Integrated Project Delivery (IPD)
A project delivery approach where the owner, architect, and key contractors sign a single multi-party contract and share risk and reward collectively, structured specifically to align everyone's financial incentives toward the project's overall success rather than each party protecting only their own piece.
Why it matters
Traditional delivery methods can put the owner, architect, and contractor in adversarial positions, each protecting their own contract and their own risk. IPD tries to remove that friction by making everyone's profit genuinely tied to the same shared outcome, encouraging real collaboration instead of each party just managing their own exposure.
On a real project
On an IPD hospital project, the owner, architect, and general contractor sign one shared agreement with a pooled profit tied to hitting the overall project budget and schedule together, rather than each party protecting only their own separate contract.
Who this matters most to
A Preconstruction Manager works far more collaboratively with the design team under IPD than under a traditional delivery method, since design and construction decisions are made jointly rather than handed off sequentially. A Project Manager has to manage a genuinely shared risk pool instead of just their own company's separate contract.
Where this goes wrong
A project team adopts an IPD contract structure but keeps operating with the same adversarial habits as a traditional delivery method, protecting individual scope and documenting disputes defensively instead of collaborating. The shared risk pool the contract was designed around doesn't actually change behavior, since a contract structure alone can't force genuine collaboration if the team culture doesn't shift along with it.