From Improving Projects to Improving Business

[Rex Miller]

How do we leverage the efficiencies that BIM and Integrated Delivery bring to the larger context of Building Operations and Occupant Productivity?

The portion we are focusing on represents only 2% of an occupants costs. 6% of their costs are operating and maintaining and 92% are people costs.

[Andrew Fisher]

How to improve occupant productivity? One way to encourage it is from your attached presentation:
'Assume Sustainability is Achievable and build it in'
To effectively earn LEED certification on a project the effort needs to start early on in the desing process (IDP speaks to this) and the methods for verification of things like adequate daylighting, etc are made easier through analysis of a BIM model.
And a green building leads to less absenteeism, greater productivity with happier & healthier employees.

[Rex Miller]

Now how do we convince our colleagues to create integrated alliances to work with the client to create better design and better buildings?

[Andrew Fisher]

This goes back to the client. We want (and should) lead the efforts towards successful projects, but the fuel for this fire comes from the client.

[ It is almost scientific. You have a design need (air), you have a client with money (fuel) and a creative spark in their head (spark). ]

When the client is willing to operate in an integrated alliance, they can get the benfit of that business model, but they have to understand it up front and commit to it. In the same way, BIM models and LEED points can't be pushed onto a client any more than we can push rope.

I am seeing a great many clients fall over themselves to 'get a BIM' for their building. A fair number will also want to obtain LEED or other certification. The integrated alliance, as I understand it, will change the dynamic of how we all work together. There are many benefits to this model, but what seems more challenging to me is not getting consultants to work together, but getting an owner to continue to pay for something without traditional measures of control, checks and balances.