Capital Project Planning Toolkit
5 tools to educate project sponsors on the true costs and processes of capital projects
While academic project sponsor input is critical to completing capital projects, effectively incorporating their feedback is difficult to balance with the project budget and timeline. Furthermore, most project sponsors are involved in only one or two capital projects, boosting unrealistic expectations about costs and processes.
Ideally, project managers (PMs) and facilities leaders use early conversations to calibrate expectations; however, many campuses report their PMs are stretched across many projects.
This toolkit is designed to simplify conversations between PMs and campus stakeholders. It offers five tools to help facilities staff better educate sponsors about capital projects.
Tool 1: Expectation-setting conversation guide
This tool helps project managers (PMs) obtain valuable information about project goals from the sponsor and pull forward challenging conversations about realities of limited budgets. This interview guide includes both the questions a PM should pose to the sponsor and guidance to help the PM conduct the interview. Users can adopt the guide as is or adapt to their institutional context.
Tool 2: Guide to creating stakeholder-centric process map
This step-by-step guide helps you create a process map that clearly explains the major stages of a capital project—as well as stakeholder responsibilities—to project sponsors. Institutions that currently have an internal process map for project management staff can use that as a starting point. Otherwise, users should consider codifying the steps to aid the creation of an externally facing process map.
Tool 3: Capital project charter template
When institutions undertake capital projects, they often find project participants do not understand their role in the project or that disputes arise due to an unclear execution plan. This tool is designed to ensure project stakeholders, including the project manager and sponsor, come to agreement upfront about the scope, budget, and timeline for the capital project. It also includes prompts to clarify the roles and authority of different people involved, ensuring all participants have a common understanding of the project and minimizing disputes as the project progresses.
Put it into practice:Â Capital Project Charter Template.
Tool 4: Cost and funding source cheat sheet
This resource defines the most important and potentially confusing components of capital project costs. The goal is to proactively educate project sponsors on the limitations of capital budgets, as well as define some of the least accessible terms that often appear in the project plan.
Tool 5: Capital project cost model
This interactive budget calculator, built by the University of Colorado, Boulder, can be used to generate preliminary cost estimates for proposed projects, to help choose between building new and renovating existing space, or as a model for developing a campus-specific construction cost calculator.
This resource requires EAB partnership access to view.
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