AEC definitions
Integrated project delivery, or IPD, is a project structure in which the owner, the designer, and the builder sign one agreement, or a set of linked agreements, and share the project's risk and reward. Profit is tied to outcomes they control together. Meeting early is not, by itself, IPD.
Definition
True IPD uses a multi-party agreement, shared contingency, and a limitation on claims among the members, with compensation that puts a portion of profit at risk against agreed goals. AIA and other organizations publish forms. Many teams say IPD when they mean design-build or CM at risk with good workshops. Those can be collaborative and still keep separate risks. If the contracts do not share loss and gain, call the project what the contracts are.
In depth
Read who signs, whose contingency is shared, and what happens if cost exceeds the target. If the builder still holds a traditional GMP and the architect still holds a traditional fee with no shared pool, you have a different delivery method and a collaborative culture.
Target value design, pull planning, and a big room are practices. They can be used without IPD. They do not create shared risk by themselves.
The contract should say how savings are split and how overruns are funded, including whose overhead is at risk and what is not. A slogan of 'we share everything' without a formula becomes a dispute.
Incentives should measure outcomes the team can influence: cost, schedule, and defined quality. A metric nobody records will not change behavior.
A management team with authority to decide, and a record of those decisions, is part of the model. Decisions that still travel through a traditional change-order stack have not been integrated.
Someone still seals drawings. Shared risk does not merge licenses. The architect of record and engineers of record remain responsible for their instruments of service.
The owner participates in weekly decisions and funds a shared contingency.
Owners who want a single price and an arm's-length designer should use a method built for that. IPD fails when the owner joins the meetings and keeps the old contract.
Calling a design-build job IPD because the builder sat in on programming overclaims the contract.
Use IPD for the multi-party risk deal. Use collaboration for the behavior.
Examples
Owner, architect, and CM sign a multi-party agreement. A portion of each firm's profit sits in a pool released against cost and milestone goals.
A project uses a big room and pull planning under a standard GMP. The team calls it collaborative CM at risk, not IPD.
A shared-contingency draw is approved by the management team and recorded. It is not an informal favor.
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