One of the biggest decisions you’ll make before a shovel ever hits the ground isn’t about materials or design — it’s about how your project gets delivered. The delivery method you choose shapes almost everything: your budget certainty, your timeline, and how smoothly the design and construction teams work together. At Three Way Builders, we’ve worked across every major delivery method since 1982, and we’ve seen firsthand how the right choice can save time, money, and a lot of headaches — and how the wrong one can turn a straightforward project into a stressful one.
Design-Bid-Build, sometimes called tendered work, is the traditional route. An owner hires a consultant to design the building, then invites contractors to bid on the finished design, usually awarding the job to the lowest price. It works well when the scope is clearly defined upfront and the owner wants competitive pricing from multiple bidders. But because the designer and builder aren’t collaborating during the design phase, there’s no one checking constructability or cost as the drawings come together. Issues that could have been caught early — a detail that’s expensive to build, a spec that doesn’t match the budget — often don’t surface until construction is already underway, which is where the cost surprises tend to come from.
Construction Management sits between the two. Here, the construction firm comes on board during the initial design phase, offering budget feedback and constructability input well before the drawings are finalized. This early involvement means the team can flag expensive design choices and give the owner a far more accurate budget than a design-bid-build project typically allows. It can run as an open-book, cost-plus arrangement, or convert into a fixed-price contract once the final budget is agreed on. At that point the project starts to resemble a tendered job, and some of the earlier collaboration can be lost — but overall, it’s a meaningful step up from traditional tendering.
Design-Build is where we spend most of our time, and for good reason. A single team handles design and construction together from day one, which means fewer miscommunications between separate firms, tighter budget control, and a much smoother path from concept to completion. Because the same team is responsible for both the design and the build, there’s a shared incentive to solve problems collaboratively rather than pointing fingers when something doesn’t go as planned. Over 50% of our clients are repeat business, and a big part of that comes down to how well design-build lets us work together with clients rather than hand projects off between separate consultants and contractors.
There’s no universal “best” method — the right one depends on your project’s size, complexity, and timeline. A straightforward project with a well-defined scope might do just fine under design-bid-build, while a complex or highly custom project usually benefits from the collaboration that design-build or construction management provides. Whether you’re planning an industrial facility, a multi-family development, or a commercial build, we’re happy to walk through which approach fits your goals.
Since 1982, we’ve delivered projects across Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Northwest Ontario using all three methods, and we know the trade-offs of each firsthand — not just in theory, but from decades of actual projects on the ground. Have a project in mind? Reach out and we’ll help you figure out the path that makes the most sense for your build.