Robust and Ready: Kahua’s PMIS Modernizes Federal Construction

Let’s begin with a true story (names of people and the agency were changed to protect the innocent!) about federal construction management, the butterfly effect and how the little things add up to seriously impact our lives. 

I spend a lot of time with my neighbor and friend John, who is a facility manager for Agency X. Earlier this year, he and I had a weekend offshore fishing trip scheduled. But, after a particularly hot summer Friday, he came home fuming. He was less than happy about a project at the facility he manages. It had gone horribly wrong. As he explained, the contractor had set replacement rooftop units on the roof only to find they were the wrong voltage.

The project was dead in the water and the facility would be without air on Monday. He had to scramble to get the facility online over the weekend, with temporary mobile air. His weekend and our fishing trip were ruined. 

Having worked in construction for a general contractor years ago, I can only imagine the scene at the site that day. The yelling, screaming and finger pointing, and then the contractor and the project manager running back to the project construction office to prove they were in the right. 

On Saturday, John learned that the contractor produced an approved submittal from Agency X’s representative. However, they also noted that the document had not been reviewed by all of the appropriate reviewers. I am not 100% sure how the rest of this story turned out for Agency X, but no matter how the blame game turned out, the facility, the budget, the schedule and the occupants were impacted. Not to mention my neighbor’s blood pressure and our lost weekend trip. 

This is just one story among many that go on each and every day across large portfolios of projects. And the impact quickly adds up across the overall program. The butterfly effect! 

Our federal team at Kahua works with dozens of agencies.  We know they are striving to provide the best value for the public funds they receive each year. We understand they work in an environment that continues to get more demanding and more complex. They have more scrutiny and less time to do their work. But we often find they come to us because they lack the tools to do so. 

In this story, the regional manager and her small team are running over 60 projects in various stages of the delivery lifecycle. Projects ranging from inbound requests through turnover. The agency uses SharePoint, MS Office, e-mail, sneaker mail and during construction, each of its contractor’s systems. Manual and disparate processes, duplicate entry, multiple logins to different systems … no wonder sometimes things get missed. Design reviews take too long, RFIs don’t get answered in a timely manner, submittals get approved prior to full review, teams work off the wrong documents.  This results in errors, rework, delays, cost overruns, quality issues, etc. 

To compensate for the usual issues, the agency carries large contingencies and with a limited budget, reduces the number of planned projects each year. Some approved projects are pushed out to future years.  

Add these issues up across the portfolio and regional budgets are overrun, projects are cancelled or pushed into future years and the agencies' constituents are impacted. 

With Kahua, there is a better way ... a way to take control, prevent these types of errors and hold the whole team accountable. And a way to work more efficiently, provide more insight and deliver better management capabilities. 

We help federal organizations like Agency X get control of their portfolios. Kahua provides a single source of truth supporting best practices and efficiencies to enable teams to get work done on time, on budget with the expected quality.  

The Kahua Federal Package is a project management information system (PMIS) purpose built to support the delivery of federal construction portfolios.  

With Kahua, agencies can deploy a modern, efficient and easy to use toolset to enable their teams and deliver better results. Key to Kahua’s success within the federal construction ecosystem is Kahua’s robust functionality, robust platform and robust expertise. Let me innumerate the way:  

ROBUST FUNCTIONALITY

ROBUST PLATFORM 

ROBUST EXPERTISE