What’s an Integrated Delivery Project?

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Integrated Project Delivery (IPD) is a term used to describe project development in the Architecture, Engineering and Construction (AEC) industry. The process came into use in the first decade of the 21st century and consists of unifying the project owner, contractor and designer into a single design team working collaboratively on the same data and sharing the same risks. The intent of the IPD is to best utilize the collective ability of the project team, reduce waste, and increase overall project efficiency. While the IPD concept could apply to most projects, in practice its use has been reserved for larger AEC projects.

The most common approach to AEC project delivery has been the construction of the design offer. In this scenario, the owner sends a blueprint to an engineer or architect for design. Once the design is complete, the design is offered for construction and data is passed on to a contractor for construction. At the end of this stage, it is handed over to the owner for operation.

“Design-build” is another common way of doing an AEC project and seeks to create additional efficiency for the owner. With this type of project setup, a designer, typically an architect or engineer, partners with a contractor to create a design and construction firm, a joint venture between the two. This usually allows you to complete a project faster than would normally be possible with design-bid-build.

Despite many technological advances in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, the productivity of the construction industry has not kept pace with other types of commerce. Integrated project delivery is intended to help bridge this gap by taking the design-build concept even further. By adding the project owner to the team, the resources of the entire project team are combined into one entity. This happens regardless of the actual companies or government agencies involved or even their physical location.

Integrated project delivery is as much a philosophy of team building and mutual trust as it is a project delivery method and represents a departure from previous project delivery methods. Combining designer, contractor, and project owner into one team, integrated project delivery requires that all team members are contractually obligated to work together toward the same goals. All team members share the risks, rewards, decision making and responsibilities equally.

There are eight main phases of integrated project delivery:

Conceptualization phase (extended programming)
Policy Design Phase (Extended Schematic Design)
Detailed design phase (extended design development)
Stage of implementation documents (construction documents)
Agency review stage
Purchase phase
Construction phase (construction administration/contract)
Liquidation stage

The definition and order of these phases derive from two key aspects of IPD. First, it is desirable to gain information through coordination with the project designers, as well as the contractor and all suppliers and manufacturers, so that any items that require a longer time to purchase can be identified as early as possible. Second, the phases are driven by the team’s ability to design and model the project using building information models (BIM) or similar software capable of creating intelligent and interactive models.

Likewise, all team members consume the same electronic data from a single shared storage location, regardless of the team members’ physical locations. The arrival of data management software has made it possible for multiple users to work on a single set of data stored in one location. BIM soon followed. These types of software, in turn, have led to integrated project delivery.

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