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4/15/2006 12:03:00 AM

It takes a team approach to build a better building

Design, bid and build: While this is the traditional way to construct a building, owners and users alike complain that it no longer works. What's needed, according to the director of Rice University's Building Institute, is a new type of management that fosters an integrated team approach versus a sequential delivery system that ends up costing more time and money.

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Close to $700 billion or approximately eight percent of the U.S. annual gross domestic product is spent on construction in this country. The building industry has become so large and projects have become so much more complicated in recent years, building owners and users complain that no one is happy by the time a job is done. The head of the Rice Building Institute at Rice University believes the long-standing design-bid-and-build process needs to be replaced with an integrated approach.

"Creating the built environment in the U.S. involves 1.2 million companies," said Joe Powell, executive director of the Rice Building Institute.

"The industry is large, fragmented and burdened by a wide collection of outmoded traditions, and none of the major players are happy."

Most of the problems, according to Powell, start with the process itself. Traditional sequential product delivery systems, which can often cost too much, take too much time and become too confusing, need to be replaced with an integrated team approach.

"This would allow all the project's experts to get involved earlier in the process," Powell said.

Powell noted that bringing together different building experts -- from the architects, engineers and contractors to the real estate advisers and attorneys -- requires new management approaches, revised legal relationships among the various professional groups, and new insurance and bonding requirements. An integrated construction team also would need to overcome adversarial relationships that have traditionally existed among the different professional groups.  

"Adversarial relationships have been built into the system, making it difficult for the various professional groups to share their expertise effectively," Powell said.

According to Powell, new management structures need to be developed so that the performance of one set of experts is not sacrificed for the motives of another. "We must find better methods for these teams to apportion risks and rewards," he said.

In recent focus group meetings at the university, the Rice Building Institute surveyed 102 building industry leaders representing every major discipline, including financing, design, engineering, construction and management. According to Powell, the feedback from owners and users was that today's rapidly evolving business climate poses serious challenges to those involved in new building construction. By the time a new building is programmed, designed, constructed and occupied, its original purposes may have changed.

"When we interviewed the major owners of various construction projects, they claimed the problem isn't the competence of the professionals involved in a building project," Powell said.

"They believe the problem is poor management and communication. Engineering, design and construction processes have become more sophisticated, but the management of these processes hasn't kept pace."

One of the barriers to improved communication between the professions is their increasing specialization. Powell hopes that eventually the professional schools will incorporate the notion of interdisciplinary collaboration into their curricula.  

Currently, Powell and members of the institute are overseeing the development of alternative project delivery strategies for new health-care facilities. Working with a broadly interdisciplinary group of industry and academic leaders, they will define and analyze the advantages and disadvantages of current systems used to construct the ten largest medical centers in the U.S. Their goal is to recommend a new set of approaches and create a management decision matrix that will represent the most effective delivery systems for different types of health-care buildings.

Powell joined the Rice Building Institute as executive director in 2004. He has nearly 30 years of experience combining architecture, corporate strategic planning and organizational behavior. A registered architect, he earned his undergraduate degree in environmental design and a master's degree in architecture from Texas A&M University.

For more information, contact Powell at jmpowell@rice.edu or Jennifer Evans in the Office News and Media Relations at jevans@rice.edu.