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

Hello, I'm Brittany Campbell-Turner and this is the Constructor Podcast, session number 29. Hello and welcome to or welcome back to this episode of Constructor, the best way to build it. This episode features Renee Chang, who is a professor and associate dean at the University of Minnesota. If you listen to the most recent podcast, you listened to the first half of our interview, which if you listen to it, you know how good it is and you're dying to hear the rest. She is a graduate of Harvard.

She's a registered architect and has stayed her course in academia. She's recognized for her teaching excellence with numerous teaching awards and appears on national lists of influential educators. So this is part two. In the first part, I covered who is Renee Chang and a bit of her journey, the fantastic approach to conducting the research. In this part, part two, we cover the takeaways, key takeaways from the success in high performance projects, building design and project delivery in the federal sector.

That was one of the research papers that we started to discuss in the first half. We're going to talk about the key takeaways. We'll also dive into the second research paper, motivation and means, how and why IPD and lean lead to success. And we talk about the myth busters. So I would like to know that these research reports are not just research white papers that you pick up and read and then put back down.

During the interview, actually, Renee is literally scrolling in and out of the sections that she otherwise is seamlessly referencing. But that's what you'll be able to do on your next project. You can reference the part that are relevant to you and your project. So with that, let us get into the second half of the interview with Renee Chang. All right.

So let's dig in to your top findings here for this particular report. What would you say are the biggest things that you've identified for these projects? There's findings that are, I would actually sort of split them up. So we've got findings that were really helpful to GSA. And then there were findings that I think are helpful industry-wide.

So if we start with those that are industry-wide, what we definitely found was that when you're dealing with high-performing buildings, you need to think about what happens when they're operating. Because so many of your – and these were also chosen, I should say, that there is some aspect of performance-based contracting in all of these. So at some point, the teams were held accountable or they had some fee attached to the actual building performance that was going to be demonstrated by the building after it was completed.

So that was something that I think GSA is really putting forward as a way to move the whole industry forward. And I think it's something – I know that there's caution around that because how do you know what's going to happen when the building's operating a year after you leave it as a designer or as a contractor or as a sub? But I actually think it's a really good thing for the industry that we should feel – You give the opportunity. Yeah. We should feel confident.

Yeah. You need to put some skin in the game. Yeah, absolutely. You know, why not? Yeah.

It helps to motivate and also puts real consequences to things. And we should feel confident enough to say that we can predict what things are going to perform like. It does, though – and we had talked earlier about the human behavior and how that affects things. You do need to figure out how you communicate to the building users because it's not always – some of these systems are pretty complex and it's not always intuitive to know that if you open a window, you're going to unbalance something, but it's okay to open a window at another time.

Or please don't turn off your computer at night because something else is going to be happening or you actually need to not run things at night because we hadn't planned for you to run that at night. So those kinds of things or even timed plugs and stuff like that are part of the process achieving a high performing building, achieving performance-based contracting includes the actual operations of the building. And so that was something I think, even though it seems fairly obvious, we found each of these project teams – because it was not originally part of the scope of work for Aspenall and Edith Green, they found a way to add it.

It was part of the original scope in Federal Center South, but they found a way to manage it. So I think all of these teams did a different take on that and we call it – most of them called it some form of verification. So that was the category that we used there. So if you look at the verification category, you see how they all worked through that. The other kind of key takeaway I would say is that just in a broad sense, high performance goals can align a team in a way that goes way beyond the actual EUI or what is the R value of this wall.

When you look at what happens when the team – I talked about Aspenall having that net zero – that was actually a goal that the design build team proposed. That was VET group and WRL. It wasn't part of the original RFP, but they responded to the RFP by saying, we think this building could be net zero. So the whole team was so committed to that that when the historic preservation group said the solar array is becoming intrusive, we would like you to cut it back, they all just jumped in and said, okay, this is how we're going to do it.

We're going to keep our net zero. We're going to abide by the historic preservation guidelines and this is how we're going to do it. They had to study a wide range of solutions and they ended up implementing also several. It was very multi-pronged in how they did it. So that was not just about net zero and was not just about R values and energy calculations.

That was about the team sharing a goal and being really motivated and trusting each other and respecting each other's capacity to offer new ideas or even offer ideas in an area that seemed to be your area. But have you thought about this? People really responded in a way that was really heartening to see that team first, project first behavior that I think comes when you have larger aspirational goals than just meeting budget and schedule. So I would say in this case, high performance goals obviously are good in and of themselves, but they're also proxy for just getting the team inspired, making the team feel challenged, setting forward some stretch goals.

Then the GSA specific takeaways I think were things like, small things like design-build contracts are not completely common in all the regions of GSA and they have also a peer review process which is common and is really helpful, but the peer review process has a certain timing. They sort of say at 15% and 50%, 75%. Well the 15% peer review for the GSA on a design-build project comes too late because the design-build team has already worked through the scheme and they've already gotten through even kind of early stage design development.

So they actually need their peer review earlier and so in all these projects they requested that the peer review be moved up so that they were able to make bigger decisions on like, let's relocate the HVAC system, let's look at this other strategy, which were really large changes that if they had waited till what was supposedly 15% it would have been too late to make the changes. So that was just kind of a, you know, pointing out to the GSA that your peer review process is great, but the time period that you establish them might need to be different for a design-build team.

And then, you know, other changes that they were aware of that we made recommendations to them. But the best outcome I think that came out of the GSA was that they realized through looking at these cases, two being design-build and one being CMC, that they didn't have a really clear and consistent way of deciding the project delivery method for their projects. They tended to go with what the project manager wanted or what the region was comfortable doing or what people had done most recently. So that might be, you know, and there's only a couple versions that they allow.

So it would be design-build-build being the most common, design-build being a little less common, design-build-bridging, which is kind of a hybrid where you have different teams but you're still using a design-build process, and then the CMC being the least common. And they looked at why are we always going to design-build when our own data is showing us that the least likely to be, to contain the schedule and contain the budget. When we can see clearly these three projects being highly collaborative, highly successful, none of them are using design-build.

Why are we, you know, why is that happening that we're choosing design-build so frequently? So they asked us then to look at, to advise them on a project that they already had going, looking at what process do they use to select which contract. And so we ended up getting involved really deeply with their policies and processes, which was fascinating, and advising on a simple tool to just kind of help the discussion. And Laura Stagner, who we worked with directly at GSA, she was really adamant it can't be another set of rules.

All right, so one of the really great things that came out of the GSA findings for this research effort was looking at the project delivery method and how they even made that decision of whether to go with design-build, design-build, design-build-thridging, or CMC. And so we got really deeply involved with their policies and processes and advised a group that was already a working group on how to help those discussions have a consistency and a documentation. So Laura Stagner, who we were working with at the Public Building Services, was clear she didn't want a new policy or a new set of rules.

She just wanted something that would assist the teams in having the conversations, making sure that they thought through all the benefits and drawbacks of the different project delivery contract types and what would best support their teams and their particular needs for that particular project. So we developed a tool for them that I think I can send you a kind of information sheet on it because most of it is internal to the GSA so it's not really accessible to people. Sure, that would still be really helpful.

Yeah, and that was really the huge takeaway for GSA is, you know, why are we making, how are we making decisions around which project to use which contract types because the collaboration seems to be better supported by certain types like design build and CMC so why are we not using it more often? Is it because of the process that we use to even select the contract type? So that was really great to be involved at that level at that early stage of that process and that's been launched so they're already starting to use it for their next set of projects.

Do you have any insight, Renee, on why they selected these particular projects to be part of this research that you conducted? I think when we've talked to them about it and there's, so now part of what we're doing for our current research with them are two more projects that were done a little bit later but have a lot of the same hallmarks where the, within the different, and they're trying to get a little bit of geographic diversity because as you might know GSA does a lot of things in a decentralized way so each region kind of has its own autonomy but so they wanted a little bit of geographic diversity even though most of these are a little bit more west oriented and they were ones that I think all tried to use some pretty innovative building technologies and they far exceeded the minimum performance requirements that were in place

for all of the era projects that were all meant to kind of increase the high performance level for all federal buildings so I think they were pretty well known. I'm pretty sure there were a couple of others that they could have chosen and I know in our current one they kind of talked us through a couple that they were thinking about. This particular set I think they also liked the idea that one was a historic preservation and small, the other was a complete renovation and sort of medium size and the other was fairly large and new construction so I think that kind of diversity was what they were looking for as well.

Yeah that makes sense. Okay. Very cool. I do want to ask you this question about swift trust just because we touched on that before. Do you mind just kind of giving us a sense of who, which project utilized that and then how was that understood here in this instance?

Right so we, in our literature review we talked about swift trust as something that we found in all of these teams and actually I would say that this is something that we wrote about it in this particular report but it's common to a lot of teams that you see working at a really high level. So it comes from the work of Meyerson, Rieck and Kramer from 1996 and it's a theory about temporary teams where you have groups of people that are coming together, they're not planning to work together for longer than the duration of whatever it is so a project.

So you find it in like film crews and you find it in emergency rooms and you can find it in construction. So if you have a team that's temporarily coming together you know you, when you have a short time period that you're working together, if you are going to develop trust it has to be pretty quickly done. If you talk to high performing teams a lot of them are like oh we've worked together for 20 years, we go way back, we've done lots of projects together, you know our kids play soccer together, all this kind of great stuff that binds them together and you can say okay that's where their trusting relationship comes from is just this long period of time.

Well what do you do when you're thrown together for a short period of time often very intense where you have to figure out how to work together and some teams can develop what's called the swift trust. So it's when you have people that are clearly understanding their roles and they're doing what you expect from that type of role. So if it's on a film crew that they are performing the role of a gaffer the way that other good gaffers have done in the past you tend then to say okay I trust them because they seem to know what they're doing, they seem to know what this role is and they perform in that role.

And so it tends to be where there's distinct and clearly defined roles. What the interesting thing was that we found in construction is that you have teams that developed the swift trust because they worked in their defined roles but then they developed so much trust that then they allowed for role blurring. So because these teams were starting with say a design build where they had to quickly work together but then the sort of crisis of saying we need to reduce the solar panel or whatever it was that would happen early like Federal Center South would be the brown field issues.

They would then say you know I didn't mind that the electrician was giving me mechanical engineering suggestions or say have you thought of this because I understood he knew his role as an electrician and he wasn't stepping out of that role but he was just offering me new ways to think about things. So swift trust doesn't necessarily mean that you are siloed in locking into particular ways of working but it tends to happen where you've got pretty strong cultural expectations of what good behavior is. So it's interesting that in the construction industry we know what good behavior is.

We don't always exhibit it but we know and we can recognize what we sometimes call these A-Team behaviors or an A-Team player and I personally don't think that it's inherently you are either A-Team or you're not. I think that you can develop that and support it but I do think we recognize when we find someone who's like that right off the bat and we do tend to trust them and work with them in a way as if you believe that they're going to do what they say because you've seen other signs of their competency.

Well that actually reminds me of an interesting study I read about some time ago about children in a classroom and you probably are familiar with this example here but children in a classroom. Actually there were two sets of students studied here. There was a teacher who decided to pretty much talk to the students in a way where they didn't expect them to learn. You guys aren't going to learn this anyway. They would say very negative things to the students and they did not perform well.

On the alternative side there was a teacher who spoke to the same, they came from the same group, same material but they said you guys are going to get this. All of you are really smart. All of you guys are capable of understanding this process and all of them performed better. Same material, same information was shared as far as the academic side of things but the sort of trust that was exemplified from that professor or teacher or whatever, it made such an impact on how well the students performed or how well they didn't perform.

And I think that kind of parallels here with this swift trust methodology. Yeah I mean somewhat yes and somewhat that would be more the expectations. Setting clear expectations is not always the same as saying I trust that you can do this because in the cases of these building projects you can set the expectations but if someone is not meeting those expectations it's not that you don't trust them or their capacity, you're just trying to figure out what's going on. And it could be that they over committed or they've got something else going on in their company or there have been leadership changes or something like that.

So it is, I think the other side to the building construction version of swift trust is accountability. Right, which in the end the story that you told about the students in the end the accountability was how they performed on the test but it wasn't in the same way of sort of saying you're meeting these milestones and I'm holding you accountable for what I expected you to be able to do at each stage of it. So maybe slightly different. It's slightly different because it's a long term collaboration that needs to take place.

I mean it is different. I'm kind of taking a siloed approach to looking at it with that study there. No but I understand. Yeah the concept I think is definitely true about the positive expectations versus negative expectations. I think in the example you chose just because it's teacher-student versus peers that are each having to do a part in a team is just a little different.

Very true, very true because it goes both ways when you're in a team. It's not just one direction. Very interesting. Okay, no I'm loving your feedback thus far from this particular study. How did this research, did it have any correlation to the IPD LEAN research that IPDA and LCI have?

Yeah actually lots of, there's lots of parallels because anytime you're dealing with collaboration, the thing that was great about being able to then switch to the motivation and means report was that these projects that we were studying for the GSA, they were not really true IPD. They were as collaborative as they could be and they did have the shared performance contracting which did in some cases have a kind of risk reward aspect to things but the motivation and means projects all had what you might call pure multi-party and we made it a criteria of selection that they be more than four parties so beyond the owner, contractor, architect and we had some that were up to I think 22 parties signing.

So that was a great complement to this one where we were looking at these collaborative practices and the kind of issues of trust that developed in these teams that we could recognize in the teams but then when you go to IPD contracts and I think some of the criticism of IPD contracts in the past has been how do you contractually bind people to be trusting and how do you contractually govern behavior and so that was definitely a question that we had in our minds as well as clearly the IPD projects up until now have been quite consistently better on time, better on budget, better on quality, better on satisfaction so we weren't trying to re-prove that but what we were trying to look at is how are they doing this?

How are they getting to the point where they're being so successful and we had this background of knowing from these GSA cases that didn't use contracts that you can certainly get the collaboration without an IPD contract so then what is the role of the IPD contract? So we were also really fortunate to find the coincidence of both IPDA and LCI both being interested in doing some research around the same time and when we introduced the idea that they would co-sponsor something they both were really positive and so that for us was perfect because we were looking, the findings of that one was really that IPD provides a really strong motivation for teams to work together not just because they're contractually supposed to but also because their risk reward pool is there that is only shared if they all do well but then lean provides the means to collaborate because

you can say you want to collaborate at a very high level, you feel good and there are a lot of teams that do this through charters or things that aren't IPD agreements but then when you come down to what does collaboration actually mean on a day to day basis or on a specific sub area basis if you have lean tools particularly things like last planner system there's a lot of accountability in there, there's a lot of measurement, a lot of transparency about where are you and that the team is collectively managing the budget because they're collectively responsible for their risk reward pool there's all these mechanisms that the contract provides the motivation but then target value design or choosing by advantages or all the pieces that are part of the last planner system really reinforce a mechanism for doing that.

So that was a great segue for us is to see these GSA projects which had a lot of collaboration and seeing the same level of collaboration but understanding differently and having the teams be much more overt about saying well we were, these were the goals and we knew we needed to collaborate whereas I think from the GSA ones they were focused on these goals of high performance and the recovery act getting America back to work type things and they knew that collaboration was a good way to do it but that wasn't as overtly a top level goal as it was for the teams that we talked to that were part of the motivation and means study.

Alright well do you mind if we just kind of take a quick step back and get a broad landscape of what the case studies were that were researched for the motivation and means IPD? Like what industries did they cover, what markets did the projects? So we were very much in agreement all the sponsors and the research team we were in agreement that we wanted this to be for an audience of owners so we were trying to look at what owners would need to know and where the value was to the owners business goals in the building projects and their outcomes.

So once we settled on that being a clear goal we also knew we didn't need to repeat a lot of the very good research that's already been done on the success of IPD that we really wanted to get into the how and why does IPD succeed. So once we kind of settled some of those issues then we put a call out to identify projects and we had really good response and ended up choosing the 10 that you see in the report. We worked really hard to try to get those that were geographically diverse a wide range of scope, project budget and some that were new construction, some that were more of a renovation or adaptation and then a large project owners as well as those that were first time project owners and project teams that were really experienced and project teams that were inexperienced or project teams that were mixed.

So we had a number of factors that we were trying to get diversity and I think we did pretty well with the kinds of projects that we ended up choosing and so we were pleased with the variety of types and then it kind of makes it potentially even more powerful how uniformly successful they were and how uniformly there was the project first, team first spirit that we saw very much throughout all of the teams and many of them used that phrase that I've never been on a team that's been so project first, team first oriented and many of them said this was the highlight of my career, this project was one that I would love if I could do another especially from the newer teams saying we're actively seeking new, our next IPD experience.

So it was striking that for all of our efforts to make it a diverse group there were some pretty very very clear results in terms of satisfaction and owner satisfaction and the ways that all of the team members felt that it was a positive experience. One thing that I loved about this particular piece is that any project type really, I mean unless you're going, well it seemed like there were a few in healthcare, medical office buildings, some workplace office spaces and like you said ranging from different approaches whether it's new build, reno's, things of that nature, pricing too.

I felt like you could identify with one, like at least one. Yep that's what we wanted, that's what we wanted is that you would be able to look at the at a glance and say hey this project's a lot like mine. And what we wanted and we almost got but we were not able to get some housing and manufacturing which would have been great so maybe in the next round if we do another round or something like that but we would have wanted to get a little bit more, we wanted also a public owner would have been great so we could have gotten a little bit more diversity but yeah I think we tried to make it that you could look through the, just even the project descriptions and at a glance and say you know this is kind of similar to our team and that kind of following

through horizontally to see their story or to kind of look through vertically and see how the different teams handle different aspects of BIM or lean or different alignments. Yeah which again makes it that practical piece that you can certainly apply to different to whatever stage you are in and then additionally you know what's most like those aspects of the projects to yours right. Well similar question as last time what would you say your key takeaways are from this piece? So we actually have been doing some presentations with the lean construction people and the people on myth busting and the kind of myths that were either just developed in the industry because of some of those early case studies and or just things that people tend to think are true based on their understanding of IPD and lean.

So for example and I won't go through all of them but for example a lot of people think oh well IPD is really only for large complex healthcare projects in California and so you know it's we actually found very successful projects that were small. There is some debate about saying you know how small is too small because you do invest a lot of time in team building and developing the contract but I think that generally there's nothing that we found that says there's a right size for IPD and that there is a too small or too big or a too anything.

So I think it definitely can work if people are all willing to do it. Another myth that we tend to hear is well you know owners benefit more if they go design, bid, build because they're getting the best market price. Well we definitely found that that was our teams were the owners were seeing enormous value where they were all pretty much on time and on budget. A few of them actually missed a bit but the owners felt completely satisfied with the performance of the team on time and on budget.

But the thing that's a little hidden when you talk about being on time and on budget is that if you set really aggressive budget and time goals and the team meets them that's great. If you over pad your budget and schedule a team will look like it's meeting it but they didn't do anything extraordinary. So what we saw were that these teams were meeting really aggressive schedule and budget goals and they were often meeting them while still increasing the scope of the project. So pretty extraordinary results in terms of owner value.

So even though people might think oh if I go to market I'm going to get the best value. Well the teams that really did a careful comparison of what it would have taken to build the project in an open market bid situation found you know really significant like 10-20% below market for sometimes increased scope which pretty extraordinary. So another myth that we tend to hear about is like well you know if I do lean I have to like dive into the whole thing and kind of do everything exactly the way they say it in all the books and I have to get a trainer and everything.

And we found yes getting facilitation and training is really helpful but you can do even one piece of it in your own way and make it positive. So if you believe that you need accountability you can find ways to make your promises clear. You don't have to do the full blown last planner system but you might find pull planning is helpful. So and obviously the more consistent you are the more you understand the overall goals and not just the mechanics of it the more successful you're going to be.

But we found some of the inexperienced teams were you know you really couldn't tell the difference between those in terms of their performance. The inexperienced teams actually some of them said that climbing the mountain together or being on the lean journey together was actually the most helpful for them because they really felt like they were moving along as a team. But we also got feedback from teams that were mixed with experienced and inexperienced that the inexperienced people learned so much from the experienced ones that they could be mentored that you didn't you know you saw a lot of positive results from that as well.

So the idea that you have to have a certain amount of experience or your certain commitment to lean and IPD we found also was not true. And then the last myth that I'll mention is the one that I think I probably held myself is that IPD and IPD ish are really the same. You know like if you do a good kind of collaboration charter you're just as well off as spending the time it takes to develop a full IPD contract. And what we found is not only the time developing the IPD contract was really valuable as the first step in team building and developing that foundation of trust and respect and kind of clarifying the goals and expectations but we also found that the behavior of people that were bound by that contract was noticeably more collaborative and more project first team first than those that were on the project but not part of the signatory pool.

So it was there were some teams that even noticed it kind of felt like you were not chosen for the team if you were on the project but not in the signatory pool and that those people would come on time do their job and leave whereas the people that were part of the signatory pool were just you know significantly more engaged more willing to kind of cross cross boundaries to share equipment or to you know do one one team one guy found a way to Velcro a pan onto his hard hat because he was always losing a pan in his pouch and he made one for everyone on the team.

You know you get and I'm sure there are other positive stories like that and teams that aren't IPD but we definitely when you look at teams that are IPD you can see the difference in behavior and it's noticeably behavior of who's actually in the signatory pool and it goes deep deep down through the superintendents through the people on through the craft workers so it's not just the executive level when you do it right it's really driven all the way down to the people on the ground.

So you know those were some of our findings were just were you know unsurprisingly IPD works but that wasn't really a finding the real findings are you know there's a lot of perceptions about how and why it works that are not really based in fact and so when you look at you know and this is a obviously a group of ten that step forward so they're potentially you know more willing to share but when you look at them and you see the variations you see you know some of these perceptions of what IPD is good for and how it works are not completely correct.

I love that you went through the myth busters I think that a lot of people do have their reservations because they're thinking it's this hurdle they have to sort of jump over or there's a learning curve that you have to climb and and you know people think that it there well there is real true reason to hesitate before jumping in and I think it's good to yes dig in and understand things well but I do I really like the the one particularly about IPD versus IPD ish.

I remember reading in the research that it would take hours upon hours for the team to review the contract together literally sit down in a room yeah I don't remember which which case it was but that process of just kind of hashing through the language and making sure that everybody had clarity around what it meant bringing in their legal counsel you know so that they had you know say and all of that that in itself just understanding what the expectations are again those long-term goals what are they you know just clarifying them and starting on that right foot yeah everybody's starting on that same path in the same beat with the same mindset is truly integral.

Well I think that they found generally speaking when we asked them to kind of estimate the return on investment of that time because it was significant time they all said it was worth it and because they gained so much time later on with not dealing with problems so one of the trade partners said you know all that time in early planning we were frustrated at first and like you know why are we spending all this time but in the end we think it was probably about the same amount of time or maybe less overall that we spent on this project but the time was spent on how we wanted things to go instead of figuring out what to do when things went wrong so you know if you're going to spend X amount of energy on a project if you can spend it on the positive planning this is what we want to have

happen strategic level and less time on the putting out fires level I think you're going to be more satisfied the project's going to be better and you know maybe it is the same amount of time maybe it's a little bit more maybe it's a little bit less if you're more experienced we're also seeing some of the more serial owners trying to do IPT template contracts we a number of our projects in our in this these cases use the consensus stocks or modified the consensus stocks others used the custom but we're now starting to see kind of real hybrids where they're custom for that owner based on a version of consensus stocks or certain things that they found over time and then they do a much more abbreviated version of bringing the stakeholders on board to explain the contract to them and there's not so much negotiation but it is this kind of clarity of expectations so

we'll see how those those turn out we had if you look closely at the two different Sutter projects one was done with the more negotiated line-by-line type thing that was Sunnyvale whereas Los Gatos was much more of a template and the team members that were experienced that they didn't really think it was that different those two experiences but some of the newer team members you know did have a different experience and we didn't we couldn't really tell that it made a negative experience but it was shorter so you know it's not very clear right now exactly how much time are you spending there we do know that everyone feels that it's worth it in the end but I'm sure it can feel onerous when you're committing to it I mean none of this stuff is easy you know doing complex successful projects is not easy so you're putting the time and effort somewhere yeah it's

all about is it a value-added activity or is it fixing something right no one likes to fix stuff it's frustrating and it's you know it's always a compromise and it's feels like a fire drill and doesn't feel like you're planning and using your time effectively so I think most people especially in the construction industry you know we we would rather things are planned and go the way that we expected you know we measure twice that kind of stuff no this is great thank you so much for digging deep into what we can expect from these research studies and I do want to ask you kind of point-blank here just because you've been seeing so many different aspects I mean from the psychological point of view team-building you've been a practitioner from the design side you you have so much perspective but besides digging into these publications what would you recommend

for people who are well I mean of course doing that too I highly recommend it but what would you recommend for someone who's wanting to take those first steps whether they're an owner architect GC trade partner what would you think yeah so I think there's you know within the building industry there's I've been really impressed with the quality of some of the events that have been being held some of them are through the the groups that you would expect like Kurt and Koa AGC AIA but there's also some smaller things that tend to pop up and so some of them are like more the LCI communities practice or more regional type stuff and so if you find things that have these topic areas with collaboration or with lean then you know if you look up the people that are giving the sessions and kind of get a sense of their their background and what they're going to be

bringing to it then you know those are I think well worth attending in person I know it takes time to get to places but the thing that I find when when I go present this work in person is that I have a lot of really great conversations afterwards and so you know a lot of the value that you get from attending those types of conferences is not so much the presentation which is often podcast or webcast simultaneously but it's in meeting not only the experts that are giving the presentation but the people in the audience are likely very much on some continuum of path that you're on so you're going to find other owners or contractors or subcontractors or whatever that are also just dipping their toe in or who or you're going to find others that have had one or two projects under their belt or you're going to find others that are completely

that's all they do and so that network for you is probably the most helpful thing and in the end a lot of this stuff is really cultural and if we're talking about culture change in the building industry which I think most people in the building industry would agree that we could use a culture change you know I think those statistics around the amount of waste that we have in our system everyone has experienced that and so I don't think there's anyone that says oh we've got a great culture we need to preserve it I think most people are like you know what we should be a lot better we should be less siloed less blaming more efficient more providing value be able to provide a stronger culture that is also more open to women and people of color that would attract that you know who wants to work in a dysfunctional culture so I think if we're talking about culture change

which I really hope is what we're talking about then the reports that I'm doing are really the kind of how to like don't get stuck you know you committed to this now don't get stuck here's different ways that other teams are doing it there's no one way you have to figure it out for yourself but don't get stuck but there's also kind of this person-to-person network that you need to develop that you can call somebody and ask them you know what they did or put their put your problem in front of them and get some feedback from somebody so I would really suggest getting out there in addition to the kind of reading and stuff that you can absorb it's really culture change and culture changes is not fast it's not easy but it can be instead of small incremental change it can be transformative if we can reach a tipping point and I really hope that

we're at the point where we've got enough that we could say we really need to change and take some positive steps towards that. I think there's some momentum here and I think that's what the Constructor podcast is all about we talk about the best way to build it I mean that's the tagline but it really focuses on culture change and it's exactly what you're talking about so I'm so happy that you mentioned that. Well talking about building network well is there a way that people can get in touch with you and or learn more about what you're doing?

Yeah I'm out my faculty web page is always really easy to find so if you just look for Renee Chang at University of Minnesota as long as you're spelling my last name correctly with C-H-E-N-G not A-N-G the website will come up and then I keep a pretty active sidebar with links to all my current research or kind of any intermediate stuff that I can release so that's probably the best way to reach me and also you know my email is on there if you need to reach me directly.

Also I've been at a lot of conferences lately so I'm pretty much have been presenting it at most of the major I've actually been doing a little bit more with the kind of owners groups recently which has been really fun so I'll be at COA in St. Louis in May and then I'll be at AIA also in April before that in Orlando so there's different ways for sure to and I don't always post that kind of stuff on my website so but if you scan for some of those it tends to be on these reports or issues of collaboration issues of integrated project delivery or issues of emerging practices or future type stuff.

Awesome Well thank you again Renee this has been an awesome session talking through your research and being able to share that with the listeners here so thank you so much for your interest yeah and I hope people do take the time to look through the reports. So if you want to hear more about IPD and Lean take a look at the reports first and foremost. The links are in the show notes you can find them at constructor that's constructrr.com slash EP 29 and you can find them there also you can take a listen to our other podcasts that reference IPD and Lean.

One of them of which is how to develop a collaborative culture on every project with James P's and that is found on episode 22. He was actually one of the participants in the research that Renee conducted so again if you like this podcast don't forget to subscribe at constructrr.com you can get email updates from me about the upcoming podcasts and I'm working on some action guides for you because I really do want to make this content actionable for you so you can take and start implementing right away.

In addition to that you can go ahead and subscribe on iTunes or on Stitcher. I look forward to speaking with you guys next week.