DCC has been recognized for helping the Department of National Defence (DND) improve cost estimates for capital infrastructure projects—leading to greater accuracy in pricing, faster project approvals, and an overall optimized project delivery.
When DND's Director, Construction Project Delivery (DCPD) initiated a review of cost estimates during various infrastructure project phases, he turned to DCC's Amanda Eid, then Technical Specialist, Program Management who is a specialist in continuous improvement, to develop an approach to reviewing and improving how cost estimates are produced.
"Often, additional information and explanations were required during the review of funding requests, leading to delays in project approvals and project delivery," Eid says.
Eid recommended interviewing key players in the estimating process, acquiring the necessary data needed for measuring ADM(IE)'s performance in project cost estimating, and forming a working group of DND stakeholders.
meanwhile, DCC data-mining expert André Champagne, Technical Specialist, Program Management, helped Eid in developing the necessary project costing data for some 70 infrastructure projects DND had undertaken over 10 years. His role was particularly instrumental in allowing Eid to gauge and analyze ADM(IE)'s performance when it came to the accuracy of project cost estimates and schedule forecasting.
The working group then mapped out all the steps of the estimating process and developed recommendations to improve the process, several of which DCPD adopted, with good results, Eid says.
"DCPD has used the recommended solutions for a couple of projects, and as I understand, these projects have all remained within the acceptable cost variation of ten percent," Eid explains.
The Assistant Deputy Minister, Infrastructure and Environment, recently commended Eid, Champagne and the rest of the Infrastructure Costing Excellence working group for its efforts.