Project Management: Integrated Project Delivery
Fundamentally, project management is all about managing expectations. These expectations vary between the client, the contractors, the trades partners, and your crew, and a new level of expectation management is needed with a new material like hempcrete. Hempcrete interfaces must be approached in a new way, and the process will likely be slower, more expensive, and with a learning curve for everyone involved. However, this different and new way provides the opportunity of creating a learning environment and for increased collaboration.
As a project manager, you can expect to facilitate the communication of the new and different aspects of the project to the different stakeholders.
HempStone uses the methodology of Integrated Project Delivery.
This format of interfacing with the design and construction team brings stakeholders in early in the process with all the information on the table. It views building as a holistic system and aims to identify the most critical paths forward so that we are efficient and effective.
Integrated Project Delivery is important with hempcrete because it is a different assembly model than conventional construction. Hempcrete is a vapor open material compared to the typical vapor closed designation of conventional construction. Vapor open materials require that all materials in the assembly are correspondingly vapor open, meaning builders cannot use materials like vinyl or drywall at any point in the process. Vapor closed materials have vapor management systems built into the assembly with mechanical solutions. While neither is good nor bad, they are simply different and perform differently with different benefits and characteristics.
Although being a project manager working with hempcrete can have a few more steps than conventional construction, we see it as an opportunity. It brings a nascent material into the industry and ignites a passion that often goes beyond an individual project.