CMAA, CII celebrate alliance’s first-year achievements

AUSTIN, TEXAS — In January 2010, CMAA and the Construction Industry Institute (CII) announced a new collaboration designed to combine CII’s tested, validated best practices with CMAA’s CM standards of practice and the certified construction manager credential — a combination summed up in the alliance’s theme, "Best Practices – Best Practitioners."

The first year of this ambitious initiative has seen major progress in bringing construction owners, construction and program managers, and academia together to improve the execution of capital programs.

CII, based at The University of Texas at Austin, is a consortium of more than 100 leading owner, engineering-contractor, and supplier firms from both the public and private arenas.

The first year of the alliance has produced these major milestones:

• CII has endorsed the certified construction manager (CCM) credential and begun communicating with its members about the CCM process.
• A 23-member team composed of CII and CMAA industry professionals has been working to identify areas of alignment between CMAA’s CM standards of practice and the 14 construction best practices published by CII. Participants found strong levels of alignment between the CMAA and CII documents in the areas of front end planning, alignment, constructability, and change management. In other areas, the group has charted a future course toward the goal of bringing the two documents closer together. Within 18 months, CMAA plans to assure that the CCM examination adequately addresses each of CII’s best practices.
• CII has created an opportunity for CMAA owner members to participate in its globally respected benchmarking and metrics program, adding extensive data to the CII database. The CMAA owner members will benefit from immediate benchmarking of their projects against a collection of some 2,000 projects with a total constructed value of more than $100 billion.
• CMAA has made presentations on certification and the SOPs at the CII 2010 National
  Conference and its semi-annual project improvement workshops.
• CII has organized program content for CMAA national gatherings, including a benchmarking session at the 2010 Owners Forum in Atlanta and three sessions at last year’s National Conference in San Diego, focusing on benchmarking, front end planning, and
  construction safety.
• Each organization has extended special discounts to members of the other organization for event registration and document purchases.

In their memorandum of understanding, CII and CMAA said the goal of their initiative was to "improve delivery of capital facilities in all settings by promoting the professional practice of construction and program management in conjunction with the broadest possible application of recognized industry best practices."

For more information, visit www.construction-institute.org and www.cmaanet.org.