Project management for medical facility development.

Project management is the process of resolving conflicts throughout the life cycle of construction and development. It is also the process of avoiding conflicts altogether.

Most major medical centers employ a full-time staff to project manage the constant flow of renovations and modernizations that are imperative to keep pace within the competitive world of modern healthcare facilities.

Yet when it's time to plan and build large, innovative and groundbreaking new structures and retrofits, professional project management companies bring resources, skills and structure to supplement in-house facilities departments and create an unmatched team to insure the project's success.

Over the course of Granary Associates' 8-year working relationship with Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, we've earned great respect for the lean and accomplished in-house facilities team.

This department manages the institution's multi-million sq.ft. portfolio and the $30-to-$40 million in annual construction projects that keep it at its excellent standing.

We've also had the opportunity to develop our own niche within the institution as valued consultants, bringing our expertise to bear for the hospital to produce outstanding results from a construction and staffing view.

Currently, Granary Associates serves as Project Manager for the $600 million development of the new research building MSKCC. This project illustrates how an expert consulting project manager proves its worth, starting with staffing.

Staffing is a sensitive issue for any organization, and even more for healthcare institutions.

Efficiency is of paramount importance and does not allow for the permanent swelling of in-house departments to meet temporary needs.

A solid 20-person department might handle the universe of standard facilities development needs, but cannot maintain its size and excellence while adding a special and extremely large project to its roster.

An operating budget might allow for one or two additional team members, but often not the dollars to attract the finest specialized and diverse talent in the business.

In the case of Granary Associates, our status allows us to join an institution and then leave when our job is done. It's ironic, but one of the greatest benefits of our hiring is how painlessly we go away once the project is successfully completed.

While on the job, we bring the very best in the business to the table. As a multifaceted project management and architecture firm with 125 professionals and 27 years of experience in the healthcare field, our resources include experts in all aspects of the most specialized construction projects. We continually shift our teams to incorporate the input of each expert as needed. In this way, an institution's facilities group grows and shrinks without the HR and payroll issues that can cripple an important and time-sensitive project. Further, Granary Associates resides within the project costs as opposed to fixed overhead.

An experienced consultant also brings new and different perspectives to an established institution and the staffing of a development corps. In the case of the new research building, we were able to identify and secure talented specialists and service companies from within our wide universe of resources.

Our work as consultants nationally and internationally gives us a great Rolodex of professional resources upon which we can call, far greater than even the formidable list of contractors and suppliers maintained by a large institution. Finally, an experienced consulting project manager is just that: experienced in the most complex and sophisticated aspects of construction. Planning and budget development for an important retrofit of an existing medical department is one skill--but facilitating the rezoning of a large parcel on the Upper East Side of Manhattan and developing a budget for a 692,000-sq.ft. state-of-the-art high rise biomedical research facility is another entirely.

These high-stakes, high-reward projects are the ones in which institutions are best served by tapping a firm like Granary Associates. And even when they love us, they are happy when they say goodbye.