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Hawaii Department of Education

FACILITY IMPROVEMENT PROCESS REDESIGN

Data-driven facilities improvements

The Hawai’i Department of Education is the only state-wide Department of Education (DOE) in the US. It serves 319 sites and 600 MM square feet across six islands and covers a range of over 300 miles. Despite an annual budget of over $200MM for school improvement projects, only 37% of the budgeted funds are spent before expiring. The district needed a new method to rapidly identify projects, equitably distribute funding, and contract with providers. MKThink developed an approach called HI-FIT (Hawaii Facility Inspection Tool) to perform rapid assessments of school campuses against a common set of guidelines. The assessment tool evaluates up to 112 attributes of each room on a campus. These assessments are then analyzed to identify common needs across multiple sites and prioritized relative to DOE goals such as learning outcomes and student safety and published via a publicly available website. Large-scale multi-site bundled projects are then assigned to prequalified contractors, replacing the conventional one-off design-bid-build process.

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BREAKDOWN:

DATES: 2018 - Present
STATE: Hawaii
SIZE/SCALE: 319 Campuses, 600MM S.F.
MARKET: K-12

PROJECT:

CHALLENGE: Despite an annual budget of over $200MM for school improvement projects, only 37% of the budgeted funds are spent before expiring. The district needed a new method to rapidly identify projects, equitably distribute funding, and contract with providers.  
APPROACH: MKThink developed an approach called HI-FIT (Hawaii facility inspection tool) to perform rapid assessments of school campuses against a common set of guidelines. The assessment tool evaluates up to 112 attributes of each room on a campus. These assessments are analyzed to identify common needs across multiple sites and prioritized relative to DOE goals such as learning outcomes and student safety. The analysis is published via a publicly available website, and large-scale multi-site bundled projects are assigned to prequalified contractors, replacing the conventional one-off design-bid-build process.
RESULT: Reduction in time from need identification to project completion from 5 years to 18 months. An increase in the percent of allocated budget spent from 37% to 88%. Projected impact – improved safety and health conditions (prioritized $60MM of project spending).
METRICS OF SUCCESS: The average budget of the contracted project increased by 1200%. The duration of design through contracting was reduced from 23 months to 3 months.
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