Green buildings have recently become a key aspect of the construction field and bring along a renovation of the whole industry chain. Such changes introduce new challenges for all subjects involved, and designers are also affected by such issues, especially for the development of projects based on international green building standards. Within this scope, project management plays a key role in the optimization of the design phase. This research analyzes the design process of international projects from the project management perspective through a multiple case study approach, considering the sustainability-related tasks that negatively affect the project design development under two types of contractual approaches: Design-Build and Design-Bid-Build. It aims to identify whether the Design-Build or Design-Bid-Build process is the best solution for developing green building projects. Two case studies in Italy and two case studies in Spain are analyzed, and the effects of the project management issues are evaluated under three different points of view: Time, cost, and level of sustainability of the building. A poorly planned process for the achievement of the various green building features of the project can impact the project schedule and the budget, whereas, a poorly managed project could also negatively impact its green building features. Finally, this research also highlights the positive relationship between process integration and green building design development.Sustainability 2020, 12, 2276 2 of 16 of necessary inputs and integrate them to meet pre-defined objectives [18]. During the last years, several research studies have analyzed project management processes to optimize green building projects focusing on various aspects, such as leadership factors [19,20], building information modelling implementation [12,21], lean construction [13,14], economic value [22], schedule performance [23], procurement approaches [24], rating systems [3], best practices [11], project-based organizations [25], processes [1], design teams [26], and design development [27,28].The management of the design phase is especially critical within the facility lifecycle, as any later changes will produce cost overruns and delays [12,29]. Designers involved in the development of projects based on international green building standards face additional challenges, primarily the need for additional design time, uncertainty regarding special equipment and materials, inclusion of green requirements in the contractual specifications, and planning green activities within the general master plan [1,8,29]. In this scenario, the standardization of procedures through green building certification is appropriate [5,30]. This way, reference standards, such as Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design [31], or the British Research Establishment Environmental Assessment Method [32], have begun to be implemented as an international benchmark for the definition of common sustainable quality for buildings. LEED and BREEAM are the most used reference st...

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The development of a green-building project following a specific reference standard, such as LEED or BREEAM, brings new conditions and restrains for all subjects involved in the process. Within this scope, project management plays a key role for the optimization of the design-project development. This research develops a comparative analysis between the design processes of two case-study projects from the project management perspective, taking into consideration all the activities that negatively affected the project design development. The first project design was developed following the so-called "design-bid-build" process with the fragmentation of the process where each subject and technician involved worked independently from the others. The second project design was developed following a "turn-key" philosophy using a completely integrated process. A new methodology was created in order to analyze the project and evaluate the effects of detected project-management issues under three different points of view: costs, time and building sustainability. Such issues were identified by researchers on the basis of the Lean-definition of "waste". The results showed that process integration affects considerably the cost, schedule and sustainability level of the project design and vice versa, the accuracy of the project management tasks affect the sustainability features of the final building design.

The development of a green-building project following a speciic reference standard such as LEED, brings new conditions and restrains for all subjects involved in the process. Such changes afect technicians, owners, bureaucracy and also the management tasks either during design or construction phases. Within this scope, the management of sustainability-related activities plays a key role for the optimization of the design-project development. This research analyzes the design process of two diferent case-study projects undergoing the same green-building certiication from the project management perspective. In both project sustainability-related activities were performed throughout the design process however, in one of them such activities were integrated to the building-design development and in the other they were not. The projects selected for the scope of the research is a new nursing home complex located in Northern Italy and an oice building project in Barcelona (Spain) currently pursuing the LEED certiication. A new methodology was created in order to analyze the project and evaluate the efects of detected project-management issues under three diferent points of view: costs, time and building sustainability. Such "issues" were identiied by researchers on the basis of the LEAN-deinition of "waste". The scope of the research is to demonstrate a positive relationship between integration of the process green-building tasks and successful development of green-building projects within the European construction environment. The results showed that integration of green-building tasks through the development of the design process can considerably afect the cost, schedule and sustainability of the project design. This study focuses on the practical implementation of a methodology developed during a previous investigation where researchers analyzed a single case-study project and developed a method to estimate the entity of project management problems generated by the lack of process integration [11] (Orsi & Guillamón, 2016).

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