Defining scope and managing bids
Nonprofit leader Darryl Nordquist moved Special Olympics South Dakota to a new Sioux Falls site and office building created through the design/build method. A newer project, the Unify Center, required a different approach. The athletics facility is the first of its kind in the nation, dedicated to Special Olympics programming.
“We understood the whys and the reasoning behind every decision we needed to make, and that was very helpful,” Nordquist said. “Nothing was too out there. We felt like we could bring up anything we wanted to try to do with this, and we’d get the advice we needed to determine whether we could make it happen within our budget.”
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Nordquist also valued TSP’s ability to coordinate the bidding process, freeing him up to “compare apples to apples” in a way that wasn’t possible in his previous design/build experience.
“TSP draws the plans, decides which items are in which packages that get released to bidders, answers questions from contractors, and really takes charge of the whole process,” he said. “There was tremendous consistency among bidders that way.”
Special Olympics South Dakota opened its Unify Center with a ribbon-cutting one year ago this month. Nordquist attributes the positive outcomes to all the careful front-end work.
“I could be sitting here now and saying, ‘I wish we could have done this or that.’ And so far, there isn’t anything,” he said. “We accomplished as much as we possibly could.”