Shaping the future of Canada's National Master Construction Specification

The World Economic Forum published a series of reports and papers on Shaping the Future of Construction, considering innovative solutions to address the construction sector’s key challenges in six areas:

1.  Project Delivery – Creating certainty of timely delivery and to budget, and generally improving the productivity, quality and safety of the construction sector
2. Life cycle Performance – Reducing the life cycle costs of assets and designing for re-use
3. Sustainability – Achieving carbon-neutral assets and reducing waste in the course of construction
4. Affordability – Creating high-quality, affordable infrastructure and housing
5. Disaster Resilience – Making infrastructure and buildings resilient to climate change and natural disasters
6. Flexibility, Liveability and Well-being – Creating infrastructure and buildings that improve the well-being of end-users

These are broad topics, narrowing the focus, to align with three goal areas:

• Supporting innovation
• Supporting performance and policy objectives
• Advancing scientific knowledge

There is currently a project underway to introduce resiliency to disasters and climate change in NMS, with a complete overhaul of the Performance & Design (UniFormat) sections.

Ideally we could seek funding support to work in new area, for example, there is a potential for updates and revisions to support GHG reduction.

The question; where can and should the Canadian National Master Construction Specification (NMS) evolve?

Examples;

• Building Information Modelling (BIM) and digital construction
• New project delivery methods, integrated project delivery (IPD), Project alliance
• Link with carbon calculators and lifecycle tools

Where can, and should NMS go?

Thanks, Jason

Sources:

Shaping the Future of Construction A Breakthrough in Mindset and Technology (May 2016)

Shaping the Future of Construction: Inspiring innovators redefine the industry (Feb 2017)

Shaping the Future of Construction Insights to redesign the industry (March 2017)