The stakeholders in an airport project need to function a lot like the musicians in an orchestra. The players of the many musical instruments in an orchestra must work together in sweet harmony. The instruments can make a lot of noise and accomplish very little or they can make beautiful music. With an airport project, the key is to look for sweet harmonies in the way stakeholders operate, which is best accomplished through collaboration and partnering, according to Skanska’s new National Aviation Director Dwight Pullen, who joined the international project development and construction group less than six months ago.
“The key is to get everyone playing off the same sheet of music,” Pullen says.
Pullen, a civil engineer by education, began his career on the program management side of airport projects , which is really more of the consulting, owners’ representative side of the business. In this role, he managed major capital programs.
Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport’s fifth runway was his first major project as program director. After completing this $1.2 billion dollar runway, Pullen worked as program manager of a $9 billion expansion project at Abu Dhabi International Airport. He spent three years there before heading to Colorado to oversee Denver International Airport’s $544 million, on-site hotel and train station project.
Four years ago, Pullen switched to the global business development strategy side of aviation where he led a large engineering company to do more work in airports in Latin America, the United States, Asia-Pacific, Europe and the Middle East.
Airport Business recently caught up with Pullen to talk about his plans and goals for his new role as well as airport construction in general.
How did your previous project management work prepare you for your new role in Skanska’s Aviation Center of Excellence?
It’s prepared me in at least three areas. The first is I've always lived and worked, if you will, in the owners’ offices. The owners in this case are the airports, so I've had to learn to think the way airport operators think. You live with their challenges and their opportunities. You learn the internal business processes and the complexities of getting a major capital program done at an airport. As a program manager, you really get an appreciation for the challenges, the timing, and all the stakeholders. You keep a real focus on the passenger and on ease of flow through airports during major construction.
The other thing, from my experience as a program manager/construction manager, is that you learn all the different roles--what the planners do in the early days of airport development, then the designers, the architects and engineers, and the role of contractors.
Finally, I obtained a real appreciation for the magnitude and the size of some of these programs. What it takes to really spend a billion dollars at an airport--it takes sometimes up to six to eight years to really do that--and all that goes into it. In the last several years, I've learned more about bond markets and working with airlines on reimbursable agreements. There are all types of things necessary on the financial side to pull off these major programs.
My experience has brought me to a point where I appreciate the different roles, the different hats people wear, and how to work together in the end.
What are some of the goals you have for Skanska’s Aviation Center of Excellence?
The first is to build on a great foundation and take it to the next level. Skaska's a well placed company in the industry, well thought of and well known.
We're going to focus on being a lot closer to our airport and airline clients in order to fully understand how to partner with them. They're evolving. In the industry it's really tough to fund these projects; federal funding is becoming less and less. They're looking for creative partners in the sense of P3s and privatization of construction, and things like that.
The way our business is set up, it's really tough to do projects by yourself. You've got to build strong relationships with other delivery partners; architects, engineers, other contractors and sub-contractors. Bringing some of my national relationships to bear and working with our local teams will also be a big focus.
One of our goals is to grow our presence at airports. We have really good penetration and we want to become airports’ partner of choice.
What must airports consider to provide an acceptable passenger experience during construction?
You're talking about terminal projects where airports have to maintain operations and keep flights going as they renovate or expand. So, it starts with requiring collaboration and starting conversations early. The old school model was to do all planning and design, then get a contractor. But if you bring contractors, like Skanska, in on Day 1 as partners, then you leave less room for error. As contractors in construction being there as close to the beginning as possible allows us to have a real appreciation for passenger requirements and minimizing disruptions to operations. We've got to start looking at the service providers that do work at airports as delivery partners that work collaboratively.
One of the key things we (airports and consultants) have to do is work together in a partnering and collaborative way. A lot of airports already require that and are very intentional about it. Other airports are not as intentional but want it. We differentiate ourselves when we consider ourselves as partners. A partner wants to bring innovative ideas to the table. A partner will take almost a stewardship-type role with the project, and take it personally if there's an issue with a passenger.
How do you go about forging such partnerships?
It really starts with the way the procurements and solicitations operate. Airports issue either a Request for Qualification or a Request for Proposal before a project. But if you try to partner at that stage you're too late. You need to build relationships early, whether it's at conferences or over a cup of coffee when you're not chasing a project but just having discussions with the industry.
The whole idea of public and private partnerships is to have early discussions and to know the construction industry. It comes down to trust. A lot of airport directors and their teams have had some bad experiences. When you have a bad experience in construction you tend to protect yourself. You tend to be not as trusting. It’s incumbent on both sides to build authentic relationships, friendships and partnerships very early in the process.
When an airport is doing master planning, that’s absolutely the right time to engage the airport and start understanding its needs. The industry is responding to that. I'll be very honest with you I don't know that every airport is the right partner. It comes down to culture, fit and the relationship. It's all emotional IQ type stuff, but it's really important.
What are some significant trends you're seeing in airport building projects?
You're seeing aging infrastructure, especially at U.S. airports. With airline consolidation and the upsizing of planes in the airline fleet, the infrastructure is not keeping up with shifts in the airline industry. A lot of terminal renovations are coming about because of the need for larger hold rooms or waiting areas at the gate.
With the TSA's influence, there's also a big rush as a frequent flyer to get to the other side of security. Once you get there you're typically hungry because you got there early, you've got to grab something to eat, so you've got to have more concessions and retail to keep people occupied. Of course that works in the airport's favor because there's more revenue.
There is a need for innovation; for contractors, architects and engineers to think innovatively. No one wants to have years and years of construction in their airport, they want to get it done as quickly as possible.
We have to be pretty innovative with how we interact. You can have live construction, but you need to communicate with the passenger when it comes to navigating the airport. We need to ask whether it's through Twitter or other social media, how do we connect with passengers during construction?
There are ways to do this. Give people a peek. Construction has always been interesting to people, so when they see it they're interested. How can you make that more interesting? The old way of doing construction is to board everything up because you don't want passengers to see.
But how can we bring passengers into that experience? Whether it's video displays or the way we advertise the project, people are interested in seeing what's happening, especially if you're flying through an airport you haven't flown through and there's a bunch of construction. Maybe you use an app so they can take a virtual site tour.
What are the challenges that exist when you're working with an existing building that's been there for 50, 60 years?
One of the biggest challenges I see with existing infrastructure is no one wants to shut down gates. As you're building on and tacking on to existing buildings, how you navigate people through to minimize their walk time is a really big deal. If you're doing construction you almost have to take people on a detour, just like if you're working on a road. Detours mean longer walk times. How do you get people through that destruction quickly and economically?
Also, if you haven't built anything in 30 or 40 years, you've got code issues, environmental issues and utility issues. It’s really hard for an airport to know everything that's below ground. For this reason, when you're about to start a major program, you should first do a complete utility master plan to full understand what's beneath the surface. Really good airports do condition assessments. They know the conditions of their assets well before they start designing construction. It's really, really, smart to just understand the asset that you have, the condition of that asset, and how you want service providers to navigate through that asset, and design and expand on an asset.
Airports are like little cities. They have utilities, but they don't always manage the utilities. Sometimes you're dealing with municipal water and another big power and gas utility company. You've got to have agreements with these entities years before, so that they understand what's coming because some portion of that site belongs to them.
Then obviously, you've got to have rock-solid agreements with your airline when you're working together. These are really tough programs--even with designers and contractors in place--when there's a lack of trust between the airline and the airport.
Construction is construction. It’s easy to get things built, but if you want to do it without major impact to operations, passengers, revenue and stakeholders, it really takes early partnering and a lot of communication upfront to make sure there's real alignment and agreement on how things are going to get done.
How does it challenge construction projects when you are asked to implement technologies that airports didn't necessarily utilize before?
I actually think it's a real challenge with major programs. They have to design today for technology needs eight years from now. No one has a crystal ball; the designers don't know, the IT professionals don't know. They work in six-month increments with information technology. You've got to build in flexibility, which is probably a bit more costly, but you've got to build in flexibility for changes in technology.
Paying attention to the passenger and what they are doing is so important for your infrastructure needs. How many people are using mobile boarding passes versus paper boarding passes? What impact does that have? This drives your ticket counter configuration. Do you really need 80 ticket counters? Do you need more kiosks? What do you really need? You might not need as much physical infrastructure if you're taking advantage of self-check kiosks.
You have to build in tremendous flexibility into the infrastructure; it's the floor plates, the size of the ticket halls, and how you keep going from one terminal function to the next terminal function. How will technology impact it, and let's dream a bit of where it's going.
Airports have to think about that 10, 15, even 20 years in the future. It takes a bit of a visionary to think ahead that far. You're not going to always get it right. But if you build some flexibility for technology and have some real guidelines it helps. Every airport should have a technology and sustainability master plan, where they're thinking about technology and sustainability on a very broad scale so that it influences their capital investment.
