Building the New Economy

Internally, the company produces its own best-practices courses in fields such as billing, pricing, and project planning. Drawing from its 11 branch offices, DPR regularly convenes people who have similar jobs -- estimators, project managers, superintendents -- to discuss ways to improve performance in the seven "critical success factors" that it has identified as essential to its prosperity. Those factors include estimating accuracy ("The first estimate we present is a reliable forecast"), zero punch list ("When we say we're done, we're done"), and project closeout ("Crisply complete every project"). The company's regional and national meetings become training workshops on how to excel in these areas.

Of course, DPR's real work -- and most of its brainpower -- is not at headquarters or in any branch office. It's on-site, where its buildings are going up. If knowledge never gets to the job site, then it can't be of much value. That's why every new hire gets a state-of-the-art laptop, which the company outfits with some or all of its core applications: Lotus Notes, Microsoft Project, Timberline (for estimating), and Expedition and ProLog (for project management). The knowledge workers of DPR may not be quite as wired as their peers at Oracle or Netscape, but within the world of construction, they are on the bleeding edge of information technology.

"This industry has always focused on its tools," says Woods. "But 'tools' usually means a crane or a laser screed for concrete work. When it comes to computers, the reaction is, 'No way, we're not going to spend money on those. We already have all the tools we need to do the job.' "

But it is DPR's information tools that have enabled the company to perform some of its more remarkable construction feats. One such feat involved completing, in a record 11 months, a $300 million wafer-fab and office complex in Richmond, Virginia for White Oak Semiconductor, a joint venture between Motorola and Siemens. The White Oak project required around-the-clock shifts and more than 1 million person-hours of labor. But the hardest part wasn't doing the physical work; it was coordinating the schedules and tracking the oceans of information.

So in Richmond, as on most of its projects, DPR set up a communications trailer, complete with servers, routers, T1 lines, and cellular connections. Such a nerve center allows DPR's on-site people to communicate with every member of their team -- from subcontractors who use AOL accounts to architects who upload CAD designs. DPR also creates a Web site for almost every project, enabling everyone to stay on the same (Web) page and eliminating miscues that can result in days or weeks of delays. On the Novell project, DPR took connectivity one step further: At the site, it installed a digital camera atop a 100-foot pole; the camera snapped photos every three hours and downloaded them to the project's Web page. That way, Novell employees in Provo were able to watch the new campus being built -- almost in real time.

DPR uses knowledge-sharing technology internally as well as externally. A few months ago, Jim Webb, 55, a superintendent for a renovation project at the Summit Medical Center in Oakland, California, received an email from an engineer in DPR's San Diego office. The engineer had a problem: Seawater was leaking into the foundations of a site. Webb, it turned out, had spent a lot of time on a previous job working with bridges and tunnels. He suggested, through email, that the engineer's crew freeze the ground by injecting it with liquid nitrogen -- a technique that he had seen used on projects in Milwaukee and Chicago. "These guys had been around building construction all of their lives, and they had never heard of that trick," says Webb. "No one at this company has done everything. But a lot of us have specialties. So when you find a problem that's beyond your expertise, you get on the computer and draw on other resources."

If You're Not Keeping Score, It's Only Practice

Webb says he has been "shocked" at the level of knowledge sharing inside DPR, which he joined in January 1997. One reason: He sits at the center of that process. At the Summit Medical Center, he's in charge of the project's continuous-improvement program (CIP), which is perhaps the most basic form of knowledge sharing at DPR. CIP is ubiquitous -- and deceptively simple. By submitting a form known as an OFI ("opportunity for improvement"), anyone on a job site -- an architect, an outside tradesperson, a DPR manager -- can suggest ways to do a specific task better, faster, more safely, or more efficiently. An elected committee of craftspeople and DPR employees decides which OFIs make sense -- and then implements them.