Board Reflections

I know … I know. When I joined DBIA, everyone told me the same things you heard — all that talk about membership diversity. I must have been told a hundred times about how this organization is different: “At DBIA everyone matters.” “DBIA is all about integration, forming real teams that value each member’s input.” “It’s about being responsible for your teammates as much as for yourself.” But somewhere along the line someone must have made a mistake. They let a specialty contractor in as chairman!

In most organizations this news would have elicited a shout from the floor, “What in the world have we done?” But here at DBIA it is just another example of who we are and what we represent.

With maybe the exception of the U.S. Green Building Council, I don’t think another organization’s membership and constituents are so diverse. DBIA proudly stands today as one of only a few associations that bring together thousands of organizations and individuals representing architects, engineers, public and private owners, general and specialty contractors, manufacturers and suppliers, students, faculty, legal and finance professionals and many more. In fact, not one single group represents more than 20 percent of our total membership.

I remember the first time Joe Critchfield, of Critchfield Mechanical Inc., invited me to attend a DBIA event. I traveled from the West Coast back to Atlanta for a Joint Committee meeting. Joe, always the advocate for design-build, took the membership committee to dinner, and that is where I first saw the difference.

Around the table were representatives from every discipline of our industry. Each person respectfully engaged in open dialog about how we collectively could make our industry better. Not one person presented himself or herself as “the key to success.” Instead, each person was convinced that the integrated model best served our industry, our employees, and most important, our customers. Each person mattered.

For 15 years, DBIA has stood firm on its mission to not only be the “center of expertise for design build practice” but to be “inclusive of all project participants in integrated services delivery.” Our history, though short, is marked by this diversity. Owners, architects, engineers, general contractors and yes, even subcontractors, have held the chair position.

Each DBIA chair, regardless of background, focused on the same objective: to demonstrate the value integrated delivery brings to the built environment. Whether through advocacy, training, the development of our Manual of Practice or contract documents that truly promote collaboration, all have contributed to the success and wide implementation of design-build.

Looking forward, the use of design-build continues to evolve and grow. And while there may be some application in other forms of project delivery, all emerging technologies in our industry work best with the integration inherent in design-build. Whether meeting LEED® or LEAN standards or using building information modeling on the latest project, design-build provides the best framework for success.

How things work, how things fit and how things flow can only be maximized when all team members work together.

As Collaboration, Integrated Information, and the Project Lifecycle in Building Design , Construction and Operation, a white paper by the Construction Users Roundtable, states: “Expanding project teams to include designers, contractors, suppliers, manufacturers, facility managers, etc., with all participants adopting a systems approach to project execution, would result in true collaboration in the best interest of the project.”

While other project delivery methods struggle with compliancce, design-build finds harmony by allowing the most capable people to make decisions in the best interest of the project, no matter what name appears on their hard hats.

I am convinced that gigantic gains in our industry will only come when we collectively look for solutions. We need solutions that make our industry more attractive to the best and brightest employment candidates, solutions that make the jobsite more functional, that put decisions in the hands of those most capable, that allow us to build “better, faster, cheaper and with no compromise to quality” and solutions that meet customer needs.

True solutions come from multiple disciplines working toward a common objective. There are no gaps between what an owner wants and what the design-builder delivers. Success in design-build is that point in time where everyone realizes that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

Without that mutual respect, all of us are … well … just subcontractors.