It’s easier to collaborate when everyone’s under one roof.
This is the philosophy behind Manchester engineering firm Fuss & O’Neill Inc.’s latest personnel move toward an integrated planning process that examines projects beyond the engineering level.
For the past 10 years, Fuss & O’Neill slowly shifted toward more integration in planning, reaching out to planning, design and landscape architecture firms while developing its engineering specs to take a holistic approach to the design process.
The end result, company officials say, is a more sophisticated process that examines all of a project’s functions as a collaborative effort. In designing a street, for example, the firm doesn’t just look at the transportation engineering portion of the concept but includes all the roles of the streetscape to define how the road connects buildings, gives a sense of places and serves the purposes of motorists, pedestrians, bicyclists and all other users.
To take the next step, Fuss & O’Neill in November went out and brought its most frequent collaborators in this process into the company, putting everyone under the same banner.
“This was the tipping point to the big step,” said Kent Schwendy, Fuss & O’Neill senior vice president. “This allows us to really streamline the system.”
The major hires were Chris Ferrero as the vice president in charge of planning and landscape architecture, and Tom Tavella as director of design. Ferrero and Tavella were the owners of firms Fuss & O’Neill frequently collaborated with in its design process, particularly in landscape design.
With the addition of Ferrero, Tavella and their teams, Fuss & O’Neill can offer services in-house such as master planning, land use planning, site planning, development consulting, visualization, public outreach and policy development.
Michael Goman, principal at Simsbury’s International Commercial Real Estate Development LLC, said this inclusive approach to engineering and design makes commercial development easier and faster.
“Development is so inordinately complex, anything that can make it simpler is really attractive,” Goman said. “It makes it easier for me to put the (development) team together when I can just call Fuss & O’Neill and get a lot of people I need.”
One of the newer movements in the development and construction industries is Building Information Modeling, which maps out — usually digitally — all the components of a new development before construction begins. Under BIM, all the various professionals working on the project — owners, architects, engineers, plumbers, electricians, etc. — know how everything fits together beforehand so no one gets in each other’s way after construction begins and costly change orders are needed.
“If you can integrate it properly, then it can save about a third of your time,” Goman said. “If everyone works a little faster and a little more efficiently, then the project gets done faster.”
In development and construction, time is money, so shaving a project’s timetable by a third can equal millions in savings, Goman said.
Since BIM calls for collaboration anyway, bringing several of these professionals under the auspices of one company seems like a natural extension of the concept, Goman said.
Fuss & O’Neill believes its slow shift toward more collaboration and its November personnel moves makes the company unusual in the marketplace. And that will bolster its client base, Schwendy said.
But the driver behind this shift wasn’t a move for more clients, but a reaction to the evolving markets and the needs of current clients, Schwendy said. Clients were no longer valuing specialty services as they had in the past and saw integration of services as an asset of a company.
Schwendy said the company never had a ‘Eureka!’ moment over the past 10 years where it realized that this was the best way to approach engineering. But, as time wore on, the strategic benefits of collaboration became clear.
“The more we explored it, the more we discovered that this was something clients were looking for,” Schwendy said.
The move to bring frequent collaborators such as Ferrero and Tavella into the company doesn’t change much from a client-perspective since most customers had already come to view Fuss & O’Neill as one team with these collaborators anyway, Schwendy said.
But by having everyone in-house, the efficiencies in the process will increase, and taking a collaborative approach to the many facets of a project becomes that much easier.
“You really start to integrate all the different disciplines,” Schwendy said.
