LEED CoreConcepts&Strategies_3rd edition - Page 046

Extracted Content

Team members should understand green building and have experience participating in a team. The experience and commitment to sustainability needs to extend to subcontractors and trades as well. Requests for proposals and interviews should include questions about experience in green building and sustainability. Ideally, evaluation of bids is based on the best low bid rather than the lowest bid. Even when this is not possible, as on many public projects, prerequisites identified in the RFP can help ensure that teams are qualified. Specific qualifications to look for might be past participation in integrative design processes, experience on green or LEED-certified projects, and LEED professional credentialing, from LEED Green Associate to LEED Accredited Professional. If inexperienced people are on the team, some training and orientation to the process will be necessary.

GOAL SETTING

For a design-build project, the team usually includes the following people:

FIGURE 3.2. Members of an Integrated Team

This guide repeatedly emphasizes the importance of project goals; every green building project needs to be grounded in strong goals and set a clear pathway to ensure they are achieved. Clear goals articulate what the project will be designed to accomplish, by:

•• Making sure that the vision is clear

•• Providing a frame of reference for the whole project

•• Defining the sustainability targets and keeping the project on track to meet them

Setting lofty-sounding general goals can be tempting; however, such goals may not provide enough information to guide a project. For example, saying that a project should be “healthful” may be appealing, but what does that really mean in the project context? How will you know if you are on the right track? This type of high-level goal needs to be accompanied by metrics, things that can be measured, and targets, levels of achievement that should be reached. Each goal may have multiple metrics and targets. For example, if by “healthful” the team means that the project should protect indoor air quality, one metric for that might be the amount of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) in building materials. A target associated with that metric might be that all paints have zero VOCs. There are many attributes to indoor air quality, so in addition to addressing the potential sources of pollutants (such as materials that emit VOCs), the team must develop metrics and targets for proper ventilation.

Project goals and their associated metrics and targets can be both quantitative and qualitative. For example, if a goal is that a neighborhood project be walkable, a team might consider as a quantitative measure the

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