The Emerging Practice of Design Integration
We had a great conversation with Geoffrey Nelson, Vice President & Director of Integrated Design, The Boldt Company, about his 2024 Congress session, The Emerging Practice of Design Integration.
Along with colleagues Aaron Hanigan of HDR Architecture Inc., Anabella Piñon of California Drywall, Brittany Williams, a design integration leader, and Stuart Eckblad of UCSF Health, Geoffrey will discuss how architects, engineers, and contractors are re-negotiating their roles in the design process to produce better, more integrated and complete design documentation, and more collaborative teams. The session will feature real-world examples from the ambitious UCSF Health Helen Diller Hospital project.
Join us at the 2024 LCI Congress, October 22-25, in San Diego for this session and many more! Register today for the best available rates.
Geoffrey’s experience in Lean and integrated project delivery began on the owner side.
Geoffrey shared that “I was on the owner side at Sutter Health about 10 years ago and helped put together the pre-construction team that delivered the Cathedral Hill Hospital and St. Luke’s Hospital here in San Francisco. These were seminal Lean and integrated projects delivered by the Herrero-Boldt joint venture. After that, I started working for Boldt, a 135-year-old company which, over the last 20 years, has become prominent in the Lean and integrated project delivery space. It’s been great to see Boldt’s California office grow into what it is now.”
“About three years ago, I started working on a very important project for UCSF Health, a $2.875 billion hospital project. It involved demolishing a portion of an existing campus in San Francisco and building a new hospital with 300 beds. I’m leading the Boldt arm of a three-way join venture with Herrero, Boldt, and Webcor, large general construction companies that came together for this project. HDR is the architect of record and Herzog & de Meuron., a Swiss-based architecture firm, is the design architect. It’s a large team—the project includes a cast of thousands.”
The session will demonstrate how design integration creates smoother flow in the field.
With an undergraduate degree from the Rhode Island School of Design and a master’s in urban design from Harvard, Geoffrey shared that this topic is a “personal passion of mine. I’m fascinated with how collaborative project delivery, and integrated project delivery in particular, has been driving the need for contractors to be smarter around design, to understand what other partners are doing so we can better integrate design and construction. In the old universe, we handed designs off to contractors. And we know the problems that created.”
He added, “We will discuss the emerging field of design integration. At first, we called it design management, but designers don’t want to be managed. They want to be integrated, so we pivoted. We will discuss how architects, engineers, and contractors are re-negotiating their roles in the design process to produce better, more integrated and complete design documentation and therefore smoother flow in the field.”
“We have a fantastic panel: Stuart of UCSF Health System who has been delivering projects for 30 years; Aaron of HDR Architects; Brittany, a design integration leader in California; and Annabella of California Drywall, a trade partner project manager who has flexed into design integration,” Geoffrey noted.
Top tips for developing more integrated designs—join the session at Congress for more!
We asked Geoffrey to share a couple top tips as a session preview:
Tip 1
“Take the time in pre-construction to deeply understand each other’s deliverables. Get into more detail than you think you need to, even when doing the first design schedules. Plan out the preconstruction design effort with all the partners with significant roles. Get to agreement on what the term construction documents mean. Trade partners’ shop drawings are different from an architect’s definition of traditional construction documents.
In integrated projects, we can deliver a much more coordinated set of drawings. In the traditional process, an architect does a construction document but that still gets handed to the trades to do shop drawings. In integrated design, you can pass the pencil to your trade partner much earlier and have them complete the design with you and be fully coordinated. That makes a huge difference.”
Tip 2
“For owners, have each partner share their staffing plans early. When trying to build a team like this, you need to force each partner—contractors, architects, engineers, plumbers—to share our staffing plans. Unless we know what other parties are doing with their staff, we will have double-ups and gaps. I can’t rationally plan for design management if I don’t know how far I’m taking the design vs. how far the architect is going to take it. We need to share our work—here’s when I’m planning to bring these people on. When we share our staffing plans, our resource-loaded work plans, we all learn a tremendous amount.”
The session will cover specific strategies and examples from the UCSF Health Helen Diller Hospital project.
Geoffrey shared a sneak peek of the real-world examples that will be covered:
“During the UCSF Health Helen Diller Hospital project, we spent a lot of time building a design to permit to construction schedule that balanced the constraints of completing the design with the need to release procurement, fabrication, and installation at the right time. That’s always been the challenge—how fast can you pull all that information together, to buy steel, to pour concrete, to do things you can’t undo.
In traditional delivery, the builders rarely care enough about the constraints that designers have of completing the design, and designers don’t care enough about the constraints we have out on the field, such as how early we must buy something and commit to something.
There is a challenge with major medical equipment in every hospital project. The equipment is huge—structurally and architecturally significant. They drive a tremendous amount of mechanical, electrical, and plumbing service to their location. And of everything in the building, this is what the client wants to pick the latest. They want the latest and greatest and they don’t want to pick it a day sooner than they have to. And because they are so large, heavy, and infrastructure-intensive, we want to nail down the design for this as early as possible. It drives slab thickness, seismic bracing requirements, and much more.
We will talk through this exact example. How do you design a space to accept a future piece of medical equipment when the owner doesn’t want to pick it for two years? We came up with a strategy to design for a strawman installation and plan for a certain amount of rework at certain times. With an integrated team, you can do this. You can recognize that you have these impossible issues but can plan for a process that gives you most of the best of all worlds.”
Top Takeaway—Design integration, though challenging, is necessary, fun, and rewarding.
We asked Geoffrey to share one top takeaway he expects attendees to gain:
“Growing your antenna towards design integration is hard but also necessary and can be a lot of fun. If we support our teams in being more collaborative and more deeply understanding of how each does their work, it will make everyone’s jobs less stressful and more rewarding. And you do need to focus on this and have people who care about it, because it rarely happens organically.”
Who should attend? Everybody!
Geoffrey noted that builders, designers, and owners will all gain value from this session. Specifically—
- Builders who want to understand more about how designers work and build their work plan
- Designers who want to understand better how their work directly releases all the predecessors for construction and therefore supports construction flow
- Owners who want to understand how to get their teams to think this way and what they need to do to culturally support more integrated design behavior
The LCI community shares collaborative project delivery values and that’s important in the field.
We discussed what Geoffrey is looking forward to at Congress this year—and every year. He said, “I’m an LCI junkie. I was on the small planning committee for the 2014 Congress in San Francisco. That’s when it crossed over from a small conference to a large one. That’s the first time we brought on a big-time speaker, and it turned out to be a huge success. I love seeing how Congress has grown and how the community has grown. I love catching up with everyone from around the country who I’ve met through LCI.”
“When you’re out in the wild crossing paths with people on jobs, going after projects, when you bump into people from the LCI world, you know you can trust them because you share collaborative project delivery values. People who get into LCI don’t get into this for a financial killing. It’s because it’s the right way to deliver projects.”
If you’re an advanced Lean practitioner, commit to continuous improvement by attending Congress each year.
Geoffrey noted, “You can’t simultaneously say you are committed to continuous improvement without continuously trying to improve. Attending Congress is how you experience the state of the art. If you’re committed to continuous improvement, you need to come to Congress each year.”
If you’re new to Lean, attend Congress to learn rewarding project delivery practices and bring a fresh perspective to the conversation.
“At Congress, you’ll learn there’s a new and rewarding way to deliver projects. Even doing it a little bit, you’ll get to see people going much further than you. Even I always learn something,” noted Geoffrey.
He added, “As the freshest set of eyes in the room, new people bring huge value. In Lean, we call it the beginner’s mind. They’re fresh and not held back by thinking it’s supposed to be this way. Naiveté is a superpower. New people ask great questions and help us all bring our game up.”
Don’t miss this session and many more at Congress. Explore the program and join your Lean partners in San Diego! Register today.