Work record / Development / LA Clippers Practice Facility

LA Clippers practice facility: rebuilt room by room, never closed

An NBA team cannot hand its practice building to a contractor, so we never asked it to. We held the practice calendar fixed and moved the finish date around it.

The seat

I held both the design and the general contracting through Tellus Design and Build, from June 2017 to October 2018. That is sixteen months in Los Angeles. The work ran under the Tellus name.

What I was brought in to decide

The Clippers' practice facility is a working NBA building. Inside are locker rooms, rehab and performance space, areas for training and coaching, and a player lounge. The team is in it every day it is not on the road, through the season and playoffs, summer workouts, camps and rehab. No window is long enough to shut it and give it to a contractor.

The Clippers called Tellus Design and Build, then the top Google result for the work, to redesign and rebuild it. Tellus took on both design and general contracting. The program was a long list of small scopes, and the four rooms shared walls, hallways, air, water and power. Ownership and team operations both approved it.

What we did

• Before anyone asked how fast we could finish, we asked team operations how many of the four rooms the team needed on a given day. We sized the plan to take one room down at a time, which kept three of the four open on any day the team was in the building.
• We flipped the schedule. The practice calendar was fixed. The finish date and the sequence were what we could vary, and we chose them to protect the calendar.
• Ahead of any drawing going out to bid, we mapped what each pair of rooms shared: hallways and the crews' own routes first, then structure, exit paths, fire alarm and sprinkler zones, wet walls and drain lines, electrical panels with their shutdown circuits, air handling zones, and the paths dust and noise would take. The order of phases came out of that map and not out of a Gantt chart.
• We changed who signs off. A phase counted as done when team operations signed that they could hold a practice in it. The designer and builder were one firm on this job, so we did not certify our own work.
• We wrote a responsibility grid with a single responsible party on every row. Team operations was accountable for sequencing the shared systems and responsible for signing off each phase. Tellus ran the process and was accountable for delivering a room they could sign.
• We set three conditions for opening the next phase. Team operations had to sign a handoff, every temporary system in the finished room had to be removed or made permanent, and we had to hold an as-built of that phase's shutoffs.
• Each trade's small scopes were held to their own phase. We closed phases one at a time, and each room's warranty started on the day the team took it back.
• We priced the phasing openly with the client so it would not show up later as a change order. That meant a mobilization per phase for every trade, a handoff window at each transition, and punch and warranty running on four clocks, not one.

Results

• We finished in October 2018, as the plan said we would, after sixteen months of phased work.
• Roughly $1.2 million of work across many small scopes was done with the team using the building the entire time.
• The client was very pleased. The workout areas, the phasing and the locker rooms were at the heart of the job.
• We came away with a phase gate and a shared-systems test that work in any building that cannot stop running.

The lesson

Keep fixed the calendar the people actually use, and let the finish date bend around it. Never reverse that.

Stories from this work

Questions about LA Clippers Practice Facility, answered

Firm record

Common Ground keeps its own account of this engagement: LA Clippers Practice Facility on the Common Ground wiki.

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