Design manager: design management plan-organizational typology

Design Manager Design Management Plan organizational typology is the seventh 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, what a project or firm design management plan, what are the key functions of the design management plan in practice, what needs to be managed in a firm in practice, and this article is the second article on building and writing a design management plan.

The second part of the consideration in writing and building a design management plan is the organizational typologies which means the type of firm that a design management plan is running and contracting with. The writer of the design management plan needs to stand on the firm characteristics that include which type of organization, the firm structure in terms of managerial and professionals, what type of specialty it focuses on in professional practice, and what characteristics it focuses on in project delivery. For example, Chevron is one of the biggest oil and gas engineering companies how to analyze this mega firm for the purpose of the design management plan see Figure 1.

Academic and professional publications emphasize that a design management plan’s second role is to identify organizational typologies. 

According to them the categories of organizations are influenced by the owner’s values and inspiration as follows:

Strong delivery firm

• Organized for efficiency, relies on standard design solutions, and has a formal structure.
• Tends to specialize in a limited range of building types such as “retail”.
• By reducing the client involvement and standardizing the production process the firm needs to change from time to time.

Strong service firm  

• Organized for service to specific needs of its clients.
• Has a flexible managerial structure and highly dynamic internal environment allowing for quickly responding to different client’s needs.
• Individual and creative solutions are favored over standard responses.

 Strong idea firm

• Organized for innovation and seeks to provide innovative solutions to unique problems.
• It has a flexible and informal structure and a highly changeable environment.
• Standard design solutions are rarely considered.

The design management plan writer focuses on two main elements of the organizational typology when he is inside a firm. These are the firm size and function or type of services a firm provides. There is a direct correlation between firm size and the type of services the firm provides. For example, an oil and gas company will not employ someone who specializes in rail engineering or someone who specializes in district cooling electromechanical design.

In practice, firms of large scale have multiple departments. I have worked with a large-scale company, as a design manager, that had various departments from engineering, architecture, environment, planning, supervision, infrastructure, and roads. This type of firm has a large size of employees more than 200 professionals and the head of departments and director level people. This type of firm provides various types of services and takes any type of project due to available specialized staff. The design management plan here considers how the project phases flow from department to department until project delivery and handover in specifying the who, what, and when of the staff to be involved in the project phases. The design management plan writer identifies what type of projects the departments handle and the team size for every type of project in a standard registry. Figure 2 shows a project, I managed in 2014, delivered by a large-scale company.

Moderate-scale firms in practice normally have teams that are organized to report to a design manager. These firms’ sizes range from 25-50 individuals. The teams are composed of 3 to 6 professionals in the fields of architecture, electromechanical, structure, landscape, and environment. These types of firms, which I have worked with provide moderate scale of projects like buildings whether they are residential, hospitality, office, recreation, medical, or industrial. These firms take projects that they can deliver on time upon studying what every team can produce in terms of engineering design and the amount of time allocated for this project.

Small-scale firms in practice are the firms that are newly established or have been in the business for a limited time. These firms’ sizes range from 10-15 individual. I have worked with a firm of a small scale and the business owner does not want to increase the size of his staff for several reasons. The staff are capable of delivering specific types of projects on time rather than others. Their experience is limited to these specific types of projects. The staff are capable of handling a limited number of projects in a specific timeline. The firm does not get awarded many projects in a year. And finally, the business owner is satisfied with the delivery of the projects and the revenue he is getting from his business.

In general, in practice in moderate scale firms, when loaded with more projects, the business owner outsources specific parts of the project like the landscape design or the AC design to an outsource firm. The design management plan writer identifies what type of companies the firm will deal with and what type of services they will provide based on their qualifications, skills, capacity, and cost.

In small-scale firms, when loaded with projects, the firm outsources some of the job parts to freelancers. These freelancers specialize in some parts of the design process like AC engineering, Firefighting and alarm building design, and so on. The design management plan writer is to consider preparing a registry of all individuals doing freelance work and type and their capacity in terms of loads of projects and time delivery.  

The relationship between the firm size and the project types is positive. The smaller the size of the firm the smaller the size of the project they provide regardless of its function. Most firms in the UAE, tend to upgrade their size to the moderate scale size to have a balance of operations, quality work, stability, and revenue. Moderate-size firms are the largest number of firms I have realized in the UAE and have stable operations and provide various types of services.