Tag Archives: Healthcare

Kitchell promotes healthcare construction executive

After having his hand in the construction of hundreds of hospitals and healthcare facilities throughout the southwest, Dan Pierce has been promoted to senior vice president at Kitchell.

“Dan is the consummate leader with a unique blend of humor, intellect and resolve,” said Kitchell Contractors President Mike Rock. “He knows how to develop great teams, sharing his entrepreneurial energy when necessary but also, as is the case with all great managers, he knows when to step aside.”

Pierce joined Kitchell 30 years ago, right out of college, as a project engineer. Since his first project, St. Luke’s Hospital in Phoenix, he has advanced through the company from project manager through vice president, Healthcare Division, and has been directly involved in thousands of projects.

Pierce has demonstrated strong and steady leadership throughout his tenure at Kitchell and has been instrumental in building the company’s healthcare division, nurturing the medical technology planning division, Facilities Development Inc., and expanding the Virtual Construction group.

“We depend on Dan to ask the tough questions and to address challenges from all perspectives – nothing slips by him. This characteristic, along with his decades-long experience at Kitchell, makes him a tremendous asset to the company and I look forward to working alongside him for many more years to come,” Rock said.

As senior vice president, Pierce will bring lessons-learned and success strategies honed building the company’s health care division to the rest of the company.

With a bachelor’s degree in construction from Arizona State University, Pierce is involved in many organizations including the American Society for Healthcare Engineering, Healthcare Forum, Healthcare Administrators Forum, and the American Hospital and Health Association.  He is an ASHE Certified Healthcare Builder and member of the Leadership Development Forum of the Arizona Building Alliance.  Pierce played a lead role in helping establish the construction management program and its curriculum at Northern Arizona University.  From 2000 to 2005, Pierce was a board member of the Foundation for Blind Children in Phoenix.

Key to success – Cardon Children’s Medical Center

Viewpoint By Jim Pullen, Project Director

The key to Kitchell’s success in building the Cardon Children’s Medical Center was our ability to coordinate the efforts of many people and then effectively communicate them.  Although Kitchell has a history of working on large, complex projects, this was the first one where every department in the hospital was directly affected by our work

Creating a formal process

Because of the project’s scope, we quickly realized the importance of creating a formal process to achieve our number one priority: keeping the existing facility up and running during construction. 

 The process included creating forms, a spreadsheet with key item numbers, a list of affected departments, a reason for our actions, details and floor plans of areas in which we were working. We also included a backup plan for each item and space to record key lessons learned.  We called it the impact matrix, and developed the process on site.

 Preplanning and communication

Thanks to this matrix, hospital stakeholders weren’t surprised when we shut down power, or blocked parking spaces or when road access changed. We preplanned with the affected departments and communicated information up to the point of execution.  We sent weekly notes to the public relations contact to include in the hospital newsletter and post in public areas.  And we contacted doctors in advance with information that would affect them.

The impact matrix was an effective tool that we have added to our toolbox. Feedback from our clients indicates that they like it as much as we do.