You’ll find here an idea that has delivered successful building projects for over 40 years.

Every type of project: libraries, hospitals, homes, manufacturing plants, auditoriums, submarine bases, jails, aircraft maintenance bases, high rises, shopping centers.

For all kinds of owners: corporations, medical facilities, cities, universities, school districts, counties, individuals, public agencies and private organizations.

The idea has been employed productively by business since the Industrial Revolution.

It’s been at the core of defensive-driving courses for years.  Software development firms have made it policy for program development.

And yet it’s a rare idea in building construction.

Most owners have never been introduced to the idea; and wouldn’t know where to start if they had been. Their design consultants aren’t motivated to tell them.

Few owners have had the chance to consider the idea because a zone of silence has evolved in the gap between the owner and the cottage industry that exploits projects to which it hasn’t been applied.

And because it requires a specific kind of fortitude, commitment and perseverance on the part of the owner to span that gap and to carry out the programs the idea requires.

It’s an idea that, effectively implemented, can eliminate 80% of the construction problems that decimate project budgets and invite construction claims. Problems that result from defective construction documents.

It’s an idea that, by enhancing the owner’s awareness of the interrelationships between design, construction and the law, can help an owner reduce the other 20% of construction problems, too—the 20% that can’t be entirely foreseen.

It’s not a new idea. In fact, it’s a throwback to the way buildings were built hundreds of years ago.

It’s an idea that exploits the latest management technologies.  But it has nothing to do with the buzzwords, cant phrases and panaceas that are offered to deliver projects on time and on budget while avoiding claims.

It takes more work and more commitment than those hollow promises deliver.

It also takes a willingness to make some changes in the way things are typically done in design and construction.

The idea is simply to analyze and construct the project on paper while it’s being planned and designed—to analyze the project progressively during design at a level of detail equivalent to what contractors will undertake while bidding and building it.

To implement this idea, it’s necessary to visit the territories of those contractors in order to see this future project as they will see it.

Then, it’s necessary to double back and visit with the design consultants, to see what’s required to facilitate this progressive program of building it before it’s built.

And it’s important to visit that peculiar territory known as the law, to learn how it views the whole matter of projects that get into trouble, and what can be done to keep them out of it.

We’ll be taking a journey through these territories—the territories of contracts administration, programming, design, bidding, construction, and construction-claims resolution.

When you return from our trip through unfamiliar territories, equipped with the resources for your real trip, then you will have a decision to make.

• Either to follow the conventional tracks that have produced a 1,000 percent increase in construction claims in the past 25 years.

Or

• To lay out your own tracks, and to change the way your own project will be measured, managed and documented.

Come along and see what it takes to build it twice, and the values it can bring to your project. Then, you can make your decision.