Programming for sustainable building design: addressing sustainability in a project delivery process

This paper addresses the implementability of sustainable design guidelines while emphasizing the need for introducing project delivery processes. Reporting on two components integral to the development of Minnesota state sustainable design guidelines the paper provides the results of an inductive analysis of five major guidance documents and of a survey of selected Minnesota professionals. Results corroborate several shortcomings that pertain to the lack of clear measures and when and how specific tasks need to be conducted in a project delivery process. However, a number of positive tendencies are observed including addressing sustainability early in a project delivery process, awareness and involvement of clients and users, partnership and team building, linking technical issues to project phases, and referencing sustainable guidance documents to other policy documents. Concomitantly, a number of features are incorporated in a manner that avoids the missing process aspects of current documents and that overcomes obstacles expressed by the professional community of Minnesota.