IQ Summer 2011: The Federal Issue - (Page 34)

CASE STUDY// Advanced planning worked at NREL: About 90 percent of the government team’s time on the project was spent in the beginning of the process. that was going to be involved with this contract was there,” she says. “It was so important to N REL that we took a week of our time out of the schedule to sit there and hear what the Design-Build Institute of America had to say about the method and to give us insight.” Leitner says design-build was a natural choice for the project because the method was designed to achieve results that had never been achieved before in a state-of-the-art facility. “Being NREL, we have energy specialists here. But what the design-build team would bring to the table is experience, newer ideas and new approaches,” Leitner says. “We told them what was in the scope of work, but it was more of a statement: ‘This is what it must do. You tell us what it must be.’” PERFORMANCE ANXIETY To select the right design-build team, Leitner says NREL embraced the best practices that the DBIA recommended for procurement, including holding interim interviews with each of the prospective design-build teams during the competition and short-listing three firms. After a months-long national competition, the contract was awarded to the design-build team of Centennial, Colo.-based Haselden Construction LLC and RNL Design of Denver. The group enlisted consultant Leandra Thompson, DBIA, LEED BD+C, president of Northstar Project Management in Aurora, Colo., to help package the performance objectives and substantiation criteria for the contractors. “Even though we’re the DOE and we know a lot about energy movement in buildings, we don’t actually build buildings, so we needed help to have people translate what we knew into a performance requirement that was not only rigorous and understandable but was also doable,” Baker says. Thompson also oversaw the design and construction process and facilitated collaboration between all of the team members, identifying and working through any issues that arose throughout the process. She says the fact that a federal agency was willing to let a design-build team solve this “We had a fixed budget and we had to build a building that was not only iconic but also had to perform well from an energy-efficiency standpoint. It was going to be tough to use a standard approach, so we needed to change the dialogue,” Baker says. Karen Leitner, senior supervisor of contracts and business services for NREL, says that although her colleagues had no previous experience in the world of design-build, they knew it was a delivery method they wanted to pursue. So they turned to DBIA for a design-build instructional “boot camp” about the method. “From the contracting people to the project management people, the engineers, our legal staff and contracting officers, everyone from NREL 34 summer//2011 the quarterly publication of the design-build institute of america

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IQ Summer 2011: The Federal Issue

IQ Summer 2011: The Federal Issue