Optimization of Green-Building Design Processes –

Abstract

The development of a green-building project following a specific reference standard such as LEED, brings new conditions and restrains for all subjects involved in the process. Such changes affect technicians, owners, bureaucracy and also the management tasks either during design or construction phases. Within this scope, project management plays a key role for the optimization of the design-project development. This research analyzes the design process of a single case-study project from the project management perspective, taking into consideration all the activities that negatively affected the project design development. The project selected for the scope of the research is a new school complex located in Northern Italy currently pursuing the LEED Gold certification with a project cost of 13,2 million Euros. A new methodology was created in order to analyze the project and evaluate the effects of detected project-management issues under three different points of view: costs, time and building sustainability. Such “issues” were identified by researchers on the basis of the LEAN-definition of “waste”. The scope of the research is to develop and test a methodology for the optimization of the project management processes during the development of a LEED building design in Europe through the detection and evaluation of process wastes. The results showed that project management issues related to green-building tasks affect considerably the cost, schedule and sustainability of the project design and vice versa, the accuracy of the project management tasks affect the sustainability features of the final building design.