Solar Builder Magazine Webinar Recap

Managing a project can be complicated, especially when multiple parties must work together. As each works on a project, they use different approaches that they are comfortable with to provide them with the results they want to achieve. This can make project collaboration between parties difficult due to differences in processes and methodologies.

Project complications are often unavoidable and occur when working on a large project with many moving pieces that must align. Without effective alignment, the project can slow down, become less productive, and possibly grind to a halt. To create an effective flow between the various parties and parts of a project, Integrated Project Delivery is an effective method of approach.

Integrated Project Delivery is an approach where several parties form a collaborative team at the beginning of a project to develop project processes to work together. This turns into a concurrent process that allows the project goals to be shared. Due to this process being a collaborative effort, it allows everyone to input their ideas and come up with the goals and objectives of the project. This also allows the cost to be reduced. Costs are reduced because everyone is creating the project development plan, allowing everyone to be on the same page. Due to everyone being on the same page any design changes would be caught and done early on which reduces cost. This is one of the main goals of implementing Integrated Project Delivery. By shifting the project development curve to the left, and increasing processes in the early stages of a project, costs and design cycles can be greatly reduced. Comparing this to the traditional project delivery process, the cost is often high, and there are frequent roadblocks that appear towards the end of a project, where changes become more expensive. The traditional process is managed by the owner, making them the middleman, so when new information comes into play, they must send it to the others. This allows information to be lost or left out. This can further increase costs as each of the parties are separated and do not work directly with each other.

Not only does Integrated Project Delivery have the potential to reduce costs, but the risk is also balanced between parties. When designing any project risk is a key factor. While risk is never avoidable, the IPD process reduces individual risks and risks to be equally be distributed. When comparing the two project delivery processes, the traditional process often has a higher risk factor. The traditional process risks are higher because the risk is individually managed, disproportionate, and often concealed.

One of the key points to the IPD is that the project life cycle is reduced. The time is reduced because the project planning to move to the front because everyone is working together. The traditional process is segmented, so the project life cycle is longer because processes happen consecutively and separately, when they could be combined collaboratively and occur at overlapping intervals.

To learn more about the entire IPD process, and to see an example applied to a solar project, watch the complete webinar here!