Education City – Doha, Qatar

The Qatar Foundation is a non-profit organization that serves the people of Qatar by supporting and operating programs in education, science and research, and community development. To nurture the future leaders of Qatar, it had the vision to create Education City, a mixed-use facility with educational, commercial, social and cultural facilities. The facility covers 800ha and is located 8km west of the capital city, Doha. It includes universities, science and technology park, convention center, teaching hospital and sports facilities. Working with the client and project management firm, ASTAD, we provided program construction management and construction supervision services for the development.

Early Planning For Long-Term Success

On this project we were responsible for the overall planning of construction activities. Individual jobs included building roads, infrastructure, cooling plants, parking structures, pumping stations, parks, open spaces and a reverse osmosis plant. We provided construction management services to 15 separate projects. We also carried out regular technical and quality audits on all contractors responsible for the implementation and execution of each project phase.

Project Challenges

One of the challenges involved was hiring and mobilizing skilled staff on short notice. By applying proven and efficient processes, we were able to assign/hire staff in a highly competitive labor market. We then took project staff through a detailed on-boarding process, so they clearly understood the client and its objectives for the project. Another key factor to success was setting up processes and procedures at an early stage. This enabled us to ensure all parties adopted a common approach from day one.

Collaboration Is Key

Integrity and professional behavior were instrumental in gaining the client’s trust. Integrity is a core Parsons value. Therefore, it is incumbent on us to remain transparent, and to openly communicate with our clients and stakeholders. On this development we solved on-site challenges by offering suggestions for areas of work not covered by the design. Our design team also provided the client with numerous solutions as project requirements evolved, demonstrating how the new needs could best fit in with the master plan. Collaboration helps support integrity, and we used our proprietary PAR-LINK document management system to foster a ‘one team’ approach.

Using our proprietary PAR-LINK® document management and collaboration system, we created a database to simplify and facilitate document control operations. PAR-LINK’s cloud-based common-access portal consolidates program data and delivers real-time information through a secure network.

A Wealth Of Expertise

Our cadre of seasoned professionals and our wealth of best practices and lessons learned form the foundation of our ability and understanding of how to execute large, complex programs—an essential ingredient of our contribution to Education City’s success. Our key contributions—on-time workforce deployment, ESHARP (Environmental, Safety, Health, and Risk Program)-based health, safety, and environment (HSE) approach, and integration of effort with customer representatives built around trust and our “one team” philosophy—have bolstered our value to the program. We are playing a central role in the development of one of the most prestigious projects in Qatar, and across the entire Middle East Africa region.