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Buckingham Companies Case Study
Building a Scheduling Culture That Delivers Months Early
Buckingham Companies Case Study
The Challenge
Schedule Risk Stayed Hidden
Buckingham’s project teams were capable — but their schedules weren’t keeping up. Across projects, schedule logic was inconsistent: tasks weren’t properly linked, and when field conditions changed, schedules often failed to react. Project managers managed by milestone rather than task, which meant problems were invisible until it was too late to recover.
Leadership felt it directly. When projects ran long, executives answered for it. For Tom Clark, VP of Construction, the deeper frustration was cultural: he’d spent decades understanding the financial stakes of schedule discipline and couldn’t get the next generation to see it the same way.
“The three most important things we can do are deliver on time, on budget, and at quality.”
- Tom Clark, VP of Construction, Buckingham Companies
The company made a decision: scheduling would become a company-wide priority. They needed tools and a process to make it stick.
The SmartPM Approach
Schedule Visibility, Shared
After evaluating multiple platforms, Tom Clark chose SmartPM — and implementation began with collaborative project reviews focused on three core metrics: schedule quality grade, compression, and overall schedule health. Teams learned to evaluate whether logic was actually driving the schedule or whether it had become a static document.
The shift from milestone-based to task-based management was the first breakthrough. When teams began managing at the task level, schedule movement became meaningful — a slipped task moved everything downstream, making risk visible immediately. SmartPM’s compression analysis removed any remaining temptation to paper over problems: stack tasks to recover time, and SmartPM showed exactly how unrealistic that was and projected the true end date regardless.
“Once you crunch it, it would show us what percentage we compressed it, which didn’t make any sense — and it would still show you’re not going to make it. There’s no magic sauce to fix it when you get behind.”
- Tom Clark, VP of Construction, Buckingham Companies
Adoption followed quickly. Anchoring every review to three visible metrics — displayed in front of peers — created accountability that didn’t require constant enforcement. Buckingham reinforced it further with financial incentives: teams that finished ahead of schedule shared in the savings.
“Once you put those three metrics in front of the PM and they know they’re going to be reviewed in a group, it simplifies everything — these are the three things I need to worry about. It didn’t take a lot of coercing after that.”
- Evan Smith, VP of Operations, Buckingham Companies
The Result
Months Ahead, Costs Avoided
The outcomes have been concrete. On a nine-building garden-style community in Indiana — 32 months scheduled — Buckingham finished seven months early. On a follow-up project in Lafayette of similar complexity, Tom reduced the target to 28 months knowing SmartPM would keep the team honest. They beat even that by five months, delivering in approximately 22 months.
“No one does a building complex of that size in 22 months with all that work. Our competitors are not doing it.”
- Tom Clark, VP of Construction, Buckingham Companies
General conditions costs run approximately $100,000 per month on a typical garden-style project. Finishing five to seven months early translates to roughly $400,000 in avoided costs per project — and more on larger jobs. Early delivery also improves financing terms for owners, accelerates tenant occupancy, and has become a competitive differentiator that generates repeat work.
Today SmartPM is on every Buckingham project. PMs and PEs use it daily. Executives monitor portfolio health through the analytics dashboard without digging into individual schedules. The three-metric framework is the operating standard — and the internal team now has the analytical fluency to run it themselves.
“From the project side, the single biggest thing SmartPM has driven is efficiency. We’re much more efficient. We make dates or we beat them. And we keep our word.”
- Tom Clark, VP of Construction, Buckingham Companies
By the Numbers
“From the project side, the single biggest thing SmartPM has driven is efficiency. We’re much more efficient. We make dates or we beat them. And we keep our word."
