A Crowning Achievement: Canada’s GCworkplace Initiative
Similar to ongoing trends within the private sector to reinvent the modern workplace, the Government of Canada has been re-envisioning how their employees work. Across many of its departments, this workplace modernization, dubbed GCworkplace, is being embarked upon in the hopes that improvements to the workplace will lead to environments that foster innovation, collaboration, and productivity. Out with the cubicles that have come to represent a one-size-fits-all, siloed work environment, and in with a space that is focused on variety, flexibility, and accessibility.
Seeing an opportunity to offer support to the government’s modernization efforts, Govan Brown launched its Federal Services division in 2021. A notable achievement for Govan Brown’s Ottawa team, the natural home to Federal Services, was their recently completed tenant fit-up for Public Services and Procurement Canada (PSPC), the department that supports the daily operations of all federal agencies. As a 21,000sf renovation project with boardrooms, lounge areas, and a telecoms room added to the scope at the tail-end of construction, Govan Brown’s team needed to come to the table with solutions that would curtail the unique challenges posed by complex project governance as well as their enhanced procurement protocols.
THE WEB OF COMMAND
Though the ultimate end user of the tenant fit-up is PSPC’s staff, the project involved several federal services stakeholders. And with an increased number of entities with buy-in comes increasingly complex stakeholder relations. Key to a project’s success, then, is developing a strategy early on to keep all partners aligned and informed and the project proceeding with a “one team” mentality. In the case of PSPC, the stakeholders at the helm of the project came via the numerous specialty teams overseeing minute aspects of the scope, such as M&E, AV, etc., and which combined make up PSPC. Acting on PSPC’s behalf, the organizational chart becomes an intricate web of decision-makers to weave through for reporting and approvals.
“To prevent lines of communication from becoming a game of telephone, we tracked all change orders, documenting them in real time through the master project schedule,” Gabriel Waxman, Govan Brown senior project manager. “This helped ensure that our project partners and stakeholders remained properly informed.”
RELIABLE PARTNERS
Given the duration of such administrative tasks, and the aggressive schedule that typifies government projects, it was imperative that construction be properly coordinated. Part of this coordination included stringent resource management, specifically as it pertained to those resources contracted through Govan Brown.
All government projects require a specific level of security clearance, but not all security clearances are created equal. For PSPC, the required level of security clearance was “Reliability,” and the onus was on Govan Brown’s project management and estimating teams to ensure trade partners were equipped with appropriate certification. But in needing Reliability Status, the pool of qualified subtrades narrows, and Govan Brown’s task then becomes keeping the bid process competitive to keep costs from increasing at the expense of the Canadian taxpayer—including flagging existing site conditions that could create inaccurate trade pricing and higher costs downstream.
“It was imperative that we kept the Canadian taxpayer in mind throughout construction as an invisible third party that we’re all ultimately beholden to,” says Waxman. “Of course the budget is important in any sector, but we had to make sure we were providing solutions that would offset the costs and reinforce the net gains that this modernization would provide.”
“The ultimate goal is that Canadians get the most out of their investment,” a spokesperson for Crown Realty Partners said. “They may never step inside the space, but they’re ultimately the beneficiaries of it.”
PROJECT DETAILS
Location: Ottawa, ON
Size: 21,000sf
Client: Public Services and Procurement Canada
Landlord: Crown Realty Partners
Architect: LWGArchitects
Engineer: McKee Engineering