Case study validation of the continuous value enhancement process

Sustainable building projects have levels of complexity over conventional building projects that challenge current project management tools at efficiently managing the rigors of sustainable projects. The Continuous Value Enhancement Process (CVEP) is a recently developed tool designed specifically for sustainable building projects. This project management tool enables project teams to systematically generate and evaluate project alternatives for meeting sustainable goals. The goal of this tool is to identify high performance solutions that increase levels of sustainability and improve project performance. CVEP was experimentally implemented and tested on four case study projects to evaluate its ability to support project management decision making in ways that elevate sustainability and project performance. Reported in this paper, the results show CVEP produced first cost and life cycle cost savings. In particular, the study confirms that CVEP has the capability to: 1.) Provide a systematic evaluation process, 2.) Collect high performance building solutions, and 3.) Be applicable to different project types. These results show that it is possible to employ targeted project management techniques, like CVEP, to improve the cost-effective provision of sustainable buildings.