IPA to Host Inaugural Airports Project Benchmarking Research Consortium, September 13 & 14
Independent Project Analysis (IPA), Inc., will host senior executives of major national and international airports at a first-of-its-kind forum focusing on the capital effectiveness of airport projects. Current IPA clients plus a select group of invited guests will attend the Airports Project Benchmarking Research Consortium, set to take place September 13 and 14, 2018, in Leesburg, Virginia.
The airport executives, including executives responsible for large capital projects at airports near New York, Washington, and London, are invited to discuss the challenges of ensuring capital authorized for projects returns promised stakeholder value. A session on building a community committed to continuous improvement of airport capital projects is also on the agenda.
Airports around the world are authorizing tremendous amounts of capital for the construction of new and improved assets, including runways, terminals, and flight operations facilities. Such airport projects are often more challenging than their size or technology would suggest, due to complicated logistics, extensive security requirements, and a complex set of stakeholders. However, airport projects are not regularly benchmarked to determine whether capital invested produced desired outcomes, including for safety and for cost and schedule performance. IPA believes airport industry executives stand to benefit from sharing ideas about common ways to improve the effectiveness of capital projects in the airport industry through benchmarking Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), as well as by evaluating project system efficiency and execution practices.
On the forum’s first day, participants will be presented with an overview of how airport projects have performed in recent years. Participants will then review IPA’s airport benchmarking approach and capabilities. This session will frame areas where IPA’s benchmarking data are strong and identify opportunities for the development of capabilities to measure performance more accurately. IPA will then present research on the topics including reasons megaprojects fail so frequently, cost estimating practices that affect project outcomes, and the practices that can bolster a project team’s capability for coping with limited resources. Each session will leverage IPA’s extensive capital projects database.
On the second day, participants will review how to effectively structure the terms and conditions for project contracts and how certain terms and conditions can affect risk. The final session on the consortium’s agenda is an IPA-led workshop to seek consensus on types of projects/scopes for future benchmarking, to align on research objectives, and to set expectations and goals for future collaboration.
This is a closed-door event. However, airport officials interested in learning about the challenges facing owner airport companies today are encouraged to contact IPA via the event details page.