Being a truly green design firm depends means more than just knowing green products and technologies.  It involves shifting fundamental business practices and aligning the corporate culture with green project delivery. This includes establishing metrics, changing your relationship with owners and consultants, budget and staffing practices, marketing and strategic planning.  Successful strategies address all levels of staff and must incorporate different types of activities for each level to be effective. Principals need to know how to sell green to clients, project managers need to know how to manage collaborative decision making amongst consultants and designers need to understand details of systems, products and materials.
 
Participants will learn how to frame the concept of collaborative, green design through a business lens to provide a foundation for understanding how to address profitability, transfer of knowledge and project management in the context of green.  The results of this process are transformative and long lasting, creating a legacy within a firm that enhances design excellence and relationships in the community.
 
The strategies in the workshop address all design types including architecture, engineering and construction and apply to any kind of building types from large scale planning to single buildings of any kind. Participants will leave with a clear understanding of how to plan a process that sets a baseline and establishes a strategy that is appropriate to their own specific context. They will be able to realize immediate benefits while working on longer-term successes. The workshop uses interactive exercises to help participants explore and discover connections between basic business strategies and green issues that relate to them, and leaves them with templates and sample workplans that they can use to implement strategies immediately. Participants will understand how to take a holistic and strategic approach to corporate transformation, learning how to craft a strategy and workplan spanning 18 months or more, that engages staff from CEO to CAD operator in ways that transform management and project delivery and enable high quality, cost effective project delivery.

Learning Objectives 

• Learn how to frame the concept of collaborative, green design through a business lens to provide a foundation for understanding how to address profitability, transfer of knowledge and project management - in the context of green.
• Participants learn how to evaluate their firm’s management and identify how their corporate goals can be aligned with green project delivery.
• Participants learn how to develop internal systems and procedures to support green firm management and project delivery. Methodologies address internal, ongoing education and mentoring processes and management approaches as well.
• Take a strategic approach to corporate transformation including crafting a workplan that achieves both immediate and long term benefits and engages staff from CEO to designer in ways that transform management and project delivery.  
• Understand how to apply baseline evaluations and metrics to management and business practices in the context of performance and collaboration and to create different strategies for different levels of staff responsibility that relate to green design 

Breakfast is at 8:00, workshop begins at 8:30.  Lunch is included.

This workshop was recommended as a Master Presentation of Greenbuild

***Please note the Early Registration Rate ends March 18th at 5:00pm***

Facilitator: Barbra Batshalom
Barbra Batshalom is known for helping draft some of the most progressive LEED policies in North America.  She is also the founder and Executive Director of The Green Roundtable, an independent non-profit organization whose mission is to mainstream sustainable development and ultimately become obsolete.  Barbra has pioneered new approaches in consulting, education and policy work, inventing creative models to solve unusual problems. She has worked with local governments around the country to facilitate, organize, create and implement green building and development policies for both the public and private sector; most notable are the Massachusetts State Sustainability efforts and Boston Green Building (the first city in the country to require green building of private sector developers).