Great variety on a joint basis – creating new user profiles.

The DGNB certification system is quickly being expanded. To this end, we have defined a transparent system development process to create new schemes and variants as need be. The major strengths of the process are its practicability and the inclusion of the bundled expertise of the DGNB and its members.

Each of the system‘s new schemes goes through different development phases. First, DGNB members (and possibly third-party experts) come together to form a preparatory group. Without any deadline or other administrative obligations, they set the foundations for the development of a potential new scheme for the DGNB system. The results of the preparatory group then are passed on to the various bodies within the DGNB. First, the DGNB office checks whether the requirements for a new scheme are fulfilled. If so, the profile is passed on to the certification system committee, which determines whether the profile is a new, overriding type of occupancy (main group) or a variation of an existing type of occupancy (subcategory). In the first case, the DGNB Board of Directors has to give its consent. Then, a working group is founded to begin the actual development of the criteria of the new scheme. Each working group generally consists of some 20 interdisciplinary, voluntary DGNB members who have the explicit expert knowledge. Bundling the expertise of architects, planners, researchers, and other representatives of the real estate sector is one of the system‘s great strengths. The experts partly try to see which criteria can be taken over from the core system and where new criteria need to be developed. In this way, they can incrementally formulate a new scheme, which will then be presented to the DGNB certification system committee for adoption.

This committee is the DGNB‘s central decision-making body concerning the certification system. It ensures that the focal points and targets of the DGNB certification system conform to each other. In this task, it receives support from the DGNB’s expert groups, each of which consists of some 10 proven experts, who ensure the quality of the DGNB certificate across schemes. They are also responsible for the further development of the core system.

Once a new scheme has been adopted, the pilot phase begins. Here, the profile is tested on specific projects to make sure it is practicable. At the same time, the auditors involved are asked about their experience in applying the profile. This evaluation process provides important information to the working group, which optimizes the targets and reference values used to determine a building‘s performance; the working group also uses the information to minimize the processing time for individual criteria. Once the feasibility of the new scheme has been demonstrated in the pilot phase, the DGNB uses the expertise of its members for further optimization. All members have eight weeks to provide comments and suggestions on all of the content and results via a special online tool on our website.