Page 258 - Green Building Through Integrated Design

234 CONSTRUCTION AND OPERATIONS

3 Painfully, clearly assign which party is responsible for which credits and continu-
ally review that assignment. During the course of construction and toward the end
when you want to submit your final report, there should be no question about what
people have been doing. “We made assignments early on and kept revisiting those
assignments because things change, people tend to get other ideas about who might
be assigned to do what; that’s just what happens in an 18-month long project. It’s
not an easy situation,” Pfeifer said.
4 Without a committed owner, it isn’t going to happen.

McGough Construction is a strong believer in a collaborative process model, much
as other major general contractors are. Pfeifer believes that this delivery method is not
only superior in general, but probably absolutely essential for the success of a high-
performance building project. He says:

There’s a lot of hype these days about IPD, integrated project delivery. For years and
years, McGough Construction in our region [upper Midwest] has pioneered the use
of a collaborative or integrated delivery system. The vast majority of our projects for
probably the past 20 years have been delivered with collaborative delivery systems. It
has just proven over time to ensure the highest quality project with an efficient sched-
ule at the lowest cost.
Along with the collaborative delivery system is basically the open-book delivery
mentality where all costs are subject to review and approval by the owner. We don’t
take the architect’s plan, develop a bid, take it to the owner and say, “Take it or leave
it.” The owner is incredibly involved with all of this from day one—as is the archi-
tect and all of the other consultants—and he has continual buy-in every step of the
way. At every step of the way, we’re challenging numbers. Open book means that the
owner sees all of the pros and cons, the pluses and minuses from the process that
we’re going through and becomes a big part of the decision-making process.
With a high-performance and especially a high-level LEED certified project, you
need to take many of those characteristics and crank up the intensity knob on all of
them. You have to optimize the efficiency of the team working together. You have to
intensify the planning efforts early on because so many of these things are interrelated
to one another. The equation to put [a high-performance] building together is much
more complicated than it was before. It’s always a decision of weighing the benefits
of one [approach] to another and comparing them with the costs.

Ted van der Linden is sustainability director at DPR Construction, a large
California-based general contractor committed to a collaborative delivery process.
He’s been involved with delivering high-performance projects almost since the incep-
tion of the LEED rating system. Most of the general contractor’s work in a LEED
project is making sure that the subcontractors follow the plans and specifications of
the design team. For DPR, it’s mostly about educating their subcontractors and secur-
ing their cooperation.*

*Interview with Ted van der Linden, DPR Construction, February 2008.