Design Manager: Design Management Plan-Work Wasteful Habits is the sixteenth article of a series of articles about design management in architecture practice. I have discussed in the previous articles what is design management. Who is the design manager in practice and is it a project or firm design management plan? The key functions of the design management plan in practice. Adding to that What needs to be managed in a firm in practice. This article is the Eleventh article on building and writing a design management plan.
In this article, I will discuss and illustrate what design managers focus on in running the work environment in the firm related to wasteful habits. What factors do design managers need to identify in the design management plan to ensure the successful delivery of high-quality work of the running design project?
What are wasteful habits in practice?
The design manager in a firm witnesses’ various activities that reduce the work and quality of work. These activities range from the personal characteristics of a team member, and their relation to following company systems and procedures, a lack of knowledge and experience in running software to produce quality work.
Wasteful habits in an architecture firm work environment have various effects on a staff member, the architecture firm, the architecture team working on a project, and related authorities connected to the approval of obtaining permits. Following I will illustrate how these habits have negative effects.
Staff Member
A staff member in an architecture firm working on a project shows unconfident status by asking other team members about various related project aspects. He illustrates low knowledge of architecture and experience in dealing with the ongoing project. Depression and loss of interest in work leading to wasting time and producing a small amount of work.
Architecture Team
A team member must always show and be responsible for producing high-quality architectural work. If the team member hesitates in producing work, do not complete work on time, and lack knowledge and experience that pushes the teamwork forward will have a negative effect on teamwork. The architecture team will lose trust in his work, his work must be reviewed by another team member, and his existence in the team will not be welcomed by the team. The team must provide support for his work, train and guide him in completing quality work and that will consume the time reserved for completing the project.
The architecture firm
Involving a team member with wasteful habits in an organization chart of a project will affect the Firm in various ways. This team member will increase the project overhead because of his improper quality work. The team member will reduce the project revenue due to delays in completing the work as per schedule. This situation of wasteful habits will put the company on continuous work review though the design manager reviews the work on schedule. The accumulated loss of paying for original software use per year will increase. The company’s hazel in finding an alternative and paying recruitment companies will put the company in an unstable status and unsmooth operations.
Authorities and planning organizations
The project building and planning permission takes a large amount of time from the firm, the architecture team, and the design manager. The design manager schedules the planning approval (as per my experience in the Gulf region) from the inception phase till obtaining the building permit. In one of the consultancy firms I worked with the company occasionally had trouble in getting the approval because of low quality work. The authority considered the firm of low low-quality work and architecture and delayed their work. I managed to intervene in this matter and introduce the matter to my company manager as a way to solve the problem. Figure 1 shows one of the wasteful habits in architecture work.
Types of wasteful habits in practice?
The design manager must identify the wasteful habits in the design management plan to increase work quality, reduce time reserved for projects, reduce the staff members required for a project, increase the revenue of the architecture firm, and assist the firm in running the firm operations smoothly. The types of wasteful habits include:
Overworking drawings: this common habit exists among architects which is an unnecessary and wasteful practice. Architects go through the working drawings in a manner to review and check quality and repeat this activity several times. Continuous going through working drawings will not increase quality but the architect to have a schedule for preparing quality work before starting any activity. Drawing criteria, coordination with project requirements and specifications, architecture standards, and compatibility with software capacity in producing architecture work.
Underworking (incomplete) drawings: architects within the architecture team must adhere to the design management plan prepared by the design manager and follow the procedure to complete work. The wasteful habit appears because of poor programming (as mentioned above) to complete project work properly.
Incomplete written specifications: In architecture firms of large-scale staff members of every discipline prepare the related project spec. The design manager designates a member of high experience to review the full specifications. In small firms, a senior staff from architecture and civil prepares the specifications and one MEP staff member prepares the remaining project spec. In the Arab gulf region, some firms rely on one staff member to regenerate spec from previous projects that in some cases appear uncoordinated.
Companies in the Gulf region like others in the world rely on specific organizations producing specifications manuals for firms to follow. These organizations give guidelines on what a staff member needs to consider in specific preparations. Some of these organizations that give booklets and manuals for guiding specification writing include MasterFormat, NBS, and CAWS.
Failure to follow office protocols and accepted standards for information production: Accepting and implementing correctly these standards by staff members will eliminate excuses for failure. The design manager to introduce these protocols and standards in the design management plan for consideration and application by the architecture team.
Searching for information: design team members look for information when conducting work show poor working practices and failure to follow standard procedures. Though architectural design and innovation do not have a standard procedure due to various available methods thus the design manager to identify specific methods to follow. The design management plan should include best practices derived by the architecture firm for architecture design.
Applying office standards and masters inappropriately: design team members who apply standards and masters inappropriately will result in errors and rework.
Ineffective use of ICTs: Architecture firms register and pay for yearly subscriptions for ICTs to use for architecture design and document production. Design staff members have various levels of knowledge and experience in using software like AutoCAD, Revit, grasshopper, SketchUp, and other software. Firms expect expert-level knowledge and use of these software to produce high-quality architecture. In the Arab gulf region, many architecture design team members take courses to the intermediate level thinking that is enough to work in an architecture firm. They neglect many parts of the software thinking it’s not used or essential, but they get surprised that these parts are very essential to complete work. The design manager encourages and includes in the design management plan continuous development in using specific software to produce high-quality work.
Main sources of external and internal information in practice
Table 1, external and internal sources of information
The design manager must consider these sources of information to generate company indexes and a supply of information to develop staff knowledge and experience. Wasteful habits affect the company, design manager, and staff member’s performance and produce quality of work.
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