Owners, engineers, and contractors are experiencing the benefits of collaborative delivery. Providing an effective framework for alignment on project goals, risk mitigation, transparent cost and schedule management, and team integration are project priorities experiencing tangible improvement through collaborative delivery. The complexities of water and wastewater management require a higher level of excellence through team alignment, which leads to innovation.
An interview with new member and IMCO Construction’s preconstruction manager Todd Pike brings insight to the partnering process.
Q. When facing challenging and high-risk, complex projects, how do you partner with clients and designers up front and how do those relationships benefit the project life cycle?
Collaboration is a buzzword that gets thrown around so often that it can start to lose meaning. But I’ve learned that it really means “building trust.” I’m currently working with Carollo and Brown and Caldwell for the City of Tacoma on their Puyallup Avenue Sewer Replacement progressive design-build project. We are figuring out how to solve the flooding challenges in downtown Tacoma. This type of complex project with deep excavations, bridge rehabilitation, and unknown pipe conditions is more successful when owners, engineers, and contractors come together to build trust from the beginning.
The team has been very intentional in how we’ve approached partnering. We started with a design partner who we already had a great relationship with. As a team, we took advantage of the procurement phase to dig deeply into the project risks and the unknowns. We brought in additional partners to make sure we had all the right expertise in the room. I think the City understood that we are committed to transparency and facing challenges head-on as a team. In traditional design-bid-build delivery, it’s more common to have an us versus them mentality between the contractor, engineer, and owner. In collaborative delivery, we are all working together toward the same goal.
As the design-build manager, I get to hear from the entire team about what is keeping them up at night, what is worrying everyone about this project. I get to understand their risk tolerances, expertise, and drivers to gain alignment on goals and bring together each company’s strengths and creativity. When approached with the right mindset, these conversations lead to much better solutions for managing risk, ideas for solving complex challenges, and identifying where the value is.
We kicked off the project with a celebration at the infamous E9 Firehouse Gastropub. It was a fun way for everyone who was going to be involved in the project to get to know one another in an informal setting. We followed that up with a formal partnering session with DBIA rock star Barbara Jackson who trained us on the mental shift to a “design-build mindset.” These two events got us started off on the right foot, and the project is going really well.
Q. How do you see your role within the complex market of water management?
I want to be a part of the conversations shaping our industry. It’s not just megaprojects using collaborative delivery; midsize projects and a broader range of municipalities are seeing the benefits. Today, over 40% of our revenue comes from collaborative delivery, primarily in the water market sector. Through my career at IMCO Construction, I have been involved in all types of water management delivery models. What stands out most is how a project team using collaborative delivery can build teamwork during procurement and build on that throughout project execution.
In July, I attended the WCDA 20th Anniversary Symposium and had the opportunity to listen in on the WCDA past presidents’ panel. What struck me was how open they all were about the challenges over the years in growing the association into what it is today. Although they didn’t always agree on things like membership or direction of certain committees, what never wavered was the belief that collaborative delivery is the most successful way of delivering complex water projects. It’s exciting to be part of a group of industry leaders committed to the same goal.