THE CONTINUOUS VALUE ENHANCEMENT PROCESS TO EFFICIENTLY ACHIEVE SUSTAINABLE PROJECT OBJECTIVES

Sustainable building projects present numerous challenges to project management teams that are not always addressed effectively. Few explicit project management processes are available for managing sustainability goals and requirements on construction projects. Consequently, sustainable objectives are often managed separately from other project objectives and treated as “tack ons” to regular project requirements. This creates inefficiencies in the delivery process leading to additional costs and schedule overruns, as well as missing opportunities to improve sustainable building performance. To minimize missed opportunities and maximize the integration and advancement of sustainability in building projects, the Continuous Value Enhancement Process (CVEP) was developed. This process harnesses the knowledge and competencies of construction professionals to enable project teams to take advantage of inherent synergies between sustainable building and constructability practices. CVEP provides a systematic process to evaluate project decisions and generate potential solutions that improve project performance and sustainable project objectives while and monitoring the process with an in-process metric. In this paper, four tests are described that show how CVEP collects sustainable building solutions that improve project constructability; provides a systematic evaluation process; consistently generates potential value enhance ments from project team members; and produces significant sustainable building solutions that result in actual first cost savings. Initial results of CVEP implementation on the Pentagon renovation project indicate that the process is working as intended resulting in previously untapped sustainability ideas being exposed.