From Design to Delivery: How Integrated Strategies Power Mega Projects

The toughest challenges facing the construction industry today date back years, even decades: the availability of skilled labor, increasing project complexity and supply chain disruptions, among others. U.S. construction labor productivity has fallen by more than 30% since 1970, even as the broader economy doubled its productivity over the same period—a decline that underscores the industry’s struggle to improve efficiency.

These challenges have also spurred an evolution in building methodologies. Ten years ago, prefabrication and modular construction were hailed as emerging trends to help improve efficiency. The rising adoption of technology and data made it possible to construct increasingly complex projects. For DPR Construction, looking at these trends holistically sparked a pivotal moment.

“We debated a ton on where the industry was going back in 2015 and what it would take to stay ahead,” said Mark Whitson, DPR president and Leadership Team member. “Our customers were looking for more efficiency around project delivery, and we took that to heart, focusing on areas that we believe offered the greatest opportunity to provide more predictability for our teams, customers and projects.”

The result is an integrated approach built on four key strategies: design-to-build, virtual design and construction (VDC), prefabrication and self-perform work (SPW)—with data woven throughout to drive predictability and performance.

Today, this approach helps power some of the largest and most complex projects in the world, like Crusoe’s AI-driven data center campuses and Meta’s multi-billion-dollar builds. And on these jobsites, the teams delivering them are proving how these strategies can deliver outsized results when deployed at scale.

“We saw there was a better way to deliver more predictable outcomes by integrating all [these strategies] together,” said Ray Boff, who leads prefabrication efforts for DPR. “It’s about providing more value to customers through schedule enhancements, safer environments and more predictable supply chains, minimizing rework.”

The Crusoe Data Center in Abilene, TX, is built for speed and scale, a campus designed to support advanced AI workloads for another large firm in the AI space at unprecedented capacity. The first phase includes two high-density data halls and is expanding to eight buildings totaling roughly 4 million sq. ft. It will be one of the largest data centers of its kind once complete.

“From the time we released design on the first building to the time we had structural steel onsite was six weeks,” Whitson said. “At best, using traditional delivery, that would have been 12 weeks.”

Accomplishing that was possible because integration was built into the plan from the start. Structural engineer GPLA, a strategic partner to DPR, produced shop drawings that fed fabrication. Prefabricated panels and other elements reduced onsite labor and shifted work from field construction to field assembly, helping keep schedule under control and improve cost predictability. VDC ensured everything fit before it hit the field, minimizing rework and RFIs. Self-performing critical path scopes like concrete and electrical helped ensure direct control over quality and schedule.

With about 8,500 workers onsite daily, success also depended on deep collaboration among an ecosystem of partners who shared the same vision for speed and precision. Key contributors included AlfaTech, HKS, Lancium, Rosendin, Southland Industries, DPR’s self-perform groups and strategic partners EIG and Digital Building Components, along with trade partners such as Wagner, WW Afco, Western States, Vanguard and Flynn

"We challenged ourselves with incredibly ambitious timelines for this critical data center campus, and [the project team] proved to be an indispensable partner every step of the way,” said Chris Dolan, Crusoe chief data center officer. “[DPR] embraced our demanding schedule without ever sacrificing the meticulous quality and rigorous engineering required for mission-critical infrastructure.”

On the Crusoe campus, concrete pours hit 4,000 cubic yards per day, and skin installation wrapped up in 10 days per sector, according to Vikesh Handratta, a DPR project executive.

“On a fast-track mega project, losing a day is like losing a week, and losing a week is like losing a month,” Handratta said. “That’s why we bring speed and quality under our control.”

Meta data centers have been a proving ground for DPR’s integrated strategies for nearly 15 years, culminating in the Richland Parish Data Center in Louisiana, a truly remote site set on 2,250 acres between two small towns and roughly 30 miles from Monroe. Mobilizing thousands of workers and equipment across rural highways required meticulous planning, making predictability and offsite strategies essential to keep the schedule on track.

The Richland Parish project team, with up to 4,500 workers onsite daily, deployed several strategies: self-performing all concrete scopes, installing prefabricated exterior skin panels from Digital Building Components (a DPR strategic partner), and leveraging large offsite assemblies that integrate complex MEP systems.

One example is MOFE (Manufactured Offsite Fabricated Equipment) components—massive modular units that consolidate critical MEP systems. Meta contracts DPR directly to supply these components and install them onsite, reducing field labor, improving safety and quality, and increasing control over schedule-critical activities while buffering against supply chain risk. This scope includes Hot Aisle Containment (HAC) modules, which isolate server exhaust heat to improve cooling efficiency and reduce energy use.

Lisa Lingerfelt, Leadership Team member who has led DPR’s Meta account for nearly 10 years, said these capabilities didn’t happen overnight. “It took proving our self-perform, prefab and design management capabilities on other campuses to get to a point where we could take on things like exterior skin panels and massive prefab components,” she explained.

Similar strategies have been applied on other Meta projects—for instance, at the Meta data center in Huntsville, Alabama, where the team designed and installed prefabricated duct banks for telecom pathways across the entire site. Coordinated closely with electricians, this approach saved schedule time and allowed the team to recover quickly from weather-related delays.

“It’s pretty cool because we’re not just building the data center, we’re also providing critical components like HAC modules that affect the schedule,” said Lingerfelt. “That’s us managing and controlling more of the critical path.”

Combined with SPW, these strategies give the project team greater control over quality, schedule and risk. Prefabrication also reduces the need for field labor, which is a critical advantage as the industry faces a shortage of experienced craft workers, and it improves safety by creating more predictable working conditions with less onsite congestion.

“We knew it would take an integrated approach and a deep understanding of their vision and needs in order to bring more project success factors under the team's control and provide that predictability that Meta expects,” Lingerfelt said.

While the combination of prefabrication and self-perform is powerful, and though VDC and data enable better planning and execution, this approach has to start with collaboration amongst the project team. DPR’s approach to design integration, or what it refers to as design-to-build, entails working hand in hand with owners, designers and trade partners.

Trade partners play a critical role in making these projects successful, especially where speed and precision are non-negotiable. Victor Sanvido of Southland Industries, who’s working on the Crusoe project, described the future of collaboration as a fully integrated ecosystem.

“Each of us is manufacturing pieces so the whole team can move together at one speed,” Sanvido said. “That’s what makes prefabrication powerful—it’s not just one trade going faster, it’s the entire job moving quicker so the owner gets to market faster.”

Sanvido emphasized that team alignment is critical to ensuring successful delivery:

“When they treat you like a partner, you act like a partner. If they treat you like a vendor, you act like a vendor. This [Crusoe] project worked because everyone was aligned toward the owner’s goal, and that chemistry lets you move a mountain.”

As the industry and complexity of projects continue to evolve, so will the need to leverage lessons learned today to adapt for tomorrow. For example, Hannu Lindberg, a technology leader with DPR, sees artificial intelligence as the next major driver.

“The rapid acceleration of AI has brought a mix of excitement and understandable uncertainty,” he said. Lindberg points to opportunities in an industry on the cusp of reinvention: the tools that once felt futuristic are now reshaping how we work, implement workflows, make decisions and even deliver projects. “It’s going to open up a whole new level of interaction with our project information and building information models, making everything less fragmented for people to understand scope, progress and constraints.” While the pace can be both energizing and nerve-racking, one truth has become unmistakable—digital transformation is here to stay.

“We see a lot of potential and opportunity to be delivering projects in 30 to 40% shorter timeframes,” said George Pfeffer, DPR CEO and Leadership Team member. Labor shortages aren’t easing. The U.S. will need an additional 1.4 million construction workers annually by 2030, a gap that makes innovation essential. “In an ideal world, between AI and doing things differently, there are trust and compliance issues that do not add to the value of the building, that if reduced, could significantly improve the efficacy of our industry and help build a stronger foundation for the future.”