This project is a specialized consultancy, training, assessment, and sustainability alignment assignment for a multi-building educational and academic campus. According to the contract scope, the development comprises approximately 20 educational, research, and support buildings on a site of around 49.5 hectares, with a total built area of more than 441,000 square meters. Within this framework, Sustain Plan GmbH serves as the sustainable building consultant, with responsibilities extending far beyond general advisory input or final-stage review. Its role is to establish and guide a structured technical process from baseline assessment through design evaluation, team training, documentation, and readiness for alignment with the DGNB system.  

A primary technical component of the project is the assessment of the existing design status and the identification of gaps between the project and sustainable building requirements. This includes the review of self-assessment forms, analysis of the current design against sustainability criteria, normalization of project data, and identification of technical deficiencies, risks, and improvement priorities. In this context, Sustain Plan GmbH is responsible for ensuring that the project is not reviewed only from conventional architectural or engineering perspectives, but through an integrated sustainability lens that addresses environmental performance, economic efficiency, technical quality, process quality, and the functional quality of academic and educational spaces.  

Another major component of the assignment is the development and delivery of a sustainable building training program for the teams involved in design, construction, and operation. The contract provides for both introductory and advanced training modules, beginning with the principles and criteria of sustainable buildings and extending into more specialized lifecycle-related topics. These include asset management, risk management, facility management, health and safety, energy management, materials and resources, water efficiency, indoor environmental quality, construction quality and commissioning, site management, social management, economic management, waste management, and data and information management. This means that Sustain Plan GmbH’s role is not limited to technical review; it also includes structured knowledge transfer and capacity building for the project teams.  

At the design and planning level, Sustain Plan GmbH is also responsible for supporting the definition of strategic and performance-based sustainability objectives for the project. These objectives are translated into measurable indicators covering areas such as energy consumption, water efficiency, indoor air quality, material selection, lifecycle cost, indoor environmental quality, user health and safety, system performance, and operational efficiency. The importance of this task is that the project does not treat sustainability as a formal checklist exercise. Instead, each topic is linked to measurable targets, review methods, and improvement pathways that can guide technical decisions throughout the development process.  

One of the most important structural elements of the project is the establishment of specialized sustainable design working groups and clearly defined assessment boundaries for each discipline. The contract emphasizes the creation of evaluation and reporting groups, the definition of assessment scopes, the formation of integrated design teams, the execution of technical reviews, the consolidation of findings, and the identification of corrective actions. This shows that Sustain Plan GmbH acts as the coordinator of an interdisciplinary sustainability process, bringing together architects, MEP engineers, environmental specialists, and project managers under a shared technical framework so that design and implementation decisions are aligned with DGNB requirements from the outset.  

From a technical perspective, the project is structured around the principal DGNB quality sections: environmental quality, economic quality, sociocultural and functional quality, process quality, and technical quality. The contract refers to specific issues within these sections, including energy reduction through improved design and renewable energy integration, water management and efficiency, environmental impacts of materials, lifecycle cost considerations, indoor environmental quality, user health and safety, accessibility and flexibility of design, transparency of documentation, and efficiency of building and engineering systems. This indicates that Sustain Plan GmbH is guiding the project through a multidimensional quality framework that simultaneously addresses design performance, construction quality, and long-term operational value.  

A key point that should be highlighted in the project description is the preparation of 29 specialized technical guidelines for 29 DGNB sub-criteria, developed specifically for this project. These guidelines function as implementation tools that translate each sub-criterion from a general standard requirement into project-specific technical instructions. In practice, they enable the design, execution, and management teams to understand what data is required for each criterion, what technical actions must be taken, what evidence and documentation must be prepared, and what adjustments can improve both performance and scoring. This is one of the most important technical contributions of Sustain Plan GmbH, because it converts the DGNB system from a high-level framework into a detailed and usable project delivery tool for a large educational and academic campus.

In addition, the contract addresses lifecycle sustainability planning as an integral part of the assignment. This includes operation and maintenance planning, resource efficiency strategies, waste management planning, indicator reporting structures, and the review of tools such as BMS and BIM to improve operational performance and sustainability management. As a result, the role of Sustain Plan GmbH extends beyond early-stage design review into lifecycle planning, technical reporting, sustainability declaration preparation, building-specific reporting, and responses to the questions of the independent assessment body.  

Overall, this project is a comprehensive sustainable building consultancy program for a multi-building educational and academic campus, in which Sustain Plan GmbH is responsible for embedding DGNB-based technical logic into the project structure, translating standard requirements into implementation processes, training project teams, defining indicators, guiding assessments, preparing specialized technical guidelines, and supporting the production of the documentation required for evaluation and compliance. The value of this role lies in transforming the project from a conventional building development into a structured sustainability-driven system in which each building and each sub-criterion is addressed through a clear, technical, and traceable implementation pathway.