Design management: firm or project design management plan?

Design management firm or project design management plan is the third article of a series of articles about design management in architecture practice. I have discussed in the previous articles what is design management and who is the design manager in practice. In this article, I am going to discuss that, in practice, building a design management plan is to manage a project or a firm. A design manager, as illustrated in the second article, builds a design management plan when he is responsible for a project or more than one project. But when the design manager is responsible for the whole architectural design and related activities in the firm, he is building a design management plan for a firm that is more complex in terms of nested activities and responsibilities.

A design management plan includes three main components managing People, Systems, and architectural design work.

A firm design management plan includes several activities, tasks, duties, and responsibilities starting from the top hierarchy of the firm to the lower level of the firm monitoring and control of the whole design management plan in the firm.

A firm design management plan includes various objectives when it is built:

The plan should focus on achieving the company strategy and firm work policy. For example, when I was working with an infrastructure company here in the Middle East the company focused on bidding for consultancy services for two main public companies and the bids to be competitive to continue taking projects. These two companies have projects that fit the company’s area of expertise and are pure infrastructure projects.

The firm’s high-level management like the managing director’s views on developing the design department are always considered in the plan. The higher management focuses on resolving work problems that are causing loss like communication problems, a bad review of department work, miss coordination between architecture work and other departments, and negotiation problems with authority officials when applying for planning and building permits and other problems.

The design management plan is to focus on increasing awareness of new employees and previous ones on any updates of the IT system in the company to reduce production time and quality of work. For example, any update in the documents folders system and any update in the draughting and architectural design procedures and schedules. The plan is to include a clear description of the design management software that is used to develop a documentation method.

Project planning and building permit approvals are the main focus of any design management plan. It should develop a research-based knowledge of preparing the index for Municipality submittals based on the accuracy of documents and the speed of approvals.

A firm performance is visited every year by the higher management. The design management plan takes into consideration establishing in-house an evaluation method to gauge the company’s performance “design”. For example, client satisfaction with company work, company architectural design, and innovation, creativity, quality of production and production speed, amount of conflict and harmony between staff, company overhead and new employment (company growth), annual revenue of the firm, staff and tools and techniques used in the office development and other criteria.

In large-scale firms that incorporate high-level professionals in monitoring the process and profit of a firm a design management plan should include the preparation of a comparative study about work quality and control using the two main methods TQM (total quality management) and six sigma. Though the two methods have variances in goals and objectives like Six Sigma focuses on improving processes by reducing defects by following data-driven approaches while TQM also focuses on process improvement by involving everyone in the organization by reducing cost and maximizing revenue.

At this level, a firm management plan is concerned about people, systems, and work quality.

A project design management plan includes various objectives when it is built:

The first activity is to analyze the project in terms of its components, and its size to stand on the volume of work required to be accomplished by the professionals. For example, a villa project requires in practice a senior architect and a draughtsman to finalize all the architectural design phases and construction documents. For a multistory building, ground plus 12 floors, in reality, requires two senior architects and two draughts men for the architectural work.

The second is to identify stakeholders especially the design team their strengths and weaknesses. In real-world architecture practice, this activity is merely conducted. When employing a team, the design manager stands on every person in the team’s skills and strengths and this work will be allocated to him within the design management plan. Companies, the large-scale ones, in general, develop employee’s weak points by assigning training courses within the company or contracting with an outsourcing company.

Third is meeting the team of stakeholders introducing the project and discussing the required actions to accomplish the work schedule, assigning tasks to the team, how to manage time for any activity distributing work to others, and identifying the person in charge, outputs, and work quality requirements and checking process figure 1. developing a performance index for the design team and projects working on will help the design manager in allocating the specific work for the individual to finalize properly. For every project completed a design manager updates his worksheet of the individual’s performance for future use or just gaining knowledge about people’s work capability from time to time without building a performance index. A performance index is required by big companies for increment purposes and rewards.

The fourth attempt to achieve an “ideas management system” by working with a firm committee to raise awareness of design-related thinking. This is rarely applied in practice, but it is used in research in the academic arena it is considered in discussion verbally for a limited time in a project due to cost matters and revenue.

Fifth is increasing the design team’s knowledge of design methodology to study and identify the most suitable design method that suits the requirements of the stakeholders. Though there are many methods of design that mix various dimensions of architectural design like function, form, sustainability, context, ideas brainstorming, and others but all firms focus on the creative part of presenting creative concepts and presentations to attract clients and new customers.

Sixth is preparing modules in preparing the architectural design drawings which can be used to reduce production time and eliminate waste time and repetitive work, this is one of the most important tasks in the design management plan that targets increasing quality and increasing firm revenue.

Professional bodies in the world produce many articles, guidelines, and studies related to post-occupancy evaluation methods. A Logbook is prepared by the firm and handed over to the client upon project handover which facilitates the future operations, maintenance, and building development plans. In my previous 30 years of architectural design and construction experience, I have never passed this activity, even with European consultants, and a logbook is never produced but it’s a common criterion of building a design management plan in theory only. Design management plans include the preparation of as-built drawings to be handed over to the client.