Integrating Project Delivery

Martin Fischer, Howard W. Ashcraft, Dean Reed, Atul Khanzode

• Editorial: Wiley
• Año: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781118415382
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Architecture
• Categoría: Architecture General

A revolutionary, collaborative approach to design and construction project delivery

Integrating Project Delivery is the first book-length discussion of IPD, the emergent project delivery method that draws on each stakeholder's unique knowledge to address problems before they occur. Written by authors with over a decade of research and practical experience, this book provides a primer on IPD for architects, designers, and students interested in this revolutionary approach to design and construction. With a focus on IPD in everyday operation, coverage includes a detailed explanation and analysis of IPD guidelines, and case studies that show how real companies are applying these guidelines on real-world projects. End-of-chapter questions help readers quickly review what they've learned, and the online forum allows them to share their insights and ideas with others who either have or are in the process of implementing IPD themselves.

Integrating Project Delivery brings together the owners, architect, engineers, and contractors early in the development stage to ensure that problems are caught early, and to address them in a collaborative way. This book describes the parameters of this new, more efficient approach, with expert insight on real-world implementation.

• Compare traditional procurement with IPD
• Understand IPD guidelines, and how they're implemented
• Examine case studies that illustrate everyday applications
• Communicate with other IPD adherents in the online forum

The IPD approach revolutionizes not only the workflow, but the relationships between the stakeholders – the atmosphere turns collaborative, and the team works together toward a shared goal instead of viewing one another as obstructions to progress. Integrated Project Delivery provides a deep exploration of this approach, with practical guidance and expert insight.

CHAPTER 1
What Would Make Us Proud?

“You're here because you know something. What you know you can't explain, but you feel it. You've felt it your entire life, that there's something wrong with the world. You don't know what it is, but it's there, like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad.”

—Morpheus, The Matrix (1999)

1.1 CURRENT STATE OF FACILITY PERFORMANCE

Buildings should perform to or even exceed our expectations. We should be able to set high standards during design that are met during operations and use. We have some success defining and predicting first cost, design-construction duration, and structural and water-tightness performance. Project teams often achieve desired performance for these objectives today. Facilities don't tend to fall down—they tend to keep the water out, and they tend to be delivered on time and on budget, although achieving all of these goals simultaneously is somewhat less common. But when we include other project goals, it is far less common that project teams meet them.

Consider, for example, building energy performance. This operational parameter is particularly significant to life cycle cost, sustainability, and carbon emissions and affects user comfort and functionality. A variety of modeling tools exist to predict performance during the design phase; yet it is rare that a building performs during the use phase as simulated during design.

A recently completed building at Stanford University exemplifies this issue. It has better energy performance than buildings of similar size and function, but, in the first years of operation, used significantly more energy than the design team projected during the design phase (Kunz, Maile, & Bazjanac, 2009). The difference between projected and actual performance is caused by operational inefficiencies (which have been and are being corrected), by unrealistic or unconfirmed assumptions in building use, changes in use of some of the spaces to more energy-intensive activities that were not incorporated into the building energy performance simulations, and shortcomings of the energy simulation and prediction tools. Even though the building performs relatively well, the project team did not meet the aggressive energy performance goals set during design or, at least, failed to notify the users and the client that actual energy use would be above expectations. Hence, the building owners and users were surprised by the lower than expected energy performance.

Unfortunately, the literature reports similar experiences for other buildings for which well-organized clients with lots of design, construction, and operations experience hired very strong design and construction teams, yet failed to achieve the energy performance goals set during the project's design (Scofield, 2002, 2009).

Nilsson and Elmroth's (2005) analysis of 23 retrofitted buildings in the Malmö project revealed three main reasons for the poorer than expected energy performance: (1) vendors indicated overly optimistic window performance, that is, the window calibration in the vendor's laboratory characterized the windows too optimistically with respect to their insulation performance in the context of the actual buildings; (2) the energy analysis program did not consider thermal bridges properly; and (3) the buildings leaked too much air, largely due to tolerances in the structural and façade systems that did not create a building envelope that supported the aggressive energy performance targets.

It could, of course, be that these examples of the performance of individual projects are isolated aberrations of otherwise strong performance. The accounts of the performance of buildings and infrastructure on larger scales suggest otherwise.

A study by the American Physical Society (APS) concludes that buildings that follow the LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) guidelines for green buildings (U.S. Green Building Council [USGBC], 2002) don't end up, on average, having better energy performance than buildings that don't follow the LEED guidelines (APS, 2008). As a final example in a potentially much longer list of far from sustainable performance of the built environment, in the United States, energy that went into making the materials that end up as construction and demolition waste each year—which is the largest contributor to landfills—is, according to our rough calculations, about equivalent to the electricity California uses each year. In other words, each year the U.S. construction practices throw away materials with embodied energy content equivalent to the electricity used in California. And it is not just energy performance that is suffering. The American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) has been giving poor grades for the state of the infrastructure in the United States for many years (ASCE, 2009). Walter Podolny and others report about several bridges that had to be retrofitted or rebuilt after just 20 or 30 years of service in Europe (Podolny et al., 2001), which is a life cycle performance and durability that is lower than society typically expects from infrastructure projects.

In summary, the experience of well-intentioned facility owners and highly capable design and construction teams and the accounts of the performance of built facilities from various sectors of the industry and various parts of the world suggest that today's approaches to delivering and operating constructed facilities do not give us what we want. Just consider the well-documented high impact of the built environment on energy consumption, emissions of carbon dioxide (CO₂) and other greenhouse gases (GHGs;), (National Science and Technology Council [NSTC], 2008), contributions to landfills, and so on.

Although better software and measurement tools would be welcome, we believe that the fundamental problem lies in how design, construction, operation, and use are integrated. In most cases, we do not fully use our human assets and fail to organize information and work into an optimized flow. Unless we do so, we will continue to be surprised and disappointed by building performance and will forfeit the opportunities created by better models and visualization tools. We need to change. Building owners should take a hard look at the performance of their facilities, and service providers (architects, engineers, builders, etc.) should thoroughly consider the impact of their current practices and then develop an inspired and inspiring strategy for dramatically higher-performing facilities. Only then can we achieve the performance we predict and the buildings we deserve.

1.2 WHAT IF?

What if every building and every piece of infrastructure truly worked? What it they were all designed not simply to fill a need, but to enhance our way of life? What if they were finished on time and on budget, without doing harm to people or the environment? What if every building performed as highly as possible, with all systems working in concert to support its purpose? But they don't. And those of us in the architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) industry know that something isn't right.

The AEC industry is responsible for building the world's physical wealth,¹ from truly magnificent structures to modest dwellings. The industry is arguably one of the oldest in the world, and many people come to it for deeply personal reasons, a long family tradition, or an inspiring experience. This field attracts motivated, incredibly hardworking professionals—early risers who work in rain, snow, and heat, and who believe it is one of the best industries in the world. The problem isn't the people; it is how they and their work are organized.

In just the past 20 years, buildings and infrastructure have become vastly more complex than they were for most of human existence. Advances in mechanical, electrical, plumbing, conveying, information, and other systems have led to rapidly increasing specialization, dramatically increasing the coordination required to engage the many specialists in a timely, efficient, and effective manner. Construction projects also suffer from variability, unpredictability, and uncertainty, such as which specific system will eventually be selected, who is involved in the building process, how facilities and their systems and parts are produced and assembled, and a host of external factors such as weather, market conditions, and so on. Each project brings together a different set of players who might or might not have worked together before; every project is unique in some way.

Despite our very best efforts, we consistently end up with a product that satisfies few, including ourselves. In almost every building, a well-meant shortcut is taken somewhere during design, construction, or operation that results in a product that is less than the original vision, and less than what the users actually require. Too many projects squander time, money, energy, labor, materials, knowledge, and other precious resources largely because of how they are organized and carried out; too often, the AEC industry is characterized by unmet expectations (KPMG, 2015). Owners and project participants are, of course, aware of this track record. Sadly, we see many project organizations set up to avoid failure, which is seen as a success, instead of striving to create a great building that sustains its users in their endeavors.

When we look critically about the process used to deliver a building, we see a huge amount of fragmentation. In an attempt to tackle highly complex problems, the industry has responded by breaking projects into small, isolated pieces, and focusing on producing each of those at the lowest possible cost. But we rarely, if ever, consider how to put all these pieces together over time to create the best building possible by thinking about how a team is organized, how information flows within a project, or how to define the vision and goals of the project and keep them alive for its duration. We keep our sights on the bits and pieces rather than raising our eyes to the project as an integrated whole. For those of us who have spent our...