THE DEVELOPMENT OF GREEN-BUILDING PROJECTSOPTIMIZATION OF THE PROJECT-MANAGEMENT PROCESSES THROUGH THE LEAN APPROACH.

Abstract

As the world becomes aware of its limited resources it is increasingly important to consider the development of buildings which could respond to the requirements of sustainability. During the last decades the development of the so-called green buildings has been gaining momentum through the implementation of appropriate reference standards, new technologies, innovative design strategies and processes. Such changes introduced new challenges for all subjects involved and, most of all, the need of working with new technologies and services through fully-integrated processes. Designers are also affected by such issue and, within this scope, project management plays a key role for the optimization of the design-project development. This research analyzes the design process of four case-study projects from the project management perspective taking into consideration all sustainability-related tasks and activities that negatively affected the project design development. A new methodology was created in order to analyze the design process and evaluate the effect of detected project-management issues under three main independent variables related to costs, time and sustainability. The research makes full use of the Lean approach to classify the issues, or wastes, experienced during the different design processes and to identify possible solutions for the process optimization. The four case studies are referred to four real projects developed in different European countries under the LEED and BREEAM reference standards. More specifically the four projects are: - One nursing-home located Northern Italy certified under the LEED reference standard. - One school-complex located in Northern Italy certified under the LEED reference standard. - One office building located in Barcelona (Spain) certified under the LEED reference standard. - One office building located in South-East of Spain certified under the BREEAM reference standard. The final scope of the research is to develop a methodology for the analysis of the green-building design processes from the project management perspective in order to identify the problems occurred, optimize the process and provide a tool to prevent unnecessary wastes of money, time and sustainability features.