LONG ISLAND CITY, N.Y. – If you missed last year’s Construction Super Conference in Las Vegas, you missed a lot. The topic of effective design-build collaboration is a prime example. David J. Varoli, deputy commissioner and general counsel, New York City Department of Design and Construction, Long Island City, N.Y., talked about the benefits of collaboration within the hyper-busy environment of the New York construction world.
The following is an edited excerpt from Varoli’s expansive answer (during a CSC educational session) to the question: What does effective collaboration look like on design build projects in the Big Apple and beyond?
“I’m going to start my answer by talking about what collaboration is not. Design-bid-build is not collaboration. We’re government, so everything has to be open and transparent. We do open procurements. We award to the low bidder who is responsive and responsible. There’s no negotiation; there’s no discussion about the contract.
“From the very beginning, in communication between the owner and the contractor and/or the designer, separate procurement is basically limited to the RFI universe. Whenever we get questions about a term in the contract—take it or leave it—that is not collaboration. Now let’s transfer to the other side—project delivery method—which I know has been around for a long time. Design-build has only been in the New York area since 2018. Collaboration in some ways is almost a complete opposite. It is about communication. It is about working together.
“It’s not just when the project kicks off, but it actually starts at the very beginning during the procurement. We are now having conversations with the vendor community about the project, the program, the contract documents, the terms, and conditions. It’s exciting for us to actually be in a conversation and a dialogue with the vendor community with a goal. And I don’t know if you hear this from a lot of owners; We say this whenever we’re given the opportunity to be in front of any audience. We want to be the owner of choice. We know there’s a lot of work out there, especially in the public world. We know we have to compete against other public owners, as well as private owners. So it is in our interest to put out a commercially friendly and fair contract document.
“We stand by that because we have so much work that we have to get done. So for us, collaboration is really at the heart of what we’re doing in our design build. We’ve broken down the silos, we no longer have a design project manager who never talks to the procurement project manager who never talks to the construction project manager. They’re all going to be on the same table, the same page, and it has changed how we’ve done things.
“It’s absolutely astounding to see public projects being brought in, not even on time, but years ahead of the old way of design-bid-build. So to me, collaboration is communication, it’s transparency, it’s a partnership. I want to have a successful project at the end. I want my end user, my 28 ‘children’, to walk into a building or to have a sewer system that works. And I want you, the vendor community, to make a profit. That is as important to us as us getting a good project. That to me is collaboration.”
