LA Clippers practice facility: a redesign built while the team kept using it

What it is

The LA Clippers' practice facility is a working NBA building: locker rooms, performance and rehab space, training and coaching areas, and a player lounge. A team uses it every day it is not on the road, from the season through the playoffs, summer workouts, camps and rehab, so there is no window long enough to close it and hand it to a contractor.

The Clippers reached out to Tellus Design and Build, which was number one on Google in those years, to redesign and rebuild it. Tellus held both the design and the general contracting on a program of many small scopes spread across four rooms that shared walls, air, water, power and hallways. Ownership and team operations approved the program.

What Common Ground did

• Asked team operations first how many of the four rooms the team needed on any given day, before anyone asked how fast the work could finish, and sized the plan to one room down at a time: three of the four rooms open on any day the team was in the building.
• Turned the schedule around. The practice calendar was fixed, and the finish date and the sequence were the free variables, chosen to protect it.
• Mapped what each pair of rooms shared before any drawing went out for bid: air handling zones, electrical panels and shutdown circuits, wet walls and drain lines, exit paths, fire alarm and sprinkler zones, structure, dust and noise paths, and the crews' own routes. The phase order came from that map, not from a Gantt chart.
• Moved the sign-off. A phase was done when team operations signed that they could run a practice in it, not when the designer and builder, the same firm on this job, certified its own work.
• Wrote a responsibility grid with one responsible party on every row: team operations accountable for shared-systems sequencing and responsible for phase sign-off, Tellus running the process and accountable for producing a room they could sign.
• Wrote three conditions for opening the next phase: a signed handoff from team operations, every temporary system in the finished room removed or made permanent, and an as-built of that phase's shutoffs in hand.
• Held every trade's small scopes to their phase, and closed each phase on its own, with the warranty on each room starting when the team took it back.
• Priced the phasing in front of the client rather than letting it arrive later as a change order: a mobilization per phase for every trade, a handoff window at every transition, and punch and warranty on four clocks instead of one.

Results

• The program finished in October 2018, the month the plan called for, after sixteen months of phased work.
• About $1.2 million of work across many small scopes, with the team using the building the whole way through.
• The client was very happy with the result, with the workout areas, the phasing and the locker rooms at the center of the work.
• A phase gate and a shared-systems test that carry to any building that cannot stop running.

External links

• Public data room: LA Clippers Practice Facility data room

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