Piloting evaluation metrics for high performance green building project delivery

High-performance green (HPG) buildings are becoming more widely adopted due to their potential to reduce energy costs, and to improve the health and productivity of occupants; creating an expectation of $10-20 billion value of green building construction starts by 2010, reported by Mc-Graw Hill. The emphasis on energy and indoor air quality aspects of high-performance green buildings leads to a need for superior planning, design and construction processes to achieve high-performance green goals within realistic financial and time constraints. The current literature offers product based high-performance metrics as a part of existing building assessment systems (e.g. LEED™ and Green Globes™) as well as metrics to study actual building performance, but lacks descriptive project delivery evaluation metrics. This gap in the literature inhibits project teams to fulfill the desired project goals and results with missed opportunities in the delivery process and shortcomings in the project performance outcomes. The limited green building population and the lack of knowledge about important project delivery evaluation metrics and methods to collect data in this field present the first challenge in HPG building project delivery research. Acknowledging these limitations, the purpose of this research is to advance the knowledge needed to deliver HPG buildings by piloting evaluation metrics for HPG building delivery. The research is exploratory in nature that aims to provide a foundation for future research by defining meaningful evaluation metrics, methods and tools to collect and analyze HPG building project delivery data. A mixed method is utilized to achieve these aims that start with a quantitative analysis examining a pool of HPG project delivery data collectively and than continues with a qualitative analysis to support the findings of quantitative analysis and draw additional lessons from case studies. The results lay a foundation for rigorous and high yield HPG building project delivery research and form a guide for the green building community to better deliver high-performance green building projects.