You’ve heard the buzz; it seems like every water/wastewater utility or owner is using progressive design-build (PDB) or construction management at-risk (CMAR) for its upcoming infrastructure projects.
Collaborative Delivery
When Is Collaborative Delivery Faster than DBB—and When Is It Slower?
Considering the topic, this has the potential to be a very short blog post. After all, we’re looking at comparing the schedule of collaborative delivery versus design-bid-build delivery.
Five Minutes with Roy Epps on his 41 years in the Water Industry and how Collaborative Delivery has Made it Better for Everyone
Roy, you are retiring at the end of this year after 41 years in the industry. What is the biggest change you have seen over that period?
How Can You Attract Qualified Design-Builders for Your Projects?
The booming water/wastewater market is keeping design-builders busy, so much so that the economic equilibrium is off-center, slanted toward a place where demand often exceeds supply. It’s a design-builders’ (bidders) market.
Starting with the End Users in Mind
When building a team for a design-build project, it’s common for agency owners (specifically engineering managers) to prioritize the obvious resources: project managers and owners advisors. What often gets overlooked is the opportunity to include the perspective and expertise of the end users during the design and construction process.
Designing for Procurement Can Help Alleviate Supply Chain Headaches
The design-build project delivery approach continues to deliver value to municipal water utilities. From a single point of responsibility and integration to cost certainty and timely delivery, design-build can help create a more streamlined and seamless project experience.
An Owner’s Top 3 Action Items for Organizational Preparedness
Do you have a one-time mega-project that you don’t have the capacity or capabilities to deliver? Is your capital improvement program growing quickly and you need to equip your staff with the right skills and relevant knowledge to keep up with the rising demand? Do you need to decrease your average project delivery time due to rate-payer or political pressure? All of the above?
Using Collaborative Delivery to Mitigate Supply Chain Disruption
When we emerge from the extreme days of the COVID environment, there will be some lingering effects that become a permanent part of our way of doing business. Management of the supply chain is probably one of the most significant.
Clarify to Specify
Words are important — an obvious truism and pertinent to a collaborative project delivery effort. The action item is to ‘mobilize the language’ for maximum effect in our contract documents for water/wastewater projects. First, a quick anecdote: A lawyer friend (not mutually exclusive) shared a simple and keen observation when I first worked with him on a contract review. He asked, “Know the difference between an engineer and a lawyer?” After searching my library of lawyer jokes, I had to admit ignorance of the difference. He said, “Lawyers know they’re not engineers.”
When Changing Enabling Legislation – Keep It Flexible
Water Design-Build Council (WDBC) research confirms a significant increase in growth in the use of collaborative-delivery methods for water and wastewater projects in the US. For certain public owners, including some cities, counties, districts, agencies, special purpose entities, and states, where historically only design-bid-build (DBB) has been utilized for implementing capital works projects, enabling legislation modifications may be required so these public agencies can utilize collaborative delivery methods such as fixed-price design-build (FPDB), progressive design-build (PDB), and construction management at-risk (CMAR).