Sustainable Design "Team Building"

Building a "Green Team" and setting project goals is one of the most fundamental steps in creating a high-performance green building, but is often overlooked in the scheduling and financial pressures of our competitive market. In order to benefit from the new opportunities that green buildings offers, all members of the project team must be educated and oriented to the goals, costs and benefits of high-performance green buildings. To be effective, the process must be horizontally and vertically integrated, and "trans-disciplinary". The building team needs to work together to define requirements and to identify synergistic opportunities. Knowledge specific to each system and sub-system must be shared to achieve high levels of integrations and resultant higher levels of building performance.

In a high-performance green building design, the focus is shifted from a compartmentalized process to a multidisciplinary approach. Team members should be involved as the project's goals are being set to ensure that future decisions will be made with the project intentions intact. Early involvement also opens the communication paths for design integration and effective troubleshooting as the project develops. The team created for a high-performance green building may include the project owner, the project user, the building manager, architects, engineers, consultants, a construction manager, the contractor, subcontractors and suppliers, government agencies, the local community and even funding agencies. Nonprofits and universities can provide areas of expertise such as technical information and group facilitation.

For the process to result in an integrated design, all parties must be educated in and committed to the high-performance goals that have been set for the project. This can be done through goal setting early in the process. The Sustainable Building Technical Manual recommends the following steps be taken to develop meaningful and achievable goals: develop a vision statement; develop goals to reflect the vision; define design criteria; and prioritize the design criteria.

In order to create a comprehensive and cost effective design, fee structures and consultant costs must be based on a different time allotment and compensation schedule. A typical high-performance design process is "front end loaded" and research intensive to create a building that goes up more quickly, easier and more economically. This may mean involving consultants earlier in the process, allowing extra time to review performance options through energy modeling and getting preliminary pricing for different options. In this case, schedules and fees must allow for extra time to gather input from the team members and to integrate the information.