Integrating Project Delivery
About this book
Integrating Project Delivery, published by Wiley in 2017, represents the most comprehensive academic and practical examination of Integrated Project Delivery (IPD) yet assembled in a single volume. The book's four authors — Martin Fischer, a professor at Stanford University's Center for Integrated Facility Engineering (CIFE); Howard W. Ashcraft, a leading construction attorney; Dean Reed, an advocate for lean construction at DPR Construction; and Atul Khanzode, director of technology and innovation also at DPR — bring together decades of combined experience spanning virtual design and construction, relational contract law, lean manufacturing principles, and large-scale project execution.
The book opens by diagnosing a structural problem that has long afflicted the construction industry: the fragmented delivery model. Under traditional design-bid-build and even design-build arrangements, the owner, designer, and contractor operate as sequential handoff agents rather than collaborative partners. Each party optimizes for its own contract scope and risk exposure, generating incentive structures that reward individual cost minimization over collective project value creation.
Information flows late, errors discovered downstream are expensive to correct, and the potential for integrated problem-solving is systematically undermined by contractual boundaries. IPD addresses this fragmentation at its root by replacing sequential bilateral contracts with a multi-party agreement that binds the owner, lead designer, and lead contractor — and potentially many other key contributors — into a single shared legal and financial framework. Under the IPD model, the signatories collectively define a Target Cost for the project, pool a portion of their fees and profit into a shared contingency fund, and agree that final compensation will depend on how actual project outcomes compare to the agreed target.
If the project is delivered within or below the target, the shared pool generates savings that all parties share proportionally. If costs overrun, the pool is drawn down before any individual party absorbs a loss. This risk-and-reward sharing mechanism is the financial engine that aligns incentives across the entire project team.
The authors devote substantial attention to the legal architecture of IPD contracts, with Ashcraft providing detailed analysis of the American Institute of Architects' C191 Standard Form Multi-Party Agreement and related documents. The book explains how liability waivers between project participants — a feature that initially seems counterintuitive — actually foster collaboration by removing the fear of litigation that otherwise discourages parties from sharing information about emerging problems. When no party can sue another team member for project-related claims, all parties have a stronger interest in collective problem-solving than in defensive documentation.
Target Value Design (TVD) is presented as the operational methodology through which IPD teams translate the financial alignment of the contract into day-to-day design and construction decisions. Rather than designing a project and then estimating its cost, TVD inverts the process: the owner articulates the maximum value the project must deliver for the agreed budget, and the design team works iteratively, using cost feedback at every stage, to engineer a solution that meets all value requirements within that financial constraint. This discipline requires co-location of all key disciplines, frequent design review cycles, and a willingness to make early design decisions in concert rather than in sequence.
Lean construction principles — most prominently those associated with the Last Planner System developed by Glenn Ballard and Greg Howell — provide the operational backbone for IPD delivery. The Last Planner System shifts production planning from top-down scheduling to bottom-up commitment-based planning, where the people actually doing the work make weekly promises about what they will complete and collaboratively identify and remove the constraints that stand in their way. This approach generates more reliable workflow, reduces waste from waiting and rework, and surfaces systemic problems earlier in the delivery process.
Building Information Modeling (BIM) is positioned in the book not as a mere technological upgrade but as a prerequisite for effective IPD. When all project participants work from a shared, coordinated digital model, clashes are detected and resolved in the virtual realm before they manifest as physical conflicts on site. The authors explore how multi-model environments, clash detection workflows, 4D scheduling that links the model to the construction timeline, and 5D cost modeling that links elements to real-time budget tracking together create a shared information commons that makes collective decision-making faster and more reliable.
The book is enriched throughout by case studies from real IPD projects, illustrating both the successes achieved and the organizational challenges teams must navigate — including the cultural shift required to move from adversarial to genuinely collaborative working relationships. Fischer and his co-authors present IPD not as a panacea but as a demanding change management challenge that requires sustained commitment from all parties from the earliest stages of project inception.