As Planned

Data center demand is growing so fast that new buildings start operating as soon as they're turned over. Bahadir Barbarosoglu, Director of Project Controls at Holder Construction, joins As Planned to talk about planning and scheduling data centers when labor, equipment, power, and commissioning resources are all constrained, and acceleration is a constant ask.

Bahadir has spent about 15 years in construction, the last eight on data centers. He has consulted for general contractors and owners and now works on the general contractor side. Michael Bograd, PSP, Executive Vice President at Stelic, hosts.

His view on constant acceleration: building a bench of subject matter experts takes less effort and brings more success than trying to make every date more accurate.

Chapters

0:00 Introductions

1:06 How hyperscale has changed

2:56 From schedule-driven to resource-constrained

5:11 Resource loading and trade partner input

7:41 Collecting actuals and using earned value

10:23 Does the critical path run through power?

12:45 Temp power trade-offs

14:05 Early access and more turnover milestones

17:26 Stricter schedule specs, and why it takes a team

20:41 Long-lead equipment and procurement

24:14 How detailed should the commissioning schedule be?

27:18 Commissioning by asset, and a two-day slip that cost nearly a month

29:54 Acceleration is a constant ask

31:33 Advice for anyone in planning and scheduling

Guest

Bahadir Barbarosoglu, PhD, PMP, PMI-RMP, PMI-SP, PMI-ACP, PSP, EVP, CCP

Director of Project Controls, Holder Construction

https://www.linkedin.com/in/bahadir-barbarosoglu

Host

Michael Bograd, PSP

Executive Vice President, Stelic

About As Planned

As Planned is Stelic's podcast on what holds up and what doesn't between the baseline schedule and the field. Michael Bograd talks with veterans in project controls, scheduling, and construction management.

About Stelic

Stelic is a construction management and project controls firm based in Hagerstown, Maryland. We support owners, general contractors, and trade partners on complex capital projects, from planning and scheduling to cost, risk, and dispute resolution.

Open roles: https://www.stelic.com/careers/?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=video&utm_campaign=as_planned&utm_content=barbarosoglu

Most firms treat recruiting as a job board and a phone screen. Rob Crouch, Senior Operations Specialist at Stelic, treats it as a pipeline: sourcing, screening, a live technical assessment, client fit, and a structured onboarding that keeps every candidate in the loop from first call to first day.

In this episode of As Planned, EVP Michael Bograd and Rob get into:

• How Stelic works with internal and external recruiters without a gap in the candidate experience
• The two-week onboarding roadmap and the touch points before day one
• Compensation in a market where job seekers know their worth
• Why one year on site can be worth three or four years remote for a scheduler's career
• The live P6 assessment: building a data center baseline from scratch, because you can't fake it
• Resume red flags, and why short stints on billion-dollar projects raise questions
• Hiring experienced GC and owner-side talent vs. growing junior analysts in-house
• Why PSP and CCP certifications, plus data center and life sciences experience, stand out

About As Planned As Planned is a podcast from Stelic on planning, scheduling, cost, and the people who run capital projects.

About Stelic Stelic is a women-owned construction management and project controls firm based in Hagerstown, MD, supporting owners and trade partners across life sciences, data centers, federal, healthcare, and infrastructure.

Website: https://www.stelic.com 

Chemical engineer, quality engineer, Lean Six Sigma Black Belt, continuous improvement PM in life sciences, and now project controls at Stelic. On this episode of As Planned, Michael Bograd sits down with Andres Camejo to talk about how a career across oil and gas, manufacturing, and pharma/biotech carried straight into construction scheduling.

Andres explains why the industry changed but his mindset didn't: every project, whether it produces medicine, electrical cabinets, or a facility, aims to deliver value safely, with quality, on time, and within budget. They cover:

• What Kaizen means and how Andres applies it to his own weekly reporting
• Why new project tools fail without training and a champion (and why teams blame the tool instead)
• How he uses a stakeholder register, communication plans, and RAID logs on an active life science project
• How PMBOK practices helped him add value fast without a construction background
• What Stelic should look for when recruiting, and why background matters less than commitment and experience

His takeaway: the job of project controls is to provide reliable information so the team can make better decisions.

Episode 7 of As Planned. Michael Bograd sits down with Charles Tenly of ATR (Arena Technical Resources) to break down what sourcing good employees actually looks like in project controls, where every firm is competing for the same 500 to 1,000 A-plus candidates.

They get into why a resume full of the right buzzwords means nothing without hands-on project experience behind it, why P6 proficiency alone doesn't make a strong scheduler, and how AI-written resumes are creating a fraud problem that only a real conversation can screen out. Charles and Michael also talk about growing your own talent by pairing green hires with seasoned vets, why the best firms forecast their staffing needs before a project ends, and how a sharp candidate experience becomes its own qualifier. Field over remote, ten times out of ten.

Who owns the float on a construction schedule? It's not intuition or "how we did it last time." It's whatever the contract says, and depending on the spec you're under, that answer can flip entirely.

In this episode, Stelic EVP Michael Bograd sits down with Stelic EVP Brook Bolger to break down total float: how Caltrans lets whoever generates float keep it, why most contracts (including the Army Corps of Engineers UFGS spec) treat float as a shared commodity instead, what subcontractors need to watch for in "keep pace with the schedule" clauses, and why consuming your own float still isn't free once trade partners carrying labor risk are in the mix.

Every small business trying to break into federal work runs into the same wall: you need past performance to win the work, and you need the work to get past performance. Most firms either give up or start throwing bids at everything and hope something sticks.

In this episode of As Planned, Mike Bograd sits down with Stelic EV-President, Stew Meny, to talk through public versus private pursuits, and why the two require completely different playbooks. Stew has spent his career on the business development side of both, and he's direct about what it actually takes to get positioned for public work.

We get into what separates a public procurement from a private one, why relationships let commercial clients sole source and public agencies can't, what the GSA schedule opens up, and why three past performances in the right market segment matter more than a long project list. Stew also makes the case against volume bidding: ten pursuits at a 33 percent win rate beats a hundred at five percent, and the second approach will bury your proposal team and your overhead.

If you run BD for a small firm, own the go/no-go call, or you're two years into trying to crack federal work and wondering why the door hasn't opened yet, start here.

Most project dashboards get built with care, admired for a week, and then quietly ignored. The status meeting still runs on gut feel, and the dashboard becomes expensive wallpaper.

In this episode of As Planned, Taylor Moore, VP at Stelic, sits down to unpack why that keeps happening on life sciences projects. Taylor works with Pharma and biotech clients where the reporting stakes are high and the schedules are unforgiving, and he's seen the full range from dashboards that drive real decisions to ones nobody opens twice.

We get into what separates a report people actually use from one that just fills a slide, why more data usually makes the problem worse, and how to build reporting that a project team trusts enough to act on.

If you own project controls, run reporting for a capital program, or you're just tired of dashboards that look good and change nothing, this one's for you.

What does it take to run a project controls company? Michael Bograd sits down with Alex Viana, Stelic's VP of Operations, to talk about the part of the firm clients never see: recruiting, invoicing, compliance, payroll. The machinery most firms call back of house, and why that's the wrong name for it.

Alex ran operations at Apple, Amazon, and Meta before joining Stelic at six or seven people. The firm is now close to 30, supporting more than 50 projects, and this conversation is about what had to change in between: why freestyling stops working past a handful of employees, how white glove recruiting keeps a bench warm for clients who need people yesterday, what internal AI bots did to a two-week invoicing cycle, and why a human still signs everything that goes out.

Every project controls person has submitted a schedule that never actually gets used in the field. On this episode of As Planned, EVP Michael Bograd and VP Michael Maynard get into why that happens, and it's rarely the software's fault.

They talk through why more detail in a schedule isn't automatically better (sometimes a GC's own strategy is to run leaner and let the field manage sequencing day to day), why Maynard calls a schedule "a storybook of your intentions," and a buildability example that shows exactly how a plan falls apart on site: what happens when nine trades need the same five-by-five room at the same time.

They also get into what changes in life sciences construction, where the regulatory agency governing a product's eventual market can dictate humidity control specs and manufacturing standards long before the building code does.

Bograd's take on the real fix: it's not a contractor problem, an owner problem, or a tool problem. It's whether your project controls person has the knowledge base to ask the right question in the room.

Hosted by Michael Bograd, EVP, with guest Michael Maynard, VP. Stelic.

This is where it starts. As Planned is a podcast about project controls in the real world. Told by the people who've lived it.In this first episode, host Michael Bograd introduces the show and what's coming: honest conversations with industry experts and veterans about what it actually takes to keep construction projects on track.Subscribe and stay tuned.