Transcript: How to Create High Performance Projects & the Benefits of IPD/Lean Projects Part I - Renee Cheng

Hello, I'm Brittany Campbell-Turner, and this is the Constructor Podcast, session number 28. Hello, and welcome to, or welcome back to Constructor, the best way to build it. This episode features Renee Cheng, who is a professor and associate dean at the University of Minnesota, who is conducting research in the AEC industry. Let me tell you, this interview is so good. It is so good that we talked for almost an hour and a half, diving into her story, which you will hear.

She is a graduate of Harvard, a registered architect, but she stayed her course in academia and is recognized for her teaching excellence with numerous teaching awards. She appears on national lists of influential educators, and you will see why when we get into the interview. We discuss her collaborative approach to research, and then we dig into case studies and their key takeaways from two research reports. Don't worry, I've split up the interview in two parts. You will be able to get through it.

Believe me when I tell you, this interview is value packed. So this is part one. I will cover who is Renee Cheng, a bit of her journey, the fantastic methodology and structure to the research, and why it's beneficial. We introduce this first research publication, High Integration at its Finest, Success in High Performance Building Design and Project Delivery in the Federal Sector. And then in part two, not only do we cover the key takeaways from this report, we also dive into the second research report, Motivation and Means, How and Why IPD and Lean Lead to Success.

So I'd like to note that these research reports are not just research white papers that you pick up, read, and put back down. You will have a sense of the usability of the PDFs when you hear a clicker or so, actually while Renee is speaking. She's literally scrolling in and out of the sections, and she otherwise would be seamlessly referencing. This is how you will be able to just click in and out of different sections that are relevant to your project on your next project. You will be able to reference the parts that you need when you need it.

So with that, let's get into the interview with Renee Chang. Hello, Renee. Welcome to the Constructor Podcast. Thanks, Brittany. It's great to talk to you today.

Oh, great to talk with you as well. So Renee, you are a professor at the School of Architecture at University of Minnesota. Tell us, what are your goals as of late? What are you researching right now? I've been really fortunate to have some great sponsors on my previous work, and all of them have been interested in kind of taking things to the next level.

So it's been great to do some continuing research with them, as well as other people that have been interested after having seen the previous work, trying to figure out how some of their interests might be aligned with what we're doing. So right now, Howard Ashcraft and Marku Allison and James Peace and Sue Clowens from Gilbane are both, all of us are working on an IPD guide that will meant to be for owners to talk about a kind of how-to, really like on the ground, like what next steps are as you move through the process of launching an IPD project.

So that's been a fun project. It does sound fun. Yeah, we've been having some really great meetings discussing what's most important for people to know, both chronologically as well as conceptually. So hopefully that'll be something that people will be really interested when it comes out. So that's been co-sponsored by the Pankow Foundation.

And then the GSA is also looking to move forward with their high-performance goals and not only documenting a couple more case studies that have been really successful after the Recovery Act is done now and they're more in their new flow of awarding projects, but also trying to figure out how more projects can reach that really high level of success. So that's looking more at the kind of policies and processes that they use to award projects and work with teams and moving collaboration forward, especially around high-performance goals.

So that one's been really, really great. And then the last kind of big bucket of stuff I'm working on now is with the LCI group, the Lean Construction Institute. So they started a research committee with a group of academics that have been doing work in the Lean area. I'm the only architect in the group. The others are from construction management that have done more with both curriculum and different certifications and research around Lean specifically.

And they gave us all kind of open-ended questions on what kind of research do we think is important. So that's been really great to just kind of be trusted by them to formulate an agenda and working together. And they asked me to kind of chair that group. So we've been getting together and we'll be presenting at different Lean construction venues. And my particular research that I wanted to follow, partly because I'm the only architect in the group, but also because I think architects in general need to do more with Lean, just need to have a better awareness of where it can really be beneficial to the design process and design outcomes.

So trying to figure out where are the current obstacles and what are the kinds of things that are more appealing or understandable to the designer compared to the construction professional who tends to see more clearly where Lean can help in the construction process with its kind of related manufacturing efficiencies and things like that. The whole idea of improving value is really something that I think architects and designers are not fully taking advantage of. And I would really love to see them to be more active and more prominent.

So that's kind of, I'm trying to figure out exactly where to focus my research efforts in advancing that. So are you going to be attending the design forum that Lean Construction Institute is hosting here in Chicago? Yeah, I am. Actually, we should try to get together then. That's actually where the first face-to-face meeting will be of this research committee, where we're going to be looking at the research agenda for the next, hopefully next couple of years as the LCI is trying to formulate this research committee to fit in with their board as well.

So we'll be doing design forum and then also, but we won't be presenting there, it was a little too soon for us. We have two or three sessions at the Lean Congress that will be coming up in Anaheim. That's great. For those of you who haven't heard the most recent podcast episode, I was speaking with Dan Heinemeier, the executive director at Lean Construction Institute. And we do touch on a little bit about the goals to get the design community more involved with Lean Construction and understanding the benefits that Lean can provide to the entire workflow, if you will.

So that's great. That was actually a big finding of our study with them and another survey that we had done, that the architects were definitely less positive, less satisfied, less feeling like they were benefiting from being part of a Lean project versus one that doesn't focus on Lean. So that was definitely part of our findings. Okay, great. So that kind of gives us a springboard to dive into learning a little bit more about you.

So you have a design background. You studied a master's in architecture and psychology. You studied psychology in your bachelor's both at Harvard. Wanted to just get an understanding like, how do those things tie for you? And then tell us, how does that get you interested in staying in academia and wanting to research high performance building and collaborative teams in construction?

You're the first person that's ever asked me that. It's one of those things where in hindsight you can say it really fits together because obviously when you're studying high performance goals and you're looking at how teams are collaborating around this unified goal and they're really doing extraordinary things to work together and they have developed these kinds of alignments and shared goals that obviously the psychology and the human behavior part is a really key part. So I would definitely say right now I look back on my undergraduate degree and I really appreciate that background in social science and the kinds of just formative tools that I got when I was in that time period when I was just figuring out who I was and what I wanted to do intellectually.

But if I remember that being actually in that time, I don't think I knew how it was going to fit. I basically was switching from a pre-med focus to an architecture focus and for me it felt like a complete switch. But in hindsight I can now say, well I did always have an interest in kind of the human behavior whether it was from the science side of the psychology or whether it was from the programmatic side of how people are using spaces and able to benefit from the built environment.

So in hindsight it's great you can paint a story but at the time I was just, I think it took me quite a long time after that time period. When you're in college you're just trying to figure out what works and the psychology was one of the handful of majors that you could do that aligned really well with the pre-med requirements. And so to me it was really attractive because it was not one of the hard sciences which I was less interested in pursuing it in a depth way and I was interested in kind of more the social science aspect.

But by the time I left undergrad I was already pretty sure that I didn't want to be a doctor. And so I had already dropped out of some of the rest of the pre-med requirements but finished up the psychology and actually had enough to do a minor in art but I never ended up just officially doing that but so unofficially did a lot of art classes. And to me that then the balance of the kind of sciencey behavioral and art was what made me think architecture was logical for me.

But again it's all in hindsight it makes sense but at the time it was probably a little bit more practical than strategic in my choices. Well you know all of us go through that sort of meandering trying to figure out where we fit the best and what our interest levels are really. It's funny because I think I didn't do as much kind of searching while I was in college but when I was deciding to study construction management I had that similar kind of like I don't actually want to design buildings but I love the built environment you know so and I love the psychology that leaders have to understand and the social sciences that you kind of have to understand like in order to get people to like work together to actually get this thing built and then how do they function in this space you know

all those key elements that people kind of forget that. Yeah I think we do. When you first think about architecture you tend to think of the object and especially the way that it's portrayed in the press it's a lot of you know beautiful shots of buildings and often with no people in it at all and they you know there's a real emphasis on the kind of formal quality but then obviously there's you know light and the kind of sensations that you experience when you're in a building but as I got more into as a designer and as an architect really realizing and then also through my teaching that a lot of the decisions that are made are you know it's holistic it's not just what does what aesthetically looks better what formally it looks better or what is cheaper or faster it's much more holistic and understanding what's possible and especially if you're doing things that

push the envelope you know that envelope can be pushed not only in form but it often you know when you are doing buildings that are pushing the edge of whatever technical or formal or even programmatic means that you often end up getting project teams that have to work differently or do something extraordinary in order to be able to figure something out that hasn't been done before or there aren't really established pathways to do. It's connected, you know innovation I think is connected. You can't really do an innovative building without also being innovative in your processes to execute that design.

Oh yeah completely agree and then pushing the envelope in terms of function as well. Absolutely. You know it's form and then how does this actually get people to function well. And I think that's kind of the next frontier. I know we might be skipping ahead in terms of the podcast sequence here but the kind of the next steps I think which I think no one's really making huge strides in yet but I think that's the nature of research is you take more kind of smaller bits but I think what eventually will become the transformative next step is really understanding the human behavior in terms of not just productivity, satisfaction, comfort and really you know holistically again understanding not just the environmental impacts of what we do but the ways that people are using the building.

Right now we're so focused on first costs and then if we're a little bit more broad-minded we focus on life cycle costs but even then we're still dealing with a fraction of the actual value of the building until we start to deal with how people are interacting and how the built environment is affecting their behavior and comfort and capacity. So I think it's a huge leap to go into that realm and I'm hoping that I begin to see some of that. I think there are glimmers of that but it's a difficult much more difficult problem than solving a kind of net zero energy which is difficult enough but once you start to get into the all the variables that go into behavior and environmental conditions broadly then you start to deal with regional scale things and it just becomes a lot more complex.

Yes, you know my brief moment of doing research when I was an undergrad it did focus on the thermal comfort design and indoor air quality and those things so that's kind of a soft place there for me in my heart I guess. Yeah, I think those are the beginning steps. Those are the beginning steps to really try to figure out but obviously people are interested like if you increase the indoor air quality does that mean you have fewer sick days or does that mean you have improved test scores in children?

It's like wow that's a big question to ask because you know their test scores are as dependent on what they ate for breakfast as what their classroom felt like. Yeah, again back to the holistic approach right you have to look at everything holistically and it's hard to measure those metrics there. Yeah, it is really hard but I think that's kind of where we need to go with things and you asked before about what made me interested in staying to academia because I love practice and I miss practice but I found as I was getting more and more involved in teaching it was harder to really carry on a substantial practice and you know it was fun and interesting to do smaller scale projects but my heart is really with the larger complex projects which are hard to do on a part-time basis if you're teaching so I started realizing that I was

able to get in more depth and actually follow my interests more by being someone who documented case studies and interviewed project teams and compared them with other stories and got a broader view of what was working and what wasn't working than if I was actually involved in a project team on a day-to-day basis but I do miss it. I wish I could do both but I think energy-wise it's really difficult to be part of these large complex projects unless you're really immersed in it every day.

Yeah and I think that what you're doing now will inform and say for instance you go back it will hugely inform how you're going to approach things if you do indeed decide to go back but I think you're probably going to impact more people this way. That's kind of what I figured again it's in hindsight you can look back and say yeah that was a great decision and at the time it was more frustration that I was not able to really do a good job on a project team if I was teaching so how would I find another way to be involved with practice but yeah clearly I think there's been the capacity to help many project teams through the work that we do and that feels great to be able to really make sure that we're trying to help people not fall into same pitfalls

that other teams have discovered and figured out so that we can begin to advance the industry instead of falling into some of the same issues every time. Absolutely. So let's go ahead and dig into some of the research. I particularly pulled two of the publications one that was sponsored by GSA and one that was sponsored by IPDA. IPDA was the Integrated Project Delivery Alliance out of Canada.

And LCI as well. They co-sponsored that one. So the ones particularly sponsored by GSA focused on high performance buildings and then the other publications dealt with IPD and Lean particularly. So just having gone through them and the links will be in the show notes for you guys who are listening but when you get a chance to look at it you will be able to see that there is much care and it is just very thorough and you can tell that there was a lot of effort and I don't know they're just amazing publications.

Right? I just kudos. First of all. Yeah. There are a lot of work.

Thanks. There are a lot of work and I know you didn't do it alone. I knew you and you worked with the team. So I wanted to just kind of ask you what was the approach to doing the research? Walk us through that.

Yeah. So obviously when you're studying collaboration and you've got people that are expert in different aspects of collaboration it's great to have a collaborative team that studies and creates the report. So I think that I've been really fortunate to find over time a number of people that have been rotating in and out of my teams and sometimes I'll have a research assistant student that works well there in school and then many years later I might tap them and say hey do you feel like doing a little extra work on the side and helping us out here for this and that.

So some of these teams, the only thing obviously with any collaborative team is there's coordination involved and we've got teams spread out through different time zones and so trying to figure out how to keep everybody sharing the same drop box and updating at the right time and all that kind of stuff can be a little hectic but it's definitely worth it. So the case studies that you're going to be linking to, the interactive PDF format was one that we developed actually relatively early on. It was around 2009 and that was actually a super talented research assistant I had, Kai Samala.

Who had come from a background in graphic design and was in architecture school and when he, I was working pretty intensively with him and some of the other researchers and we were talking about the kind of storytelling that a lot of case studies get into and well each case study is a really fascinating story and so it's really tempting to just tell the story you know almost like a journalist would. And around the time that IPD was pretty new there were a lot of success stories and a lot of them were healthcare, a lot of them were kind of you know more California based healthcare projects but you know I was working with AIA to kind of help identify a little bit more broadly different project types and they were being done as, not by me, but they were being done as these kind of interviews

and they kind of started to blend together. So after you got that first batch of really successful projects that got people really excited about IPD, I would be going to all these conferences presenting my work and things that I was interested in IPD and they started to blend and I thought you know this isn't that helpful to just keep hearing one success story after another. It's inspiring and it's feel good and the stories are great but you start to forget oh which was the one that used BIM more than the other or which was the one that had that intensive early planning.

And so started working with Marku Ellison who at that time was at AIA about the difficulty of getting case studies to be more rigorous or rigorous enough that you could compare and contrast or pull any kind of data even if it was more qualitative data to be able to see which teams had which ingredients or which aspects were more prominent in which stories. And so we ended up doing that first case that our research assistant of mine thought you know we could do this interactive PDF because we had thought about a website and there are times where I still think maybe a website would be better but we started on this path and the nice thing is they're nimble, they're small files and you can navigate them so everyone sees the same thing so the graphics don't get messed up and things like that.

So you know I think that the format has worked pretty well for us. They get a little bit technically difficult to manage but we've been managing. But that idea of being able to click between the same category so you could see say like the way that the teams were selected and look at all the different projects how they handled team selection or how they handled the contract process. And then you could also look horizontally across one building to see from the beginning the overview the timeline how they handled energy what did they did for their RFP their team their contract etc.

So you know the idea that you could navigate either vertically through one category or horizontally through one project was really kind of a breakthrough like yes this is exactly what we think will be most helpful to people. And then we did a lot of beta testing with different industry experts from owners to subcontractors, trade partners, you know consultants getting feedback and we actually even you know made sure we got people that were older and younger to look at like font size and navigability and things like that.

So we got a lot of feedback on the first ones that we then adjusted for the subsequent ones. So we knew that that format was one that we really thought kind of got at that kind of compare and contrast usability. So that if you were okay yes I'm expired I want to do IPD or I want to do IPD and lean and you get part way through it and you're like wait a minute we're having trouble with our BIM execution. What did these other teams do?

So then you can go back and just look at the BIM column and say okay team project team one did BIM this way but project team five did BIM really differently and at the both of them it worked but I think we're kind of more like and then you can even go back to like the project overview and say well demographically we're more like project team five because we're about that size and scope, about that schedule, about that budget. How did they do their BIM? You know so that's kind of where we wanted it to really be a tool more than just something that you would read and remember oh that was a great you know report but really to be more like a tool that you could use as you reach these different milestones in your own project as an owner or as any member of the project team could

then kind of get active information. And we took the same approach with the literature review where we know that a lot of industry professionals are not necessarily going to be familiar with the body of research that is part of organizational development which is not necessarily building industry but it's just how teams work. But we pulled out sort of seminal or leading articles and highlighted where they connect with the case studies so that you could again read it through but you could also just quickly go to it and say you know my team seems to be really stuck on trust.

How do some other team stewards need to look at is this and it was like I when I first read that it was like oh my gosh that's amazing. So I think often in our industry we seek to solve our problems completely within our own industry and part of me purposely composing these teams that are broader than just building industry people is making sure that we get benefit from understanding other work that's been done and largely it's been in social science. But some of it the lean stuff is also there's a lot of things that are about kind of the manufacturing flows and efficiencies that are again not necessarily part of the building industry but maybe that's a little bit more logically connected.

So anyway going back to the methodology we our goal was very much to make this usable and make it a tool that you could more than just read the report but go back and use it. And so we spend a lot of time on organizing the so the way they're organized as you've got on the on the vertical axis are the different projects and then an overall kind of comparison between all of them. But then arrayed along the top are these different categories and there's kind of bigger buckets and then subcategories underneath them.

So the bigger buckets are usually commercial strategies, leadership strategies, logistical and practice process tactics. Usually if there's something specific that the study is looking at like high performance we'll break that out and make it its own bigger bucket. Then the subcategories underneath them those can vary a little bit too depending on what we're finding and what we think is most important to highlight in this set of projects. So we usually have something around teams under leadership strategies but we depending on you know those could be three subcategories or ten subcategories or whatever we think is important.

So our team actually spends a lot of time with post-it notes and different markups and different kinds of ways of parsing out the information. So what we do just in terms of the method is we once the projects are identified and that's a whole process that sometimes the sponsor is doing for us. Sometimes we have input, sometimes there's a call that we would then reach out through different venues and I would say that generally we know that that bias is because the teams that step forward tend to be ones that want to show off their story.

On the other hand they're so candid with us of the challenges that they faced that I think you know we are still getting you know pretty good information especially since we're cross-checking it with their documents and we do multiple interviews with different stakeholder groups. It's obviously when the sponsor like GSA is choosing the projects because they're the owner they have a lot more ability to just say you know this project team unit please participate. So the projects are identified and then we go through identifying the kind of key people to talk to and we've been lately doing things in stakeholder groups so we'll have all the people involved with the architect so the architects and their consultants then we'll have the general contractor and then we'll usually do subgroups of trade partners depending on what we're looking at and then we do the owner owner's rep as another group.

If we start to find that people maybe are the dynamic is beginning to get in the way of any one person giving their whole story we will do a follow-up interview because sometimes that just happens because of timing. But we tend to sort of see a little bit of the dynamic in these group interviews of how they talk with each other and different things that they agree on or disagree on and how they remember things and then we transcribe those interviews and we code them which is just pretty standard social science process where you go through and you have one or two coders and you spend a lot of time making sure they're coding similarly and you will say you know over the course of time that they're talking about an issue you would tag okay they're talking about a problem with the mechanical system but if you read what they're talking about they might have

been talking about something that was part of the RFP or they might be talking about something that was part of an issue of communication or something that was about championing or leadership. So we pull apart the section that they talk about the mechanical issue and we code the different aspects that they're the quotes into the other categories that they might be also dealing with. So it's less about the story about the mechanical but more about you know this is one more piece of evidence for how this team is managing their schedule or how this team is building trust.

So over time when you do that you get some pretty interesting the coding pages are you know they're fragmented stories but you start to see you know how that trust was developed either chronologically or through seminal incidents and then we use that as we are writing up the report so that we're getting more than just you know this is what happened first and this is what happened second but kind of looking at how some of these threads carried all the way through. That's exactly what I was thinking that common thread that just kind of connects all the the pieces there from A to Z.

Yeah because sometimes when people are experiencing the events and that's one of the great exciting parts about being in a project team is you are really immersed day to day you don't necessarily have the perspective to say oh yeah that was a seminal moment where trust really got established but if you are from our point of view as researchers coming in and recognizing that something really was key and then we can push a little and dig a little in the interviews a lot of times they will say oh yeah you're right things were different after that and then we can also look up the the memos and the emails happening around that time and see if there's a shift in what's going on in terms of volume or if there were kind of key things so it's I think a lot of times when you're in a project

team it's hard to get the perspective of what you only remember the success but often by the time we talk to the project teams they only ever remember working as a super high-functioning team and you have to really pull them back and say well how was how was it when you were doing your RFP you know how would it do you know what happened in your first issues and what happened in the kind of early planning because they forget and you know once once you get that ball rolling about what happened that was wrong then people remember you know they'll they'll dig into it they're like oh yeah such-and-such said right and and those are those kind of pivotal moments too but once they get back onto the success route it's it's challenging now to to remember that and they just it just becomes like oh it was great we really enjoyed it you know and so that's why we dig in and we

always get access to a ton of documents and then we're under non-disclose to make sure that we're not you know sharing the actual pieces but we do do analysis of like even their BIM model and look at the volume of email and look at the ways that they're communicating so that also allows us to build prompts for what we're gonna ask and how we're gonna dig into things so that's been really helpful so do you ask for that documentation prior to doing interviews okay is there a survey that you guys all that you that you guys conduct with them we like to when there's enough projects to make it worthwhile doing it's not really worth if we end up if it's a small project team and we're not doing very many projects and we're pretty much talking to everybody anyway then we wouldn't do a survey but for the times where we've got only a fraction of the people that were able

to talk to the surveys become really useful you know when you're working with the GSA and they can really tell the project teams to fill out the survey we can get something like 80 to 90 percent responses and then when we're working on our own the surveys sometimes we get like 20 or 30 percent responses you know which is more normal for survey responses and the surveys tend to be long and fairly involved so but we can do great quantitative analysis on the survey so if it's appropriate we always like to be able to do those and that's part of the qualitative comparative analysis that carry Stewart Dossack and Jean and F together were have been great resources to be able to bring that process and their graduate students to do more quantitative analysis that complements the qualitative stuff that we've been doing so that was really key to understanding what what we can

do neither of the two reports that you are pulling used extensive QC a the one that did was probably the GSA teams matter report which I can share the link on with that okay that would be great all right so we've been talking about the the approach thus far and but I'm sure the listeners are ready to hear okay well what did we learn right what what did we actually get from these studies and so if we can talk a little bit about the GSA high performance one first that'd be great there were three case studies included in here for federal buildings that are owned by GSA could you tell us a little bit about these specific projects so these were chosen by GSA as examples of really successful projects done under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act so the good thing about that for us is that they were all being done at around the same time period and so you

had you know similar economic conditions and those economic conditions were also a little unusual that people were potentially more willing to work together because they knew that part of this the larger goal was getting America back to work and so there was more than just the high performance of that building but they were part of a larger cohort of projects that were all being done around the country at the same time so I think that was also kind of an added project inspiration goal for all the project teams so the three projects that were chosen by GSA to highlight in this one one was the Wayne Aspen all federal building and US courthouse in Grand Junction Colorado is actually a very small building but I think is still the only building that is net-zero and also on the National Register of Historic Places so it was you know tricky to normally you think oh if it's

nationally it's on the National Register you can't alter anything and so you wouldn't be able to you know do this super high performance building but this one and if you look at the photos you can see you can actually see the PV array on the roof at certain angles but the state historic preservation group worked very closely with the design team to figure out what they felt was appropriate so you can see it pretty prominently on the back of the building but from the front of the building it's only barely visible only from certain angles and so they had to work with that visual sightline limitation kind of limited the amount of area that they could use for the solar array and then that changed their energy calculations and capacity so they ended up through a whole series of really amazing inventive techniques doing stuff with walls the windows and some

additional geothermal so that they ended up making up the reduced solar panel area which allowed them to you know stay within the preservation rules and still meet the net-zero so that was a super amazing project and also the yeah it was incredible it's a little jewel of a building to just really beautiful and they that project team it was sort of it's a bit of a remote area and you have to pretty much commit to getting there and once you're there you're there for a while the way the project team worked so they socialized a lot and they had so they were co-located in the building along with the tenants that stayed in the building so you had a lot of great kind of just social human interaction between all the people that were a part of that and you could really tell when you talk to

them about how they work together so that was a really wonderful little building to to study and it was you know really great to be able to see how they worked through at the very detailed level of you know matching the wainscoting but also figuring out the insulation value of these historically designated walls that match the window trims and things like that so got really in-depth on that the second building that was studied was the Edith Green Wendell Wyatt Federal Building in Portland Oregon and this one is we had actually studied this building in about three years before as part of our AIA study it was the only federal building in our AIA study and they weren't done yet and so this was great to go back to the team and hear about how everything resolved and we already had some pretty good background and how they were working with the

closest thing to an IPD contract for GSA is this construction manager as as constructor so it's CMC and they use this what they call CMC plus six which was this sort of sixth version of the CMC that this this region was using but it was very close to IPD. You have to iterate. Yeah so they just like labeled their versions and they're calling it this plus six so it was and that was an extraordinary project team but a fairly typical project for GSA where you have a 1970s multi-story office building that wasn't performing particularly well energy wise had a lot of changes that could have been made and so in this particular case and actually that base building is one of several dozen around the country so it's the kind of you know anonymous concrete strip window office building that you've seen in almost every city so that's what they started with and they

ended up reskinning it completely and adding a kind of apron of space which allowed them to have a much more efficient footprint and so the brand new curtain wall and all the systems upgraded and the project lead on that one was really for GSA all of the GSA project leads were pretty amazing I must say but they he was very interested in delving into a lot of these teaming literature so he was actually doing a lot of stuff with kind of Army Corps of Engineers strategies so it was really great to sort of see the the way that he that Pat Brunner was kind of pulling that team together and really pushing the envelope with a lot of things like the radiant ceilings really radiant heated and cold ceilings which was a system that's been used in Germany but not used in America before had to go through a lot of extra steps to for GSA to you know trust that it would

work and how they would and it changed the way that they had to lay out the walls and just their general approach to the office tenants that were going to be in there so he was really tireless in pushing innovation and that team you know invented what they called aftercare where they they ended up saving enough money on their contingency and other things that they made decisions on that they realized they could spend it on something so the team collaboratively said well you know what we really need is a year after this project is done to tune the building and help the tenants figure out how best to use the space and get used to the fact that we have a you know different arrangement for servers and a different arrangement for how you would handle the even that the fact that the radiant heating and cooling didn't make noise and people felt

like they weren't getting air because they couldn't hear the ventilation so they invested and it were able to get most of the team on a contract for what they called this aftercare so that was you know just one example of many innovations that this team was able to do for this building. The last project of the three is the Federal Center South building what they call building 1202. This one was the of the set of three was the only new construction and it was new construction on a brownfield site and it was also a single tenant which is a little unusual for the GSA because they tend to have multiple tenants and one of the things they have to balance out is the very different needs of the different tenants like you could have IRS and the immigration services or you could have federal marshals and FBI.

So this Federal Center South building was all Army Corps of Engineers and Army Corps of Engineers has subgroups within there but generally they were all one one client so that was in a way a kind of more simplified version of the tenant than some of the others experienced and that one was a because it was a brownfield site and it also had issues of kind of there was a river near some sacred sites that were Native American sacred sites that were kind of nearby so there were complex site issues that they needed to balance out and they went with a design build contract and the design build team was able to get access to the site very early and they were and GSA brought in a lot of site level consultants so kind of soil engineers civil people so that they had a lot of information and they found

actually one of the buildings that they needed to take down was a old warehouse that had really beautiful timber and so they made it one of the design goals to reuse as much of that timber as possible as a kind of central design feature so that's part of the communal spaces that are in the core central part of the building and there's an atrium that wraps all the way around that and then they found after they made that commitment once they actually inventory the boards that were the timber that was reusable they had not as much as they thought and they had to rethink how they would do some of the structure because the structure used in a both structurally as well as aesthetically reuse the timber for the central core area so they ended up having to pull together a kind of cross-disciplinary team with the engineers and the subcontractors and the the wood

specialists as well as the architects to rethink the spacing of the structural elements and testing them so they actually physically had to test them in order to get that information and were able to pull off what's really a very beautiful it's practical and practical and also you know obviously very reduced carbon footprint from reusing this material so that was kind of a nice success story among many other things that they that they handled really well in their in their work. Renee you did a really good job of describing the the different sites and well one thing that I appreciate about the report is that there are lots of photos and you did a great job of kind of pictorially describing what to expect especially in this last one with the timber but for those of you who kind of want to see what some of these look like there are some photos in there can kind

of help you you know get a sense so so that's great. I think we have a good understanding of what's what's included. The other thing I'd point out in terms of the visuals is we spend a lot of time on the infographics and so you know I have a lot of really talented research assistants but we also have really great support from actually my sister who runs a design graphic design company in New York that she is I think a lot of times when people think of information and data they tend to think of well there's really only one way to show it or you can tabulate it or show it in bar graphs and what we really found is that if we want people to quickly make these make these projects useful to them the more we can do information graphics that graphically depict

how is the team composed who's communicating with whom how who's in the different contractual relationships it really helps them immediately understand the roles of the different players as well as understanding other aspects of the timeline or different chronologies so we I would definitely encourage people to look at their reports to understand how the infographics fit with the text information. I would say that those are absolutely useful for me when I was thumbing through the the project overviews you can kind of compare and contrast really easily with those graphics so that is hugely helpful.

If you want to hear more about IPD or Lean before we get to part two and haven't listened to this episode how to develop a collaborative culture on every project with Jane Pease that's episode number 22. James Pease is with Sutter Health and was actually part of the motivation and means case study so you'll be able to see that when you download the actual PDF. If you liked this podcast don't forget to subscribe at Constructor.com that's ConstructRR.com to get email updates from me about upcoming podcasts.

I will have action guides being developed as we continue on with doing these podcasts so that you can best apply what we've learned from all the awesome people that I've interviewed on the Constructor podcast. So if you haven't already subscribed you can do so at iTunes and Stitcher. I look forward to sharing the rest of my interview with Renee next week. Thanks guys!