HOME BASE

This is your exclusive member area for the New School Group.

First things first. While you are here, go ahead and use Zoom Direct to schedule your next monthly one-on-one. If you have recently joined us, we will be in contact about scheduling the kickoff catch-up session with you spending a bit more time to catch-up on what you have going on.

SCHEDULE MONTHLY ONE-ON-ONE

Team Twenty-One

Review Status

This month typically sees review approvals percolating back. As we get these, keep in mind that our job is to evaluate and ensure the requirements and feedback actually applies to our work. Remember, the people reviewing the drawings do not know what you know. We can talk horror stories about some things I have come across. Bring you review comments to our session and we can discuss some of the challenging ones as a group.

Construction Cost

Bidding is a parallel activity. More than likely you have some preliminary costs and now as design is complete the builders can provide hard numbers. As you get those and find some things might cost more than others, it is time to make changes. You can submit changes to the plan design during the revise/resubmit cycle if you are not approved in the first round, or simply post a revision for review.

Team Twenty-Two

Site Selection

Site selection often dominates the winter and spring months. If you are lucky enough to have a site identified, and better yet under control, you are working initial due diligence. Due diligence is our planning and evaluation of a potential sites fitness programmatically, financial, as well as timeline viability.

Team Twenty-One

Can you believe it is already December? The typical project at this stage is submitted, or near ready to submit, for plan review with the local authorities having jurisdiction. Why December? Well, that has a lot to do with strategically making sure you through the gate for when the staffs are back from holiday ready to work and not caught up as an application lost on a desk. Not submitted yet? Not necessarily a bad thing, just depends on your project.

Looking ahead at January and February, you will be in a position to be bidding harder numbers for any construction you need to do. If you have not already, work on your vendor pool from construction to furniture. With the current COVID-19 pandemic supply chain issues, you don’t want to get hamstrung by something simple like a door frame not getting in on time. We have seen it happen. It is not pretty. In terms of change management and transition planning on the ground level, having final plans in hand means preparing the communication roll out, something else we will cover in this weeks group session. Invitations are out, so make sure you clear your calendar for this critical phase of the process.

Team Twenty-Two

For members who are planning 2022 implementations, you are in the early conceptualization stage. You can get a glimpse from above where you will need to be in 12 short months. I say short because often board meetings are monthly. If you are approving a project at the June 30 fiscal year, you have only 5 meetings left to identify core issues, present options, and iterate to a point of confident direction.