Improving Conditions for Green Building Construction In North America | CEC

Executive Summary 

Recognizing that green building requires specialized skills and capabilities on the part of many actors in the building industry, this report reviews education and training opportunities throughout North America and compares those opportunities to the skills and capabilities that are needed now, or are likely to be needed over the next decade. It also identifies gaps between the educational offerings and anticipated needs in the industry, and makes recommendations for bridging those gaps. 

Improving Conditions for Green Building Construction In North America | CEC

All workforce sectors need specific technical skills, such as the ability to work with certain tools or install certain systems, as well as interpersonal skills—the ability to communicate and collaborate effectively. Beyond skills, however, all parties to a green building project will be most effective if they also embrace an ecological mindset of interdependence and interconnectivity and shift their thinking from the conventional, sequential hand-off paradigm of design and construction. 

Successful education and training programs typically have one or more of the following characteristics:

• Knowledgeable, charismatic trainers with experience in the field 
• Peer-to-peer mentoring
• Online education that is accessible whenever the students can make time for it 
• Short-format instructional videos 
• A focus on the “why” of green approaches in addition to the “what”

The recommendations include specific suggestions for disseminating these best practices, along with steps for addressing the following gaps: 

• Ecological mindset and awareness 
• Soft-skills training and mentoring 
• Financial benefits and evaluation
• Training in specific technical fields 
• Cross-disciplinary education and training 

In addition to these industry-specific education and training needs, the report points out the value of educating those who can drive demand for green building, especially corporate clients in the United States and Canada, and government officials in Mexico.
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If you are interested using lean project delivery practices to deliver high performance green building and working on getting all new building to be NetZero Energy by 2020, please contact me with an email supporting this initiative.

For more information on Commission for Environmental Cooperation 

Thank you for your support in helping to make the Building Industry more Sustainable

Murray Guy @Lean_tobe_Green
Learn: LEAN LAB. … Design: Integrated Designs … Build: EcoSmart
For inquires: Mguy@i-designs.ca or 306.934.6818

4 Ways the Future of Learning is Changing | Randy Swearer

As the world becomes increasingly complex, the old Industrial-Age approach to higher education—studies of siloed individual subjects such as math, language, and science—has to change.

4 Ways the Future of Learning Is Changing: "

One of the hallmarks well-regarded universities share is their history as longstanding institutions of education and tradition. But disruption of how people make (and how they learn to make) things is erupting everywhere. So in the future of learning, if universities don’t ride the waves of change, they (and their students) won’t be able to keep up with the evolution of industries and jobs—and more broadly, the demands of a complex, global society.

Higher education must adapt to the 21st century—in learning, in culture, and in developing future leaders. And it won’t look anything like the current college experience.

1. No More Lectures. That’s right: The days of showing up to an hour-long lecture at 8 a.m. will slowly diminish. Traditional teaching pedagogies are ripe for disruption, and it’s starting with the new idea of “flipped classrooms.”

2. Not Just a Degree: Micro-credentialing. The boundaries of having just “one” role in a career is eroding: Skills and knowledge across disciplines is becoming more evident and necessary. Unbundling of degrees is gaining traction as an approach to actually get multidisciplinary education into practice.

3. It’s the Student Experience That Counts. Universities must adapt to the idea of expanding learning opportunities outside of campuses—to local businesses, major corporations, nonprofits, and other institutions.

4. No More Grades. The grading system started around 150 years ago, and it requires more than evolution; it needs a revolution. How do you quiz a business student interning with a company as part of their real-world application of materials in a flipped classroom? How do you take all of those multi-channels that students are confronted with and bring them together into a graded experience? Right now, you can’t.

Integration of education is the key because learning happens everywhere—in the classroom, in outside experiences, and online. It’s not about the knowledge channels; it’s about the connections between them. So each university must bring that integration to bear on the needs of its students.


If you interested in trying an Online course to develop your Lean and Green project skills, you may want to check out Lean Lab.

Murray Guy aka @Lean_tobe_Green
Learn: LEAN LAB. … Design: Integrated Designs … Build: EcoSmart
For inquires: Mguy@i-designs.ca or 306.934.6818

Is it Time to FLIP the Education System?

The Flipped Classroom - Education Next : Education Next: "The Flipped ClassroomOnline instruction at home frees class time for learning
By Bill Tucker 

Four years ago, in the shadow of Colorado’s Pike’s Peak, veteran Woodland Park High School chemistry teachers Jonathan Bergmann and Aaron Sams stumbled onto an idea. Struggling to find the time to reteach lessons for absent students, they plunked down $50, bought software that allowed them to record and annotate lessons, and posted them online. Absent students appreciated the opportunity to see what they missed. But, surprisingly, so did students who hadn’t missed class. They, too, used the online material, mostly to review and reinforce classroom lessons. And, soon, Bergmann and Sams realized they had the opportunity to radically rethink how they used class time.

It’s called “the flipped classroom.” While there is no one model, the core idea is to flip the common instructional approach: With teacher-created videos and interactive lessons, instruction that used to occur in class is now accessed at home, in advance of class. Class becomes the place to work through problems, advance concepts, and engage in collaborative learning. Most importantly, all aspects of instruction can be rethought to best maximize the scarcest learning resource—time.

The Benefits of Flipped Classroom Learning

• Fostering better relationships, greater student engagement, and higher levels of motivation.
• Creating videos forces instructors to pay attention to the details and nuances of instruction—the pace, the examples used, the visual representation, and the development of aligned assessment practices.
• Course redesign offers an opportunity to reengage students and improve their motivation
• Instructional videos are powerful tools for teachers to create content, share resources, and improve practice.

Flipped classroom teachers almost universally agree that it’s not the instructional videos on their own, but how they are integrated into an overall approach, that makes the difference. 

It is TIME to Flip the Education systerm on it's head?

Murray Guy aka @Lean_tobe_Green

Learn: LEAN LAB. … Design: Integrated Designs … Build: EcoSmart

For inquires: Mguy@i-designs.ca or 306.934.6818

Add some Discipline to the Building Design Process | Murray Guy

Target Value Design is a disciplined design management system that turns the traditional design process upside down. Unlike traditional design processes where teams often design in silos and the final cost is not known until after the tender, target cost design is a dynamic process that involves the contractors that are going to be doing the work. It involves establishing a clear target, developing fully integrated design solutions with the whole team that meet the requirements and testing assumptions to the requirements and cost. Simple as that!

The target cost design process requires that the design team completely understands the Project Requirements and what represents value for the owner, tests design assumptions early and regular for value, keeping all options open until the last minute and finally choosing and integrating the best concepts that create the best value for the target cost. 

In this four-hour work shop, you will participate in the design of a Smart Building Net Zero project that will be a building of the FUTURE. Through collaborative and the adoption of lean and more integrated practices we hope to establish a conceptual DESIGN to meet the TARGET requirements and cost while provide exceptional VALUE.

The design workshop will include six clusters of 4 to 8 people organized around building systems including foundations, structure, envelope, interiors, mechanical, electrical and communication systems.

1. The first round of the simulation will include an assessment of the Project Requirements document and a testing of assumptions with the Owner’s representative.

2. This will be followed by a short pull planning session to plan the afternoon, establish milestones and deliverables.

3. The cluster groups will then proceed with 20 minute refinements of design, followed by 20-minute report outs of the cluster groups to the overall design cost to the target.

4. Finally, we will collaborate, integrate and innovate until we develop a solution that meets or exceeds the project requirement at or below the target cost.

The work shop will conclude with a discussion on how collaboration and integration can be used to deliver higher performance at less cost enabling teams to be more competitive.

Murray Guy aka @Lean_tobe_Green

Learn: LEAN LAB. … Design: Integrated Designs … Build: EcoSmart

For inquires: Mguy@i-designs.ca or 306.934.6818

WHY we need to Fix the Construction Industry | Murray Guy

Customers will first buy WHY you are in business. In the building industry customers are looking for VALUE that our industry fails to deliver on most projects due to inefficiency and bad behavior.

With the right team everyone wins. The Owner gets better VALUE! The Team benefits from higher PROFIT margins! The Planet wins with much higher levels of sustainable PERFORMANCE!

WHY Not adopt a more collaborative and productive approach like Toyota that has enabled them to become 3X more profitable than their closest competitor? 

There is evidence that our industry is inefficient and that productivity has been declining. In the Book Broken Buildings Busted Budgets we learn that this inefficiency costs the North American Building Industry, $500 Billion per year. When there is waste there is also opportunity for companies to take advantage through innovation, integration and the adoption of new processes.

In our case study projects, we explore how lean can be applied to any type of project to fix broken budgets or to take a new project to much higher levels of performance. With lean practices we can deliver exceptional value at less cost, with less stress and with much smaller contingencies.

Where there is waste, there is also opportunity to achieve much higher levels of performance. The Lean Construction Institute (LCI) has developed a system that enables TEAMS to deliver project with 200% improvements in productivity, 40% reductions in capital cost and 30% reductions in operating costs.

In a survey conducted by AIA, the top five reasons building owners are adopting Lean Project Delivery (LPD) are:

1) Market advantage as industry leaders

2) Managing cost predictability

3) Schedule predictability

4) Reducing or managing risk

5) A higher degree of technical complexity is feasible

With government and business leaders motivated to improve productivity and address climate change, LPD is a solution that does both. Industry leaders are able to deliver buildings that have #NetZeroEnergy use at no additional cost as demonstrated on NetZeroEnergy projects like EcoSmart Prefab Green home, Okanagan College and the Mosaic Center.

If you are interested in becoming a leader in the Lean Construction market consider joining the Lean Construction Institute - Canada or arrange for a workshop or training at Lean Lab.

Murray Guy aka @Lean_tobe_Green | mguy@i-designs.ca

Integrated Designs  | EcoSmart  | Lean Lab   

You made it to the end ... Have an Awesome Day

http://www.slideshare.net/mguy/moneyball-high-performance-at-less-cost

How Lean is your Project?

The adoption of Lean principles and practices can be applied to any project. The level of performance improvement will be dependent upon the level of team integration and how well the team collaborates and implements lean methods and strategies.

Through a workshop process led by Professor Paolo Tombesi, Chair of Construction at the University of Melbourne and Markku Allison, resource architect for AIA, they determined key markers that define a lean and fully Integrated Project Delivery (IPD) team.  They organized the characteristics into Markers unique to IPD projects and the key strategies employed and published these in an  IPD Case Study 

They are as follows:

IPD Markers

• Relational Contracts 
• Protection from litigation 
• Aligned project goals (Jointly Developed Project Target Criteria) 
• Informed and balanced decision-making (Collaborative Decision Making) 
• Open Communication 
• Risks Identified and Accepted Early 

IPD Strategies

• Key Participants Bound Together as Equals (Multi-party Agreement) 
• Budget & create team for design intensive work 
• Early contribution of expertise (Early Involvement of Key Participants) 
• Pre-existing relationships between parties 
• Champion/ Facilitator (Leadership by All) 
• Shared Financial Risk and Reward Based on Project Outcome 
• Liability Waivers between Key Participants 
• Fiscal Transparency between Key Participants 
• BIM - virtual rehearsal of construction and ongoing constructibility reviews 
• Lean Construction processes 
• Co-location 

They also studied the motivations for selecting Lean Project Delivery:

• Market advantage:  IPD may give the firms valuable experience upon which to market themselves as industry leaders. 
• Cost predictability: All projects would like to meet budget, however, for some the predictability of cost is a notably driving factor. 
• Schedule predictability: Similar to cost, all projects share the goal of meeting their planned schedule, but for some projects this is a major factor. 
• Risk Management: Reducing or managing risk can be tied with cost or schedule, but also may include transactional risk inherent to project type, site or other conditions. If risk management is a critical factor, the increased communication in IPD may be of particular advantage. 
• Technical Complexity: A high degree of complexity will usually demand integration of expertise and require a level of coordination that is achievable in an IPD environment. 

Collaboration and integration can occur with any project delivery method, however, IPD sets up structures that make it more likely to occur than not.  

For more information on Lean Project Delivery, you can arrange for a work shop or take a course at LEAN LAB .  If you would like help implementing lean on your project, Integrated Designs can join your team as a facilitator.

Murray Guy @Lean_tobe_Green
Mguiy@i-designs.ca

Lean Lab | Integrated Designs | EcoSmart 

How to Fix a Broken Budget with Target Value Design

At the Richardson College for the Environment project we turned the design process on its head as we needed to try and meet the expectations of project stakeholders that were initially told to “Dream Big” on a not so BIG budget. The financial reality was there were only funds for a much smaller dream of $38.5M and not the $50M that was the price tag for the initial design.

Our team was tasked with finding over $10M in savings, as there was no money to be found to build the dream. We were living the "Broken Buildings Busted Budget" reality which was the book that was used to convince the U of W that we needed to adopt the Lean Project Delivery approach.

As a framework for assessing how well the process worked for the design phase, I have adapted an article that was written by Glen Ballard one of the founders of the Lean Construction Institute. My reason for doing this is that our team delivered an exceptional project and I was interested in knowing how close we came to implementing what would be considered best practices for Target Value Design (TVD). 

Project Summary

Target Value Design together with a Relational Contracting enabled the RCFE team to fix a BIG Dream project on a Smaller Dream budget and deliver an exceptional project that did achieve the project requirements within amazingly tight time and budget constraints. The team needed to get started with shoring and foundations before the project was designed, deliver a $43.8M 70% laboratory building project with 65 fume hoods, vivarium, green house with only a $750,000 contingency. This was achieved which is amazing considering that $450,000 of the contingency was used on one code related issue that emerged on an interpretation of stairwell pressurization to meet fire code. 

Our team exceeded the LEED Silver requirements, Got Gold and through Innovation and Imagination in Laboratory design deliver one of North Americas most energy efficient laboratory projects at 58% less energy that MNECB.

For the full article Lean Lab Blog

For a workshop on Target Value Design 

Lean-Lab | Target Value Design | An Assessment of the RCFE Project: "Target Value Design | An Assessment of the RCFE Project

March 2, 2016

Upon review of the TVD process, our team did pretty darn good!

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