Twidwell addresses Walsh’s Battery Park project team.
Last year The Walsh Group, one of the largest general contractors in North America, named Jeff Twidwell its Senior Vice President of Northeast Transportation operations. Twidwell, who received his law degree from Notre Dame University, has spent over a decade working for Walsh, moving up the ranks after starting as an assistant project manager for the Chicago-based company. With offices across the country, Walsh has enormous perspective on the construction industry throughout the United States and Canada and is a leader in building major infrastructure projects, including airports, highways, water treatment and desalination plants, and bridges. In the following interview, Twidwell discusses Walsh’s success in using progressive design-build and the company’s novel approach to elevating innovative ideas internally so they can be adapted for all of their projects.
BTEA: Tell us about The Walsh Group and about what you do for the company.
Founded in 1898, The Walsh Group is a family-owned construction service provider in its fourth generation of ownership. We’re one of the largest contractors nationally, operating across multiple different markets, and we’re organized into three different divisions: our transportation division, which does a lot of heavy civil work; our building division; and our water and wastewater division. Within that purview, I’ve worked both within our building division and the transportation group. Currently, I oversee the Northeast for our transportation-heavy civil projects, and I’m responsible for all aspects of our transportation business in the region, including winning new work, developing client relationships, managing ongoing projects, recruiting and retaining and training staff, and everything else in between.
BTEA: Progressive design build is a relatively new concept for contractors in New York, but it’s a widespread practice in so many other parts of the United States. As a company that works all across the nation, can you speak to your experience with progressive design build and how well it has worked for your company elsewhere in the country?
We’ve been engaged in progressive design-build for years across the country. In many instances our water and wastewater group and their clients have been ahead of the curve, either in progressive design build or a CMAR [Construction Manager At Risk] delivery. A lot of water/wastewater clients have procured projects in that way and it makes sense, because there’s so much coordination with the user groups and the operating entities of those plants. I think the key to success of any project delivery is early and strong planning and coordination; basically, resolving issues before issues arise, and by bringing everyone to the table and early engagement. Within our practice of progressive delivery projects, we’ve seen that the quantity and value of change orders and claims is significantly reduced and the likelihood of early project delivery is so much greater. It really does deliver value that can only be achieved by bringing everybody to the table, properly planning, and then executing.
BTEA: At the BTEA’s SafeBUILD Conference this year The Walsh Group received the award for Best Practices and Safety Culture. What is the approach that Walsh takes to safety that has made it a leader in this all-important area?
There are a couple main things that have driven our safety performance. The first is culture. There is simply nothing more important for safety performance than establishing culture. Safety incidents happen from an individual making a decision on a project site and we have thousands of individuals making hundreds of thousands of decisions every day on our project sites, so building a culture where people actively care for those around them is so important. The work in our industry can present hazards, but we can establish safe work environments by making the right decisions, properly planning our work, and looking out for those around us. So, establishing the culture from craft to management is something we spend a lot of time on at every level of the organization. The second thing is the processes that we’ve put in place to help move the larger organization. Around 25 years ago, we committed ourselves to collecting and tracking data at a different level: not just incident, frequency, severity, but also categories of incident specifics and root cause analyses, and then relay that information throughout our organization. With a consistent, deeper focus, we built out a robust safety program to include a number of components or programs designed to prevent, avoid, and mitigate work hazards. You can’t manage what you don’t know, and by collecting that data, analyzing root causes, it helped us focus our attention. And so, I really think we continue to get better every day, and we continue to strive to do even better. It’s not a static program.
BTEA: An important focus of the BTEA is making sure our members are on the cutting-edge when it comes to technology and innovation. Is there any technology you’re employing or any innovative approaches that Walsh is taking that are particularly noteworthy?
One recent innovation that jumps to mind was on a marine-based project where we are utilizing a robotic rescue buoy. If there’s a man overboard situation where someone is in the water and they’re not in range of a normal life ring that you’d throw, we have a robotic life-saving device that you throw in the water, which has a joystick, and you can drive it to them like a boat. It’s an innovative tool that we’ve added to our repertoire, which addresses a risk that we saw working in rough waters around New York City. There are additional examples, but on a larger scale, we embrace ingenuity and harvest ideas from our different project teams and bring them up to the larger organization. Within our company, we have an Ingenuity Award competition, where our project teams submit innovations that they implemented on their projects. There’s also a bracket-style competition, where each idea moves through the bracket and then there are winners in several different categories. The top ideas are shared throughout our company so that they can be employed on other projects where appropriate.
BTEA: You are collaborating right now on an important project in Battery Park. Can you tell us about it?
NYCEDC is the public sponsor of the project and they’ve contracted Hunter Roberts as the construction manager. There are two primary components to the project, a marine component and an upland, more park-based one. Walsh Construction is supporting Hunter Roberts as a subcontractor on the marine component, and it’s part of the larger Lower Manhattan coastal resiliency program. There’s a lot of interesting and unique components to it. For one, it’s about as high profile a location as you could get, and it’s complex because you’re working directly adjacent to Castle Clinton and the ferries that are transporting people to the Statue of Liberty and Staten Island and elsewhere around the city. Our project responsibilities involve replacing 1,600 linear feet of wharf, so we have to demolish and remove the existing structure and foundations, and then drive a sheet bulkhead wall, concrete piles, and set pre-cast caps, beams, and fascia panels. We’re also installing outfall and tide gate chambers and a caisson-supported bridge structure over the Hugh Carey Tunnel. The project raises the wharf structure about five feet to bolster and protect against rising waters. It’s a very interesting project with a lot of unique challenges.