Integrated Project Delivery:
A Platform for Efficient Construction

An Executive Summary is available for this article.

• Mutual respect and trust: Parties work in a collaborative environment. The emphasis is on communication to solve problems rather than assign blame.
• Mutual benefit and reward: Compensation typically rewards early and active involvement of the architect and the builder, with incentives for working in the best interests of the project.
• Collaborative innovation and decision-making: The project team makes decisions under consensus, and parties work across boundaries to spur innovation.
• Early involvement of key participants: The architect and builder are typically hired at the same time at the start of a project.
• Early goal definition and intensified planning: The team formulates specific project outcomes. Effort is “front-loaded” during the design phase and green design is often explicitly integrated.
• Appropriate technology: Project teams often use advanced design technologies such as BIM to maximize collaboration, efficiency, interoperability, and transparency.

Integrated project delivery, or IPD, is at first glance simply a contract mechanism. Like other common structures, including design-bid-build and design-build, it is a legal framework that the owner, the architect, and the builder can use to collaborate on a design and construction project. Specific IPD contract documents have been developed by several organizations, including The American Institute of Architects (AIA), which released in May 2008 a version of IPD that joins the library of contract templates the organization publishes.

...

To read the complete article, please login below.

BuildingGreen.com