Julie Brown’s thoughts from last week’s NNECERAPPA conference, held at Phillips Exeter Academy in Exeter Academy in Exeter, NH.

Last week I attended the NNECERAPPA conference held at Phillips Exeter Academy in Exeter, NH. The school was established in 1781 by merchant John Phillips and his wife Elizabeth. While on campus and throughout the sessions at the conference we were told the history of the Harkness Table, and how it revolutionized scholastic teachings on campus.

In November, 1930 philanthropist and oil magnate Edward Harkness gave Phillips Exeter $5.8 million dollars, a staggering sum in those days, to implement his way of teaching, around the Harkness Table, in an effort to make learning more interactive. Harkness described its use: “What I have in mind is [a classroom] where [students] could sit around a table with a teacher who would talk with them and instruct them by a sort of tutorial or conference method, where [each student] would feel encouraged to speak up. This would be a real revolution in methods.”

The graphic on the left is the typical sage on the stage teaching method. The graphic on the right is the Harkness Method.

So, how does this revolution in teaching methods compare to Integrated Project Delivery?

In almost every way.

In the Harkness Model the students act as a team, they all participate without competition. The students work for a collective grade, they all share in the responsibility of the goal – one student cannot get a better grade than his or her peers. They all work for the grade. This is the same in IPD. We all work for the project, the team, is that in the truest sense, they share the risk and the responsibility and the shared goal is the project executed flawlessly.

In both scenarios getting to the goal is a team effort, not only does everyone have to do his or her part, but everyone has to look out for each other, that is what teammates do. Think as a team, act as a team and everyone wins.  Unprepared, unwilling and selfish personalities cannot hide in this scenario – nor will they be able to hide in the minutia and be carried by the team – everyone on an IPD team has to perform at their best.

In IPD, we all work for the project.

More on IPD.

Marlborough Hospital is featured in the Worcester Business Journal. From the article:

Handler said IPD is still very new, but big on the West Coast in health care. “There’s a lot of buzz in the industry on IPD right now,” she said, with close to 100 IPD projects having been completed. She said Marlborough Hospital officials did not need to be sold on the concept. “Once they understood how it aligned all project participants, it just clicked for them,” she said.” They just got it.”

“Each company has been at the table since the first day, all working steadfastly to achieve the shared goal of building an innovative patient-centered facility, said Candra Szymanski, the hospital’s chief operating officer, said in a statement. “This experience has verified for me that I will never build a hospital any other way than through IPD.”

Read the full article here.

Monarch Lofts and its rich history is featured in the Lawrence Vale.

Last week, we wrapped up our February giving project – a linens drive for Mission of Deeds.

Lila Tocci, Director of Company Life and Charitable Giving, handed off our donations to Beth Ryan, Director of Development. Beth expressed her gratitude for Tocci’s donations, which will be shared with needy families in our area.

Yesterday’s NY Times Business section include an article discussing Rio de Janeiro’s “mission control center”, a system and project that promises to revolutionize the way cities are run. Reading about the system and the process of building it, one can draw quite a few parallels to our own industry and transformation.

The Operations Center of the City of Rio is the first of its kind – a citywide system that integrates data from all of Rio’s agencies.

Like BIM, Rio’s system seems to be 10% technology, 90% sociology. The city already had all of the information, but it was in different departments and systems. The system reports all city activities, but takes it a step further by identifying patterns and trends. The NYT article summarizes “Like a corporate chief executive, the mayor wanted to knock down silos among his departments and combine each one’s data to help the whole enterprise.” (We should offer them a great motto: We all work for the city!) The goal is to take Rio a city managed by data.

The $14M project was a massive undertaking for the city and IBM. The NYT article even recognized the parallel to our industry, comparing IBM’s approach to a general contractor – managing the project, subcontracting some of the work to various entities (local and international). Interestingly enough, IBM terms their role the “master integrator”. From the NYT article:

I.B.M. incorporated its hardware, software, analytics and research. It created manuals so that the center’s employees could classify problems into four categories: events, incidents, emergencies and crises. The manuals also lay out step-by-step procedures for how departments should handle pressing situations like floods and rockslides.

I.B.M. also installed a virtual operations platform that acts as a Web-based clearinghouse, integrating information that comes in via phone, radio, e-mail and text message. When city employees log on, they can enter information from, say, an accident scene, or see how many ambulances have been dispatched. They can also analyze historical information to determine, for instance, where car accidents tend to occur. In addition, I.B.M. developed a custom flood forecast system for the city.

If this doesn’t sound like a model for “data-driven building management”, we don’t know what is.

The city is already a model; the mayor spoke last week at TED, and (probably not) coincidently, City 2.0 was the recipient of the 2012 TED Prize. City 2.0 “is the city of the future in which more than ten billion people must somehow live happily, healthfully, and sustainably”. Another connection to note: Autodesk is a sponsor of City 2.0.