Integrated Project Delivery has been making headlines for the past 2 years. Industry thought leaders like Chuck Thomsen have written extensively on this project delivery approach (link). CMAA and COAA/AGC/AIA have also published a couple of comprehensive white papers:
Integrated Project Delivery for the Public and Private Owner
Managing Integrated Project Delivery
Both documents provide a lot of information on what IPD is all about, and the benefits it presents all project participants, not just the owner. I had the opportunity to speak with one of our clients, Bob Cull, Project Director for the Cedars-Sinai Health System in Los Angeles, California, on this topic. In the next series of blog posts (3), I will share how Bob has enabled an integrated team approach similar to IPD, and how this approach has contributed to the success that Bob and his team have experienced to date. We also discuss the role of web-based construction management software in helping this process.
Jon: Bob, to start can you tell me a little bit about your background and your experience.
Bob: Well, I'm an architect, and I've focused most of my professional practice in healthcare planning, design, and construction management. For the last five years I've been an owner's representative and I'm currently working at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center for the development of a new project called the Advanced Health Sciences Pavilion. It's about an 880,000-square-foot project that's combined healthcare and research activities in a single building.
Jon: I was hoping for the benefit of our readers, what do you mean by that, or are you referring to integrated project delivery when you talk about enabling an integrated team?
We don't have an actual integrated project delivery contract. What we mean by the phrase is that what we try to do to deliver this project from conception through completion is to put together a team with all of the right resources and have all of those resources available to us from the beginning to the end. So what that meant is, in the selection of the architect, we wanted to select an architect who was open to a collaborative process, someone that would be willing to work not only intimately with the owner, but also work collaboratively with the resources that a good contractor could bring and the contractor subs. We entered into an agreement early with the general contractor, Hathaway Dinwiddie in this case, and we also entered into agreements with ten of their subcontractors very early on in the schematic design phase. And we made a decision to compensate them pretty significantly for those early services so that we could start the project both in terms of conceiving it from a budget, schedule, program, and design perspective with all the resources at the table. And I think from our perspective, this is the most important thing, is to put together a team that can look at the entire perspective of what it takes to not only conceptually develop a project, but to implement the project and deliver it, you know, with the objectives of the budget and schedule and the design. The architect is HOK.
Jon: Critics of this integrated approach have told me in the past, and I've heard when I go to conferences, that, you know, this only works if you've worked with these teams in the past many times before. Did you have a relationship with these guys before, you know, would you agree or disagree with that sentiment?
Bob: Actually, nobody in the institution or on the team had preexisting relationships. I think what's actually critical is that you have shared attitudes toward the process, the shared objectives about what it is that you're trying to achieve, and also sort of a shared personality or commonality in how you want to achieve things. So, I think if you don't get the blend right in terms of how you want to work together, you won't be successful. But that's true of any structure that you might choose. But I think when you're looking for partners, people that are going to be willing to provide and commit resources and energy to the project, and have a history of success. So in this case, HOK had a history of success in a design/build approach on a recent hospital project, so they seemed to be open to and actually positive about the expertise and intelligence that a contractor could bring to the process in the early stages. And Hathaway has had a history of working collaboratively on many projects, both in design/build relationships and other sort of unique relationships. So I think all the partners in the process brought together not only an understanding, but also a desire to have a project work better because they could all collaborate early on and shape the project and shape the objectives of the project and shape the [understandings] of how we would get the project done.
Jon: Having had a chance to walk your project site, speaking with some of the folks at Hathaway, and during our presentation at CMAA with the HOK folks, I can attest to the smoothness in the way that the team is working, because people are excited when you come over and ask them about what they're working on and how they're using systems like e-Builder and other tools to make your project run. And I guess the question is, how have you been able to enable this process? You've sort of said people have to come with good attitudes, but I suspect you probably had some challenges, some people that may have been critical, maybe peers within your organization. Were there any of those that came to mind, and if so, how did you overcome, you know, those challenges to get to the place where you are today?
Bob: Well, actually, I work with a group of people that are highly skeptical, in terms of a building committee that has a fiduciary responsibility for the institution. And we're in the last stages of about a ten-year master plan process; it's been about one and a half billion dollars in its implementation, and this is the largest project of that master plan and it's also sort of the culmination of this cycle of the master plan. So when I say skeptics, I say that because the projects prior to this didn't go as smoothly as everyone had hoped they would. So, you know, when we talk about attitude and behavior and stuff, that's a lot of sort of soft or emotional kind of words to put around the framework of the performance of the team. So you have to demonstrate somehow in the process through the contracts, and also you have to demonstrate through performance, that you are achieving some of these things. And now, most of those skeptics are enjoying the fact that the process is going well. I mean, the building committee is now enthusiastically supportive of the whole process and they enjoy the process. We don't have contentious meetings where we're always fighting about change orders or people pointing the blame at each other. The project just continues to have a series of successes. And it's not that we haven't had difficult issues to address, but because of the structure of the team and the way we've put together the team and the way we've built a way of working together as a team, we've been able to meet these challenges head on, mitigate them, be totally honest and open with the building committee about what the challenges, issues, and situations are that we need to deal with. And I think through that openness and their seeing how the process is really yielding benefits to them, I think that we've overcome their skepticism.
Next - part 2 of 3
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