Delivery Method - Construction Documents and Services - A.R.E. Live

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Mike: Cool. Okay, number four, "Your client is looking for advice on a project delivery. Their main concern is speed and schedule. Which delivery method would you likely suggest?" So okay, the obvious set of choices of project delivery would be the standard, which would be design, bid, build. Which is where you, as the architect, get hired to design something, eventually you get to the end of your process, it's bid out to a number of different contractors, eventually a contractor is chosen, and then they build it.
So there's a bunch of advantages to that but speed is definitely not one of them. Another logical one would be design build, another possibility would be construction manager, or CM. I'm just going to say construction manager, CM. Construction manager is when an owner, instead of hiring a GC, actually hires a construction manager on staff. Now I'm saying on staff, there's a couple different ways it could be. It wouldn't necessarily be an employee in the technical sense, but I think that's the easiest way to think about what a construction manager is, it's like an employee. And so a construction manager is somebody who's employed by the owner. And the idea for a construction manager is there's a couple things. One is, clients don't like the fact that the GCs get to have all that overhead and profit going to them, and it would be nice if they could take that profit back.
Well, by hiring a construction manager, you're taking the profit back because you are now effectively acting as your own GC. But the big reason, especially on the exam, the big reason the construction manager is a useful, is that it brings a lot of cost information because you have somebody who's there to help do all the estimates early on. So the construction manager and the architects at schematic design, design development, are talking about cost and pricing all the way through. So construction manager, that's the big advantage to get that early cost information. So a bunch of advantages to design build, a bunch of advantages construction manager. None of them are really about being superfast.
The main one that's going to be about fast, it even has fast in the name, fast-track. And so that's going to be the answer. Fast-track is a completely ridiculous way to build, but it's very quick. Fast-track is where you start building...or excuse me, you start designing the excavation and concrete for the foundations, you get that package up, you hand it over to the contractor, they start building it. While they're building that, you start designing the structural frame and maybe the shell. You do that set of drawings, you hand that over to the contractor, they start building it as soon as they get it, as soon as the foundation is done, and then you're now back onto designing the interiors and the other things.
So you go through a whole series of these different packages, and that allows the project to move forward much more quickly than obviously compared to something like design, bid, build. Or even design build. Design build is going to be faster than design, bid, build, but not as fast as fast-track. And that obvious disadvantage to designing while the building is going on is that clearly you're going to make mistakes, and things you're not going to know, information you need to know. Like are you going to put the foundation in?
But then maybe you decide down the road that you really need to have plumbing in a different part of the building as well, and so now somebody's got to go back through. Instead of doing it before they put the foundation in, they have to put it in after, and it costs a lot of extra money. So fast-track is always more expensive, but the question there is often it's more expensive because you have to make adaptations and change things, but that more expense may be less money than the total cost if you start looking at a very expensive site. Like the loan costs for building in the middle of Manhattan, or something like that.
It may make sense to spend $500,000 extra doing it fast-track in order to get the building up and running faster, because you might save more than the $500,000 in that process. So okay, design, bid, build, design build, construction managers. There's a few other ones as well, those are some of the main ones. In this case, they're clearly talking about fast-track. Fast-track is not particularly common, it shows up every once in a while, but it's common on the exam because it's such a particular thing and it's an easy one to ask questions about.

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Fast track is a scheduling technique and is not a actually project delivery.