Strategy Guideline: Partnering for High Performance Homes

High performance houses require a high degree of coordination and have significant interdependencies between various systems in order to perform properly, meet customer expectations, and minimize risks for the builder. Responsibility for the key performance attributes is shared across the project team and can be well coordinated through advanced partnering strategies. For high performance homes,traditional partnerships need to be matured to the next level and be expanded to all members of the project team including trades, suppliers, manufacturers, HERS raters, designers, architects, and building officials as appropriate. In an environment where the builder is the only source of communication between trades and consultants and where relationships are, in general, adversarial as opposedto cooperative, the chances of any one building system to fail are greater. Furthermore, it is much harder for the builder to identify and capitalize on synergistic opportunities. Partnering can help bridge the cross-functional aspects of the systems approach and achieve performance-based criteria. Critical success factors for partnering include support from top management, mutual trust,effective and open communication, effective coordination around common goals, team building, appropriate use of an outside facilitator, a partnering charter progress toward common goals, an effective problem-solving process, long-term commitment, continuous improvement, and a positive experience for all involved.