The History of Design-Build - Design-Build for Water and Wastewater Projects - page 7

97

90
80
70
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40
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10

83

68

64

56

53

47

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36

30

33

30

24

20

17

2004 2005 2006 2007 2008

Year

Domestic International

Figure 1-1. The total revenue for international and domestic design-build projects
Source: Computed from Engineering News-Record (ENR) top 100 firms ranking information.

THE PERFECT STORM

The past decade has seen an ever accelerating flow of new technologies and work meth-
ods into the design and construction workplace. While the nature of these new develop-
ments varies, they typically have certain characteristics in common: (1) they are inherently
collaborative in nature; (2) to be optimized, they require early application; and, (3) the
manner in which they operate cuts across the traditional design/construction boundary
that anchors DBB. A partial list of these new approaches includes such things as building
information modeling (BIM), aggressive commissioning techniques, lean construction,
public-private partnerships, integrated product teams and matrix management, and green
building construction.
These new technologies and work methods exemplify the adage that “the whole is
greater than the sum of the parts.” Employing two of these new procedures does not
simply double their cumulative impact; instead, their interaction multiplies the degree of
change that occurs, providing extraordinary results for the resources expended. As these
new methodologies displace outdated processes and are imported into the workplace to
interact with DB project delivery techniques, the result is a “perfect storm” of change
within the industry. Unfortunately for those owner organizations and industry firms that
are wedded to old ways of doing business, DBB is proving remarkably ill-suited to dealing
with this ongoing change.
Using BIM as a representative example, BIM enables modern design-builders to rep-
licate a technique that was often used by renaissance design-builders, the use of models to
effectively communicate what is to be built. In those days, the master builder would often
augment designs and drawings with actual models showing in three dimensions the work
to be done. The model then served to facilitate communication and collaboration between
the master builder and the guild workers on the work site.
BIM produces a three-dimensional representation to serve a similar purpose, but
now the model can be distributed over computers and made accessible to many people
and locations simultaneously. Similarly BIM facilitates interaction among all the parties