QUICKNOTES – DELIVERY METHODS AND COMPENSATION, Ch. 10
PROJECT DELIVERY OPTIONS
- Project Delivery Method depends on two considerations:
- What roles will the owner, architect and contractor play during development and construction?
- Which variable factor(s) – cost, schedule, building quality, risk, client capability – are driving the choices?
- Participants
- Results from complex sequence of decisions made by participants.
- Someone must define the key responsibilities and organize work of participants (in addition to managing delivery process).
- Owner relies on architect’s expertise about delivery decisions.
· The General Contractor and Delivery Methods
o The roles and responsibilities of the general contractor vary greatly in different delivery methods.
o Until late ‘70s, most projects were built under what was then known as a traditional delivery approach. Now called DESIGN-BID-BUILD, this approach assigned each player a clear and expected role.
§ The owner hired and paid the architect to provide design services.
§ A set of contracts was developed and placed into the construction marketplace for bid
§ General contractors assembled a collection of subtrades and submitted bids for the project.
§ Lowest bidder was awarded the contract.
· Today’s Design-Bid-Build
o Evolved into multiple variants with different designer, owner, and contractor roles and responsibilities.
o As interest rates rose in ‘70s, speedier project schedules required not a single construction sequence but multiple individual packages that were bid as their design was completed.
o Resulted in asynchronous construction of individual pieces of project.
o General contractors “became” construction managers attempting to control these complex projects.
o Liability crisis in ‘80s pushed architects further from job site responsibilities and pressed new risks on contractors, who assumed job site responsibilities.
o Owners demanded in-depth construction advice during design that architects were unwilling or unable to provide.
o Large projects (hospitals, airports), which need to operate during construction, require sophisticated management and construction planning beyond the capabilities or interests of architects.
o Today’s projects are built faster, entail more risk, and involve far more participants than those built twenty years ago.
· Players in Delivery Process
o The Owner
§ Initiates a building enterprise and is usually the eventual owner or operator of the finished building.
§ Can be individual, organization, or other entity.
§ Owner is the entity that holds one or more contracts with the architect and contractor and is responsible for payment.
§ Also responsible for paying for construction of building.
o The Architect
§ Licensed design professional acting as an agent for the owner by providing architectural expertise.
§ Designs, documents, administers the contract(s) for the construction of the project.
§ Can be an individual or a firm and can include consultants such as engineers.
§ Generates documents and describe design intent.
o The Contractor
§ Responsible for the actual construction of a building.
§ Includes a variety of subcontractors, supplier, and fabricators who together execute the design intent of the architect’s documents.
§ Agrees at a prearranged point in the design process to construct the project for an agreed-upon sum.
· Variables
o Key variables may affect the selection of a delivery approach.
o Construction Cost
§ Owner’s greatest financial obligation.
§ Central concern of design and construction.
§ Fixed budgets create clear and definite obligations for the architect and contractor.
o Schedule
§ Schedule/timeframe in which the project must be complete, ready to occupy.
§ When a building program is important to an owner’s mission, meeting a precise schedule may be the most important consideration in determining how a project will be built.
§ Typical of such situations are academic projects, which must be synchronized with an academic calendar.
o Building Quality
§ The demand for particular standards of performance.
§ Directly related to schedule and construction cost.
§ The architect typically establishes a clear relationship between a project’s level of quality, budget and program.
§ For a shorter period of time, owners may be willing to accept lower levels of quality / saving construction cost.
o Risk
§ The most intractable variable in the building process is risk.
§ Each player in the process makes its best effort to reduce or transfer its exposure to liability.
· For owner: can the project accomplish its goals within the constraints of time and budget?
· For architect: can the project be accomplished within the standard of care at an acceptable level of quality, the owner’s parameters, and strictures of the fee?
· For contractor: is it possible to complete the project within the contractually stipulated time frame and/or cost?
o Client Capabilities
§ Internal capabilities of a client organization can significantly affect the roles of the client, architect and contractor.
· Methods of Delivery
o Architect’s role:
§ What are the responsibilities of the architect?
§ How do these apply to successive design phases?
o Contractor’s role:
§ What entity is responsible for building the project?
§ When in the process is that player selected?
o Establishment of construction cost:
§ When is the actual cost of construction definitively established contractually (between owner and contractor)?
o Number and type of design and construction contracts.
§ How many individual contracts for design and construction are necessary to accomplish the approach?
o Design-Bid-build
§ The “Traditional” Approach.
§ Linear design sequence that results in a set of construction contract documents against which contractors submit fixed price bids.
§ The lowest-bidding contractor whose proposal responds to the requirements of the contract is awarded the project.
§ Most projects in the US are constructed under this approach.
§ A variation of this approach is the NEGOTIATED SELECTED TEAM approach, in which the contractor is selected early in the design process and certain of the firm’s contract terms (overhead, profit multipliers) are determined prior to completion of the construction documents. Subcontractors are then selected and a final contractor team is assembled (once documents are complete).
§ Yet another approach is the COST PLUS FIXED FEE method. In cost plus, the contractor is selected at the completion of the contract documents, but the scope of construction is unpredictable (due to unknown factors, such as existing conditions).
§ Under cost plus, the contractor is paid actual labor and material costs for construction plus a fee for coordination of trades on the site.
§ Added incentives may be added to the fee if the project finishes early or under the original budget.
o Construction Management
§ Participation of a contractor who acts in both advisory and technical roles during design and construction.
§ The CM (construction manager) can play one of three roles:
· CM-advisor: acting only as a constructability and cost management consultant during the design and construction process, but will not build the building.
· CM-agent: provides early consulting and may act on behalf of the owner in assembling and coordinating the construction trades prior to and during construction. Provide services for fixed fee and assume no risk for actual construction costs.
· CM-constructor: Technical and cost advisor role of the contractor during the design phase of a project. CM-c method typically includes:
o Establishment of guaranteed maximum price.
o The GMP acts as a commitment by the CM-c to build the project for a specified price based on early design documents.
· Typically construction managers are involved in many large building projects.
o Design-Build
§ Popular when an owner is interested in single-point responsibility for both design and construction.
§ Approach stems from clients’ growing dissatisfaction with the inherent tensions and conflicts of delivery approaches that place the architect and contractor in adversarial roles.
§ Under design-build, a consolidated entity provides both design and construction services to the owner.
§ A single contract is established between the owner and the architect-contractor or design-build entity.
§ Contract typically includes fixed price for both design services and construction cost.
§ Design-build requires explicit determination of the roles and responsibilities of the design-build team.
o Bridged Design-Build
§ Borrows a design approach from architect teams that include both a design architect (who establishes the design concept) and a production architect (who determines technical criteria and generates the construction contract documents).
§ Owner eventually hires two architects. The first is a design architect for preliminary design and performance specifications. The second is a design-build team to whom the concept and criteria packages are tendered.
§ The bridge between concept and technical design is the juncture at which design-build teams bid on a project, and a team is selected based on the consolidated costs of technical documents and construction.
§ Design architect remains in an advisory role to the owner.
§ Detailed technical documents are provided by a technical architect, who is part of the design-build team.
§ This approach takes maximum advantage of the traditional architect-owner relationship with the participation of the design architect and simplifies the contractual responsibilities of the design-build approach.
§ May not be suited to projects that require extensive interaction between the architect and the owner, since a portion of the design team is contractually tied to the contractor.
No comments:
Post a Comment