Integrated Project Delivery (IPD)
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Integrated Project Delivery (IPD) is a project delivery method that unites the owner, designer, and constructor under a single multi-party contract, with shared financial risk and reward tied to project outcomes rather than individual scope performance.
What separates IPD from other collaborative delivery methods
The defining legal structure of IPD is the multi-party agreement: a single contract signed by all three core parties, typically on an AIA C191 or owner-drafted equivalent, replacing the bilateral contracts that govern design-build or CMAR. Profit and contingency sit in a shared risk pool; if the project beats target cost, all parties share the upside, and if it misses, all parties absorb losses up to their at-risk amount. This financial interdependence is what actually changes behavior at the table, not just the org chart. True IPD also requires co-location or intensive integrated work sessions during preconstruction, so the GC's estimating and the architect's design evolve simultaneously rather than sequentially. Some owners use "IPD-lite" arrangements that adopt the collaborative language without the shared risk pool; those are closer to CMAR with a BIM mandate than genuine IPD.
How IPD changes the pursuit and proposal workflow
Owners who pursue IPD almost always issue an RFQ before any RFP, screening for demonstrated collaboration experience and prior multi-party contract history before they discuss scope or fee. Your SF-330 equivalent still needs project-specific relevance, but the selection criteria weight cultural fit and preconstruction integration track record more heavily than on a hard-bid or even design-build pursuit. Shortlists for IPD projects tend to be smaller, often two to three teams, and interviews are frequently structured as working sessions rather than presentations, so the pursuit team needs to brief technical leads on facilitation, not just talking points. Fee proposal mechanics also shift: rather than submitting a lump-sum or hourly-rate schedule, the design firm is typically negotiating a target cost and profit percentage alongside the GC under owner supervision, which means BD staff must coordinate with finance earlier in the process than on any other delivery type.
The institutional knowledge problem in IPD pursuits
Most firms have fewer than five genuine IPD projects in their history, which makes those pursuits disproportionately dependent on the specific people who worked them, and that knowledge rarely survives in a retrievable form after project close-out. When an IPD opportunity surfaces, proposal teams frequently rediscover relevant experience weeks into the pursuit because it was filed under the project name rather than tagged to the delivery method, the contract structure, or the shared-risk outcome. The misconception is that IPD pursuits require less proposal infrastructure because the team is assembled early and selection is relationship-driven; in practice, they require more precise institutional recall because the differentiating evidence is narrower and harder to find. Kantiv surfaces that evidence by connecting delivery method, contract type, and personnel history across a firm's project data, so the pursuit team starts with what actually exists rather than what people remember.
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