It Takes A Team

By William J. Angelo

	ANGELO

One way we hope to make your Design•Build Magazine reading time more productive is by adding a new Welcome page that quickly summarizes the magazine and offers commentary on issues affecting design-build project delivery. Besides our regular departments featuring In the News global project coverage and hot topics in Boardroom, the December issue is all about teamwork–how design-builders manage various types of public sector projects and the teaming arrangements they chose or were required to work with.

The wonderful thing about design-build is the flexibility it offers through a wide range of possibilities for selecting the team and team members, structuring the team and project and encouraging teamwork to bring forth the best ideas. You can pick a team through low bid, qualifications-based selection or best value. Structurally, there are six basic design-build team variations–integrated all in one firm, joint venture or contractor-led, designer-led, developer-led and now vendor-led teams. But there are infinite operational varieties in each type that bring new strengths and challenges to the process. How well everyone collaborates with the owner to form a true job-focused partnership is the secret to a successful project and to long-term business success.

Successful teamwork is more than just a patched together design-bid-build attitude coupled to a design-build agreement. It’s a cultural change that requires top management involvement, true integration of teams, trust, open communication and shared risks and rewards. It takes uncertainty and surprise out of a demanding process and replaces them with focus and commitment. Successful teaming can lead to greater innovation, more cost-effective delivery and better project quality.

Our cover story in this issue focuses on a one-of-a-kind border-crossing compound spanning the U.S./Canada frontier and jointly owned by the two governments. The contractor-led team not only had to deal with bridging documents but also had to accommodate a border running through the middle of the project that brought into play two sets of labor laws, building codes, currencies and treaties.

Our lead feature chronicles how one innovative design-builder simultaneously managed the $27-million capital expansion of six major schools, a $15-million renovation/upgrade of another 16 buildings and $8 million in technology and infrastructure upgrades. It did this while working as program manager for a public agency that also selected the civil, structural and specialty designer.

In Phoenix a contractor-led team completed a publicly funded six-story, 173,000-sq-ft spec biotech center that is the cornerstone of a new 15-acre urban research campus that may change the city’s economy. But getting everything just right on an intensely schedule-driven job required the team to constantly redesign numerous labs around continuously evolving program needs.

Finally, we’ll put you on the ground in Portland, Maine, as the state DOT completes it’s first design-build road project–a contractor-led $24-million waterfront connector that will help alleviate traffic congestion.

So, two national governments, two municipal agencies and one state agency all utilized various forms of design-build to speed their critical projects to market. Did they work? Turn the pages and find out.

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