ZBeta’s 7 Step Playbook for Successful Corporate Campus Design
A corporate campus initiative can represent both unprecedented challenge and unprecedented opportunity for a security program and its leaders, especially when it reflects key transitions for the organization as a whole: accelerating growth, a move from smaller leased offices to fully owned properties and increasing complexity in its business operations.
In a recent, city-sized development project consisting of +5Msqft of space and iconic architecture, ZBeta partnered with its client to design and implement physical security solutions that fit its challenges: the addition of horizontal space to vertical stacking, increased consideration for core building services and infrastructure, greater interaction with the community and neighborhood, and a far greater mix of space and use types than it had previously known.
The seven keys to success that ZBeta embraces as a guiding force for all of its campus projects are as follows:
- At scale, planning is critical - The solution to campus-sized scale, complexity, and duration challenges lies in excellent program definition. A well-executed security program book captured the vision and clearly communicated objectives and requirements. A clear and simple roadmap immediately integrated security into the project, helped recruit the entire design team to the mission, and allowed ZBeta to represent its client fully and effectively, pursuing their interests precisely as they would.
- Security must fit business - Categorizing security space types early was critical to achieving solutions that would be consistently applied, sensible to user groups, and manageable operationally. Security zone definitions aligned campus spaces and their functions to security requirements and created a legend for the application of security measures. Security program illustration tools overlaid zoning on architectural drawings, provided pass/fail testing of design vs security program, and clearly revealed gaps and conflicts. These ensured that the design foundations were laid effectively.
- Big decisions and the little things - In addition to size, visionary architecture ensured that the campus would elevate security threat concerns. Our client faced unprecedented questions about its duty of care: how to protect personnel in an open, highly urban environment, how to effectively manage protest and demonstration activity, and how to gauge the possibility of a malicious attack. ZBeta used a large-risk decision methodology to navigate a best-practice and comps based approach to making big-ticket decisions. Plus, seemingly very little things can have an outsized impact on success. The client had a goal of ensuring that employees could reach their place of work via stairs. With high rise offices, multi-level below-ground parking, an anti-tailgating access perimeter, and multiple building entrances; this was no mean feat.
- BIM power – The project design team was applying cuttingedge design approaches to its pursuit of magazine-cover architecture. This was an ambitious Building Information Modeling (BIM) effort, fully designed in 3D Revit, with shared models and regular Digital Design Coordination. Leveraging Revit’s mass of data-based wealth allowed us to automate the generation of equipment center loading reports for our partners in IT, electrical, and mechanical disciplines, specifying wall space, power and circuit requirements, cooling needs, and network ports not just once, but every time they changed throughout the project.
- Protecting value - At campus scale, security investment itself is vulnerable. When configurations are to be replicated many times, the risk of under-detailed, under-coordinated design is multiplied. ZBeta’s building block approach to system design and scope detailing allows us to take design detail to the Nth degree with efficiency. And the payoff is real: taking questions out of the RFP, scope closing holes, ensuring same-fruit bids, and drastically limiting opportunities for change-order based pricing approaches. Post-award, the efficiencies persist. VARs can hit the ground running and they will find all necessary infrastructure in place: conduit pathways, doors and hardware, equipment wall space and electrical circuits.
- Day 1 success, Day 2 security - The goal for any launch is a seamless user experience on Day 1. Sensible, well integrated and intuitive to navigate security goes a long way towards Day 2 efficiencies. If they are high-friction, user resistance can set in quickly, often followed by post-occupancy projects. Both investment and security are ultimately compromised. Expertise, experience and capability must be supported by process. ZBeta’s tools for project management and site launch allow us to do this at scale, correctly under aggressive schedules.
- Continuous optimization - ZBeta and its client leveraged the opportunity to take a data driven, programmatic approach to the project portfolio and along the way each engagement contributed to the development program. The initial Program Book became the basis for corporate security policies, design building blocks became the basis for its build books, and project specs became equipment and technology standards. Both successes and lessons were banked so that they could be leveraged for future efforts.
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