldn’t pan out in the public sector. That was the refrain that McCormick heard routinely, which is why he was eager to prove naysayers wrong when he took a job at the University of Washington (UW) as VP of capital planning and development in 2015.
“What hit me is that there are a lot of really important decisions that affect the outcome of the projects, and the architect is not even in the room.”
Michael McCormick
After receiving a donation from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, UW began a large project to house several entities related to public health. McCormick’s team employed a similar delivery mechanism in its design-build contract to the IPD contract that worked so well at Brown. The collaborative building translated to risk/reward incentives for partners across the project.
Again, McCormick says, it was completed with flying colors. COVID delivered complications but the project was delivered ahead of schedule and under budget and won serval design awards including DBIA Project of the Year.
Now at CalPoly, McCormick faces a new challenge for his project delivery strategy: adding 4,000 beds to campus over the next 10 years while keeping the room rates down.
“We put a decade-long program together into one contract so that we could work with the same partners over and over again and get better and better and better as we go through,” McCormick says. “We eliminate the procurement time, and we benefit from the learning curve.” The team includes a modular builder who will manufacture all of the units off-site in a factory and stack them on top of each other after they are delivered to campus.
McCormick hopes the integrated strategy will become an industry standard so that builders can work smarter and not harder. “My goal is in all of this is to change the industry so that we end up with better results and a better built environment,” he says, “because if we don’t change the way the industry operates then people stop caring about the quality.”
Stay in School
Having built his career on college campuses, Michael McCormick sees the opportunity to make waves in the industry by uniting academic research with the real-life experience of builders. The facilities vice president returned to school where he became interested in the project delivery process itself, how it impacts key decision-making, and ultimately determines the outcome of the built environment.
McCormick’s passion for continuous education led him to help organize conferences where he brings in his own professional networks of builders and researchers to tackle tough questions together and drive progress.
Building for the Next Generation.
At Hensel Phelps, we build facilities that inspire learning. Throughout California and across the country, our teams are working on more than 20 higher education campuses, delivering innovative and future-forward buildings that promote student engagement while providing value to our owners. With offices in 9 states and more than 4,000 employees nationwide, Hensel Phelps is focused on delivering excellence in all we do. From research facilities to student success centers to on campus housing, our trusted partnerships allow us to deliver exceptional projects for our higher education clients. Learn more at henselphelps.com.
