CAUTION! Choose LEED Project Team Member Roles Wisely

One of the first things you’ll want to do after you register your LEED project is to get your team going by setting up your LEED project team on LEED Online.

By default, the person who registers your LEED project through GBCI.com is dubbed the one and only LEED Project Team Administrator. (This person has ULTIMATE power on LEED Online, so choose who registers your project carefully!)

Another key role is the Project Team Manger. Project Team Managers are not to be confused with Project Managers (but often Project Team Managers are Project Managers.) Project Team Managers essentially have the same rights and permissions as the project Team Administrator does on LEED Online. However, before you make a LEED team member a Project Team Manager, ask yourself, “Do I REALLY want this person to have the power to change templates, upload documents, delete information, choose new credits to go for, submit your LEED project for review, etc.? If you don’t want that person to have that much power, choose someone else!

Unlike the Project Team Administrator, you can have as many Project Team Managers as you want – but use caution when assigning this role to a LEED team member. (You know what they say about too many cooks in the kitchen…)

Who can assign roles? Only the Project Team Administrator and Project Team Managers can make LEED team member role assignments.

You manage your LEED team in the Team Admin section of LEED Online (at least that’s the way it is for v 2.2.)  To add a team member, simply enter the e-mail address of the person you want to add to your LEED team and click “Send Invitation.” That person will receive an e-mail letting them know that they’ve been chosen to join your LEED project team.

Once they accept your invitation, you can then go into the Team Admin section and assign that person a role. NOTE: Whenever you add a member to your LEED project team, the LEED Project Team Administrator receives an e-mail letting them know the name of the person that has been added. (There are no secrets from the LEED Project Team Administrator!)

Here are some typical LEED Team Roles:

• Contractor
• Owner/Client
• Project Manager
• HVAC Engineer
• Contractor
• Project Team Manager
• Architect
• Civil Engineer
• Electrical Engineer
• Commissioning Agent
• And others

Don’t find a LEED role that matches what you had in mind? You can make up your own team roles if you’d like. You can also choose not to assign a team member a role. Not assigning a person a role gives them only basic rights and limited access to the project information on LEED Online. (A “non-role” team member can see things on LEED Online but they cannot change anything.)

Make sure you assign roles carefully. Some roles have more “power” than others and you want to make sure that only the appropriate people have access to make changes to credit templates.

Here’s an example of how to assign roles. Let’s say you give SSC 1 credit to your Civil Engineer to complete, but you also want to have a junior civil engineer review the work as well. You would want to give the Civil Engineer who’s filling out the credit template the “Civil Engineer” role. The junior engineer wouldn’t be given a role at all. The junior engineer could see the SSC 1 template but not make any modifications to the credit template.

Note that in LEED v 3.0 credit templates are assigned by the person’s name not by their “role.”

You can change role assignments as often as you want throughout the project. You can even assign a person to more than one role. Why would you want to do this? Let’s say, for instance, that you selected the HVAC Engineer to work with the Electrical Engineer on some credits. With the Electrical Engineer role, the HVAC engineer would then be able update both HVAC and Electrical Engineer credits.

Change your mind about a team member? You can add and delete team members on a whim. (Here today, gone tomorrow.)

When working with team members roles, remember: you want to carefully think about the impact a particular person will have to your LEED project before you give them a role. Choose judiciously!