Managing Design Work

Managing Architectural Design Work

8/14/2016

I have always been interested in the 'process' of architecture. Early on, any path I took felt like I was getting somewhere, but sometimes I was and sometimes I wan't. Once I was convinced that the solution to a small school admin office was designing the building from the front door inwards. Two days later with nothing to show for my effort except my boss's observation:

"What in the hell are you doing?"

I guess this wasn't a path that produced useful results.

I continued to be on the lookout for "the Way".

Nearly twenty years later I stumbled upon a magazine article describing when types of design decisions should be made in the design process to minimize re-work.

Finally, a clue!

One of the curious things about the recommended sequence was how they had been broken down by the same 'assemblies' system that I had seen in RS Means' Cost Estimating books.
Later I learned that this was the UNIFORMAT system.

The UNIFORMAT system organizes everything that goes into a building. What is unique about the UNIFORMAT organization is that each division aligns with a whole group of other related tasks.

To some extent these divisions align with groups of drawing sheets, too. Bottom line: the UNIFORMAT system, especially the oldest version, aligns with groups of responsibilities that you could delegate to team members so they won't be stepping on each others toes, or having excessive coordination to do.

I converted the article into the table you see above to make it a handy reference. Downloadable.

The columns represent progressive stages of the design process. The 'bands' of rows represent the UNIFORMAT assembly divisions. The intersections show the tasks that should be taking place to stay on course.

I think it makes sense to group the UNIFORMAT Assembly Divisions for delegation of assignments. Not every UNIFORMAT Division can stand completely alone except perhaps for an enormous project. In the table below, I have placed each UNIFORMAT Division in a Group. Each Group has an ID from 'A' to 'F'. The Groups are my idea of which Divisions are best to keep together. I have listed the drawing sheets that I foresee being part of the Group assignment (or the 'responsibility' if no drawings are involved). The table is downloadable as a zip file with Pages and Excel versions. Use it as a planning tool.

My Version of UNIFORMAT

GENERAL
FOUNDATIONS
SUPERSTRUCTURE
SITE
EXTERIOR CLOSURE
ROOFING
INTERIOR CONSTRUCTION
VERTICAL CIRCULATION AND CONVEYING
MECHANICAL SYSTEMS
ELECTRICAL SYSTEMS
EQUIPMENT

Of course, you still need coordination among all Groups, but this shows you how to use the maximum of people for speed with a minimum of overlap in assignments.

Clearly Group A has the most work and takes the lead in decision-making. Group A might consist of the project manager and/or principal and the project architect.
Group B is very stand-alone.
Group C is also very stand-alone.
Group D is significant, but might be easily combined with Group C.
Group E can stand alone or be folded into Group A. Group E doesn't even exist for one story buildings.
Group F can be handled as part of Group A for small projects, but the M/E coordination takes more and more time as the size of the project increases. For some project sizes this assignment might include structural coordination from Group A.

This concept of how to organize the work of a project for effectiveness was the impetus for my public Trello board PM-Steps. This board carries the UNIFORMAT Divisions across all design phases. Then the UNIFORMAT Divisions are further subdivided into over 700 tasks. I recommend that you look into making Trello your project management system for reasons that I have outlined in these posts.

If you like what you see, Trello-PM might be of interest to you. Trello-PM will show you how to implement your own project management system using free Trello accounts.