Page 112 - Green Building Through Integrated Design

WHAT NEEDS TO HAPPEN 89

by the end of 2008.∗ It is quite possible that LEED-EB is near the “take off” point in
terms of market acceptance, a development that would be very useful for the emerging
priority among many organizations to reduce their carbon footprints.

What Needs to Happen

What are the obvious fixes for the situation where most LEED-registered projects
don’t get certified? After all, if the USGBC’s mission is to transform the building
industry, the first step in completing the assignment is to make sure that those projects
which start the journey actually get to the end of the road.
To get a better handle on what can be done, we interviewed several experienced
LEED project management consultants around the country. Here are some of the fixes
they recommended:

1 Have a realistic expectation of the costs of completing a LEED-certified project,
both in terms of “soft” costs (design, process management, and documentation) and
“hard” costs of additional net capital expenditures. Make sure that the project budg-
et contains money for potential capital cost increases and, equally importantly, for
LEED documentation.
2 Find a sensei, a master teacher (aka consultant) who can guide you through (at least)
your first two projects, until you can clearly master all the technical, process, and
documentation steps and until a “process champion” emerges from, or is assigned to
the design and construction team.
3 Develop or purchase proprietary tools for LEED process management (see Chap. 8
for an example). It’s different enough from conventional project design and con-
struction to warrant a fresh approach. Make sure that these tools are employed on
every project. Don’t have people “winging it” by starting over each time a new per-
son is put in charge of the LEED certification effort.
4 Building teams shouldn’t expect to get paid extra for each project to do the same
level of effort in green design and certification. My advice to them: get your costs
down with each subsequent project. Look at LEED project management as a
process amenable to the same process improvement steps as project design and
delivery. One engineer noted the architecture and engineering firms “should be
charging lump-sum fees for the value they bring” to an integrated design team. †
5 Project teams should take advantage of the distinction between “design” and “con-
struction” credits in LEED-NC version 2.0 and submit the design credits for review
as soon as construction starts. That way, they’ll have a better idea where a given
project stands (and will have assembled the documentation for the design credits)
long before construction completion, while there’s still time to add construction
credits to reach desired certification levels.

*Personal communication, Warren Whitehead, CB Richard Ellis, December 2007.
†
Paul Schwer, PAE Consulting Engineers, personal communication, May 2008.