With so many variables in the building process and the increasing complexity of buildings, construction projects today are notoriously difficult to predict—everything from schedule to cost to the finished form. It’s no surprise that many owners are looking for project delivery methods that provide results that are more predictable.

Lean methodology, integrated project delivery (IPD) and building information modeling (BIM) have all had their share of the limelight in recent years, and many projects have found success through a combination of all three. With a delivery system that is carefully, intentionally designed—eliminating as many unknowns as possible from the entire process—even very complex construction projects can reliably meet cost, schedule and design quality goals.

In a new DPR white paper, “Setting Your Project Up for Success Using Lean, BIM and IPD,” Atul Khanzode, who leads DPR’s Construction Technologies Group, offers eight recommendations based on lessons learned from successful projects. The projects used lean, IPD and BIM to facilitate breakthrough results on cost, quality and outcome.

As a result of using the following strategies, for example, one DPR hospital project ended a month early and improved productivity from six to 28 percent.

EIGHT LESSONS LEARNED

1. Begin by organizing how the team will work together, including mapping workflows and developing incentives for collaboration.
2. Develop a “virtual” organization for the duration of the project with shared vision and goals.
3. Understand workflow “customer-supplier” relationships, or who is relying on whom in order to get work done.
4. Determine how and why you will use BIM. Being explicit about who will use it and to what level allows the team to know what to expect.
5. Include small breakout spaces in a Big Room so a few team members can meet without disturbing the entire team.
6. Use pull planning to understand handoffs and track commitment reliability.
7. Identify and track meaningful metrics that can be used as key performance indicators, and analyze how well a team is achieving their goals.
8. Last but not least, make all information (schedules, financial information, etc.) as transparent as possible. Building a complex facility requires knowledge from many disciplines, which can only be fully leveraged if information is available to everyone.

Visit “Setting Your Project up for Success Using Lean, BIM and IPD” to read it in its entirety.