Page 170 - Green Building Through Integrated Design

146 INTEGRATED PROJECT MANAGEMENT—COST/BENEFIT ANALYSIS OF GREEN BUILDINGS

the various measures proposed for their green building projects. Without a solid quan-
tifiable set of metrics to assess a project, teams inevitably begin to see environmental
initiatives take a back seat to traditional project forces such as schedule constraints and
budget-related issues. I believe that with a well-established framework of vision, goals
and life-cycle financial benefits, project teams will be able to better understand the
owner’s needs, and owners will be able to make better data-driven decisions.
In this chapter, I will focus on the fact that benefiting from the paradigm of green
building requires all project stakeholders to understand the goals for which they are
striving. In addition, there needs to be in place a project management process that
addresses the full range of life-cycle financial benefits. As I’ve pointed out in this
book, the foundation of green building success is the integrated design process.
Simply put, the entire team needs to utilize the talents of all disciplines to accurately
understand the impacts of green buildings. This chapter presents several examples
of LEED project credit analysis and offers an introduction to a cost/benefit method-
ology that is critical to the success of any green project. At the end of the chapter, I
examine a situation when the individual solutions are combined into a complete
project analysis. In this case, the aggregate impact of both soft and hard costs can
be analyzed immediately against the long-term benefits of various levels of LEED
certification.

Introduction to the Environmental

Value-Added Method

Traditional project delivery methods do not provide a very easy path toward the goal
of successfully delivering a green building project. As you’ve learned from various
examples presented earlier in this book, when evaluating the cost/benefit components
of a green building, the starting point on all projects needs to be a visioning session
among project stakeholders. This session should be a focused meeting that allows the
project owner or developer to develop a set of goals, that the project design and con-
struction team will refer to frequently during the design development process.
In the visioning session, the owner should bring the entire stakeholder team
together to help participate in the visioning for the project. Sustainability and its
application to green building can be defined by the concept of the Triple Bottom
Line. The Triple Bottom Line concept is based on concerns in three main areas of
impact: planet, profit, and people. Others define the impact areas as environmental,
economic, social. If the owner can clearly define what elements of the triple bottom
line they are striving for, then the team can more clearly articulate a design path to
reach those goals.
Many times, project teams start a project with a LEED checklist, but no specific
areas of focus. This can lead a team to “shop” for points, in some cases implementing
elements that the owner might not have that much interest in, while leaving tougher
credits aside. The owner should define for the project team (and for the project itself)