Can DOT play a ‘team sport’?

When a reorganization creates a new set of managers to oversee large projects, is that necessarily an inefficiency?

It depends on their role, and whether the outcome represents an improvement in service, according to management specialists. The issue will become more relevant as the R.I. Department of Transportation begins to spend up to $4.7 billion over the next decade rebuilding Rhode Island bridges and overpasses.

The RhodeWorks program, approved in early February, will establish tolling for large commercial trucks using highways in Rhode Island to help finance the replacement or repair of 150 structurally deficient bridges, as well as 500 bridges in need of repairs.

Even before the program was approved, the state DOT had reorganized to emphasize project management in its execution of large works, a structure expected to be used in RhodeWorks.

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The department’s reorganization, begun last year, will include new management positions within a “Division of Project Management.”

In all, the state will hire new employees, or shift existing employees, into 14 new positions in the upcoming year, according to a department spokesman. Eight of the positions are new, while the others represent reclassifications. The salaries for new positions are expected to total $1.3 million to $1.5 million.

Peter Alviti Jr., the DOT director, says the department is moving to a project-management approach in managing its work, which is the standard in private industry.

The new division will oversee and manage all projects from design through final completion.

“There will be one person responsible for managing the schedule, the budget and the scope of the project … for its entire life, rather than it moving from silo to silo,” Alviti said.

A wasteful inefficiency? It depends.

Inefficiency results when the state, or governments in general, set up chains of command that essentially amount to “an associate director, reporting to an assistant director, reporting to a deputy director,” explained Gary Sasse. He’s founding director of Bryant University’s Hassenfeld Institute for Public Leadership and the former director of the R.I. Department of Administration.

“You want to create positions that are actually delivering services, and doing things,” he said.

At Rhode Island-based Gilbane Building Co., one of the largest construction-management companies in the U.S., the process is called team-based management, but essentially involves a single construction manager, on a site, all day, coordinating the flow of work at a complex project.

The key to the process working well, said company spokesman Wesley Cotter, is getting individuals to buy in. “Construction,” he said, “is a team sport.” •

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