Design-Build Best Practices

Decades of experience across all sectors and project types have given our industry a time-tested roadmap to success. Design-Build Done Right® Best Practices help you engineer higher quality outcomes by showing you what works – and what doesn’t.

By convening multiple disciplines, Design-Build Done Right® helps power singular success stories with collaboration and innovation that’s driving industry transformation.

Excellence. It’s built in.

DBIA’s Universal Best Practices is a good place to start your design-build journey. This document categorizes 10 best practices and nearly 50 supporting implementing techniques into three areas:

  • Procuring Design-Build Services
  • Contracting for Design-Build Services
  • Executing Design-Build Projects

The evolution of this document is based on input from DBIA members and the A/E/C industry.

DBIA’s Best Practices are available to download in our online Bookstore for free.

Visit DBIA Bookstore

More Resources

DBIA offers a number of additional resources to download in our online Bookstore to help deepen your design-build knowledge:

Sector-Specific Primers: The challenges facing sectors can be unique. That’s why industry leaders serving on DBIA’s market sector committees created these targeted resources to address specific issues impacting the Transportation/Aviation, Water/Wastewater and Federal sectors. Start with the Universal Best Practices document and then use these targeted resources to deepen your design-build knowledge.

Deeper Dives: These documents provide a more targeted look at specific topics important to each sector.

Design-Build Manual of Practice: A comprehensive reference manual for Owners and practitioners about all aspects of design-build practice. It provides everything you need to build your design-build foundation, such as: definitions, selection procedures, project execution checkpoints, tenets of professional ethics, risk management guidelines, contract formats, licensure data, and regulatory and legal information.

The Manual of Practice is a DBIA Members benefit. Sign-in with your DBIA online account to download. Non-members can purchase the Manual of Practice in the DBIA Bookstore as individual chapters ($25) or a complete set ($350).