Blog Archives

CONSTRUCTION ADMINISTRATION

7/31/2016

Construction Administration - DOs and DON'Ts

When I started my career (1970), CA was really simple. My experience was that the superintendents and project managers in every modest-sized construction outfit were usually more experienced about construction technology than the architectural staff, and they could be counted on to construct the project with competence.

Most firms were unionized. Tradesmen were apprenticed and grew in competence with each year of experience. You often received good 'advice' from contractors, which you ignored at your peril.

This is the world that standard owner-architect agreements anticipate. Things have changed. That world doesn't exist anymore.

Written Agreements - Gotta Have 'Em

7/24/2016

Should You Have Written Agreements

Everyone urges you to have written agreements for your design projects. There really isn't a good reason for not having a contract. However, we were rarely able to accomplish the goal of 100% of projects having a written agreement.

Our best effort to achieve this goal was to simplify the process. The two tools that we found helpful were a Letter Of Engagement, and our own Standard Agreement. There isn't anything wrong with standard AIA agreements. They aren't even hard or time-consuming to complete. But formality and exactitude get in the way.

Delegating

7/17/2016

I should be a genius at delegation. I certainly put in the hours researching, planning, trying things out. I am mediocre at best.

This is a problem because business is dependent on delegation, and the architectural business is not any different.

Now that I am retired, I am pretty much out of the business world, but I was thinking that many other architects face the same thing.

How Do You Calculate Fees?

7/10/2016

There are only three ways to calculate the fee for an architectural project.

List all the tasks that the project requires, and estimate the time that each task will take. The typical project has over 500 tasks.
Research the fees and profitability of similar past project, and interpolate the fee for this project. Unfortunately projects are rarely very similar.
Use a fee schedule to look up the value of the project in question.

FeeCalqs uses method #3 - but improves on the typical use of this method.

Here's How FeeCalqs Works

Building Groups Explained

7/3/2016

One of the fundamental parts of calculating a design fee as a percentage of construction cost is characterizing the complexity of the project. There is a different fee table for each level of difficulty. The terminology may vary, but the solution is to place each type of building into the Group representing its level of complexity / difficulty. Traditionally there were five Building Groups. Here is what those Groups look like.