This blog post was authored by Elizabeth Moggio, AIA, DBIA, Principal, Miller Hull.

I’ve spent nearly all of my time at Miller Hull designing higher education spaces, a typology that never stops changing and never stops giving you a reason to care about the people who’ll use what you build. What fills my cup, career-wise, is being challenged: Having real opportunities to stretch, to think outside the box, to stay a little uncomfortable in the best way.

I think that’s the main reason progressive design-build (PDB) has become the delivery model I find most fulfilling. It’s that you get to be completely immersed in information, surrounded by a diverse group of people who are motivated to add to the richness of the conversation instead of just executing their piece of it.

When trust and respect are built into how a team operates, you get better teamwork almost as a side effect, because everyone’s knowledge and curiosity actually gets used. There’s an inherent mindset in a good PDB team of always looking for a way to do things a little better, a little differently, and getting to expand my own design thinking alongside a team that wants that too is genuinely energizing.

Why Progressive Design-Build?

What I’ve come to love about integrated design-build contracts is that they let you rewrite the rules. You can run traditional SD-DD-CD phases, or you can decide you don’t need to. You can build in a formal RFI process during construction, or invent something better. You can find entirely new ways to convey design intent, like new kinds of drawings, models, specs, instead of defaulting to whatever’s always been done.

It’s given me the chance to look back at what’s actually worked across my career and use that reflection to build better value for clients and a better experience for everyone at the table, rather than just repeating a process because it’s the process.

None of that means we’re drawing things that can’t be built. But there’s a real difference between relying on your own knowledge as an architect, like lessons from projects you’ve built, manufacturer standard details, and having direct access to the people who’ve actually installed the materials.

When trade partners are in the room early, design intent gets more realistic, documentation gets tighter, and there are far fewer misunderstandings about sequencing and installation down the line. Doing things differently only works if the whole team is weighing in on the things that matter most like the biggest drivers, the most critical scopes, and when we are engaging everyone, we can actually take advantage of the freedom the delivery model gives us.

Where the Time Goes, and Why It Doesn’t Just Stay in the Office

One of the things people notice fastest about PDB is that it gets teams to solutions quicker and more effectively, which can be really satisfying, and also a genuine gift of time. Part of how that happens is by questioning the status quo at every turn: Questioning standards, questioning tasks, questioning processes that exist mostly because they’ve always existed.

That habit catches on fast, and it extends well beyond the immediate project work, building a questioning, curious, creative environment almost by default. Once you’re not burning hours on rote tasks that used to crowd out design exploration, you actually have room to dive deeper into the ideas that interest you, to take the time to develop a genuinely better answer instead of the first workable one.

Shaping Mentorship

That same questioning environment has started shaping how I mentor younger staff, too.

I’m proud of how our firm invites people to talk openly about how it’s okay not to know things, and that wanting to ask a question is a strength, not a gap, and that trade partners are just another group of experts you get to lean on as you develop a design solution.

Time isn’t the only thing that changes; the tools for how you approach design change with it.

These days, in every delivery model, I start construction administration by talking with the team about what success actually looks like for each person in the room. I push our internal teams to find out what’s genuinely making their trade partner teammates nervous. For some companies, it’s RFI turnaround speed; for others it’s the fear of submittals coming back rejected instead of reviewed-and-noted. Once you understand what’s making someone else tick, you can shift your own approach to help them succeed, and you usually end up finding your own success right alongside them.

Shaping Daily Life

That mindset doesn’t stay at the office. It shows up in my daily life as a comfort with vulnerability, with an instinct to connect with people by admitting it’s okay not to know something (my own kids and family included!), and actually wanting to ask the question and find the answer instead of pretending I already have it.

And it shows up as honesty, plainly explaining why things went a certain way, why a decision isn’t moving as fast as someone might want, instead of letting silence do the talking. Those aren’t PDB-specific skills. They’re just better ways to work with people, and my PDB work at Miller Hull just happened to be where I learned them!