Dive Brief:
- Developer Matthews Southwest Inc. has awarded general contractor Balfour Beatty a $780 million contract to lead the design-build process for the $900 million Broward County Convention Center expansion project in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida.
- The project includes the addition of 525,000 square feet of meeting space and construction of a new, 800-room, 29-story Omni Hotel, which will also feature 73,000 square feet of meeting and ballroom space and and an 11,000-square-foot spa and fitness center. When the project is complete, the convention center will offer up 1.2 million total square feet of event, exhibition and meeting space.
- Preliminary work has started for the project and will continue into next year, with construction scheduled for completion in 2023.
Dive Insight:
In order to deliver the project as efficiently as possible, Balfour Beatty said it plans to use the latest technology and building principles, including building information modeling (BIM), virtual reality and lean construction methods, including target-value design (TVD).
TVD delivery is driven by collaboration between all project stakeholders through every phase of construction in order to ensure that the operational needs and values of the end user are met. The method is also used to make sure that the project is delivered within budget and with the innovative measures necessary to increase value and to eliminate the waste of time, money and effort.
According to a consultant paper posted by the Lean Construction Institute, TVD involves such concepts as:
- Design based on an estimate rather than an estimate based on design.
- Designing for constructability rather than trying to determine the constructability of a design.
- Designers working in pairs or large groups instead of in isolation form each other.
Mark Konchar with Balfour Beatty told Construction Dive last year that no matter what the delivery method is — integrated project delivery, design-bid-build, design-build, etc. — that the company will use its SmartStart program to kick off every job because, Konchar said, when projects start off on the wrong foot, they tend to end that way as well.
The SmartStart program entails aligning team members in such project areas as behavior, values, governance, scheduling and strategy. SmartStart also calls for safety, constructability and lifecycle costs to be taken into consideration. If the project team cannot create that collaborative environment within the first 100 days of the project, Konchar said, then the remainder usually will not run as seamlessly as it could have with everyone on the same page.
