Preliminary Project Descriptions: Deliverable & Design Tool

• By: admin
• On: 06/10/2010 01:21:36
• In: Specifying Practice Group
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Louis Medcalf, FCSI, CCS, who wrote an article on PPDs in the May 2010 Construction Specifier magazine (page 24), led the discussion.
He talked about the trend toward the design team to making decisions and understanding how the project will come together earlier in the construction process.

"The industry trends we are all dealing with now point to us needing to understand the building much earlier," Medcalf said. "We need to know how the parts of the facility will in fact function."

"We're looking to make sure that we're thinking of everything that is necessary. This is an analytical tool."

CSI published PPDFormat last month. It was developed in parallel with UniFormat and includes information on how PPDs relate to current industry trends such as Building Information Modeling (BIM), sustainability, lean construction, and Integrated Project Delivery (IPD).

A PPD helps the design team understand their project earlier in the process. It can:

• Help the client and lending institutions make informed approvals and decisions
• Coordinate with published cost estimating systems
• Helps with checklists to verify the project is delivered as planned -- which are very important to commissioning
  

"It helps us understand how the building is supposed to perform, and that's an essential part of the commissioning process," Medcalf said. "They're not just pretty pictures."

Used with UniFormat and MasterFormat, a PPD can help track a goal for a project from the fuzzy conception (any roof membrane) to a specific, bid-able specification (THIS roof membrane).

PPDs can also track design decisions that are based on soft goals, such as sustainability targets that can't be stored as objects in a model.

PPDs in a BIM environment also are not throw-away documents, Medcalf said, which has been the chief reason time-crunched design teams aren't using them.

"The traditional method for designing is that it's beads on string -- you get one document done, and then you throw it away," he said. "That's one of the objections to preparing outline specification -- that they get thrown away."

PPDs can also be useful for planning content of work packages for fast-track projects and for planning the production of Contract Documents for the work packages.

Download Medcalf's presentation (PPT), which includes examples of what a PPD looks like as a document or a table. CSI will make a recording of the meeting available until July 3, 2010.

Specifying Practice Group Leader David Stutzman, CSI, CCS, has posted his notes about the meeting on his blog, SpecWords.

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