Category Archives: Collaboration

The Future of Work Needs a Redesign

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What if instead of starting with the design of the workplace of the future – we need to start with the design of work? For many work is broken, out of date and just doesn’t work anymore. In any ways, maybe it always was but most of us kept going because “that’s the way it’s always been”. But in fact it hasn’t.

What if instead of starting with the design of the workplace of the future – we need to start with the design of work? For many work is broken, out of date and just doesn’t work anymore. In any ways, maybe it always was but most of us kept going because “that’s the way it’s always been”. But in fact it hasn’t.

The world of 9-5 work, the office, the corporation- are all constructs of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Just like the landline, gramophone and steam train – should we snap back to those too? The traditional world of work was conceived in a world were mothers didn’t work, fathers didn’t spend time with their children and most of the work was designed like a factory production line.

More and more talking to both leaders and their teams I am realising there is something missing in the way we approach work.  It’s not so much about workplace as it is about how we do the work itself, how we connect, the processes, what tools we use.  For a while I didn’t even know what to call this aspect of work. It’s not strategy, or experience or organisational design or workforce planning, although it is a piece of all these things. Then I heard the term “work design” not “workplace design” but work itself! How simple, how obvious – this should be easy.  But it’s not,  not many teams or organisations are really thinking about it.

Long before the pandemic, Fully remote organisations like GitHub and Basecamp started thinking about the design of remote work. Atlassian have now built a big part of their brand message on it. Often these companies are just viewed to be doing this so they can sell software, but that doesn’t mean the rest of us can’t learn something from what they do. You don’t have to be remote first to benefit from work designed and optimised for the twenty first century.

One of the reasons hybrid work seems so hard is that often it hasn’t been deliberately designed. To really work, it requires a rethinking, a redesign of the processes of work and not just replacing meetings with virtual links. As I’ve written about before – part time or dispersed working also requires more thought about the process. For years organisation’s have been tinkering at the edges of process, layering on agile methodology or  new software to communicate and coordinate. But if we don’t bring intentional design to this process we keep layering these new ways and tools over the top of the old and creating the mongrel beast that work was become today – where people’s job is all about replying to emails and going to meetings. These are things that do need to happen as part of doing with in the twenty first century but they shouldn’t be the main thing whole teams are doing.

Often the problems are seen as software problems, email is the problem, zoom is the problem (or insert any industry specific software – in building design revit is the problem). However often the software isn’t the problem – the process itself is the problem.  However with many of the companies trying to address the problem (such as Atlassian) – the problem is still seen as software or something simplistic like too many meetings.

Even within the word of work, I (and others I’ve talked to) we’re struggling to work out – who can help fix this? There is no commonly used terminology to describe this problem or the type of consultant you might hire to work with you to solve this challenge. Recently I came across the work of Sharon Parker,  and The Future of Work Institute using the term “work design”.  Light bulb moment!  This is so simple conceptually but exactly what we need. Work needs to be redesigned! (Thanks also to Melissa Marsden for introducing me to Sharon’s work thru her podcast.)

The SMART work design model is based upon crafting work that is more meaningful and motivating, allowing people to build better working relationships and achieve better work outcomes. Similarly, the Four day workweek (or reduced hours workweek), where people work less hours for the same productivity and pay is a redesign of work.  In order to work less achieve the same outputs you have to reconsider, rethink and redesign how you do it.

What does work designed for the twenty first century actually look like? In my view, it does have to mean digital first, optimising whatever you do for best in class technology. Integrating AI will be part of redesigning work.  Likely so will new means of interacting with technology – the keyboard is surely reaching the end of its lifespan. Voice will become bigger but what else?

It also has to be designed for people, for individuals – the face of capitalism has changed. Many behaviours or work practices of the early twentieth century are no longer acceptable. So let’s also accept that work can be designed for both individuals and companies alike – it needs to be flexible in both place and time so we can draw upon the most talented and divese teams. It needs to be intentional.  We need to stop being busy for the sake of it,for the fact it’s always been done a certain way and think about what is really important to the outcomes, for our clients, our teams and the work we deliver.

Intention takes work.  Redesign takes work.  Structural change is disruptive. Some people see booking a desk or  coordinating a time to meet as hard. What they may not realise is that for others, coming to the office 5 days a week is harder. None of this is easy. People don’t like to change, especially if the can’t immediately see the benefits to themselves. The redesign of work should benefit everyone. But there are people who have been privileged in the past who might find this harder to see.  It’s been well documented (McKinsey etc) that more diverse companies outperform less diverse companies. The potential benefits are huge. It think it’s worth the effort – don’t you? Four day workweek anyone?

Ceilidh Higgins

Image via Unsplash https://unsplash.com/photos/water-ripple-Q5QspluNZmM

What if instead of ‘learning by osmosis’ we tried sharing with intention?

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Before 2020 if you googled ‘learning by osmosis’ you would mostly find memes of cats and students asleep atop a pile of books, alongside articles telling you this was no way to study.

Then came lockdown, and all of a sudden the idea of ‘learning by osmosis’ was everywhere and all of a sudden I realised I now had a name to put to the problem I had been seeing with many many graduates of 2-5 years experience. No-one was actually teaching them anything and they were just expected to be learning because they sat there working in an office.  Similar to the people who believe that a positive workplace culture comes from just sitting in an office together, there seems to be a lot of people who believe that learning happens just by being together.


So is leaning by osmosis really the best way to expect professionals to learn? Do graduates actually get exposed to training and life lessons through overhead phone calls and incidental conversations? Do many people even have phone conversations anymore? Or is it just like culture, in that you might find you get better outcomes if there is some intentionality behind how you teach, coach and mentor.  Maybe more learning happens by inviting them to sit in on client meetings and spending time explaining the concepts behind what we are asking them to do?  Maybe even investing time in regular group training (which can also easily be recorded for future use).  All of these things can happen both in real life and virtually too.


It’s not just about learning for graduates but other ways we communicate and share information in the workplace too. The pandemic has highlighted the function of the office as a place where frequently all kinds of project and organisational knowledge is shared on an ad-hoc basis between whoever happens to be physically around at the time.  Long before Covid and remote work, larger companies have been aware of the need to create ways to record and share knowledge beyond smaller groups and individual teams who might speak to each other on a day to day to basis – to share across different disciplines and geographically dispersed locations. Anyone who has worked if a dispersed team has probably noticed this and perhaps thought about how to change it. I believe it’s one of the biggest reasons why dispersed and hybrid teams are often so difficult to setup and manage.


Do you want to rely on the right person happening to overhear the right phone call to learn or know something? Its a pretty chancy way of communicating even without the fact that people taking taking phone calls in the open office has been on the decline since before Covid (unfortunately though still to many people think its okay to do a Teams in an open office). More business is today conducted via email and scheduled meetings. Frequently one on one phone calls just create confusion when multiple parties are expected to be on top of the issues and part of the decision making. Copying everyone into an email or scheduling a meeting became the solution to ensuring no-one was inadvertently left out. While endless meetings are not ideal, sometimes it’s better than circles of calls (and messages) trying to keep everyone in the loop. Even when phone calls do occur, with mobile phones now the default number to call, frequently they are taken while on the go, or in a meeting / focus room so as to not force your colleagues to have to listen in.


An informal and ad-hoc approach to sharing information also can create disadvantages for many in the workplace. The people who are part time, work shifted hours, work on site some days or happen to have the day off. Even someone who was in a meeting or at lunch.  Whenever we communicate based upon whoever happens to be physically present at the time, we are potentially creating inequalities of information (which can even become a form of bullying).  A more intentional approach to sharing information, whatever level people are at helps avoid this bias.


Intentional teaching and sharing also helps address different modes of learning or language barriers.  By writing down or recording what we are communicating, we allow people to review and learn at their own pace and to check back in later.  Written forms of communication particularly where shared amongst the group – such as chat, planner platforms or shared documents are invaluable for dispersed and hybrid teams. As long as people use them! Make these methods the starting point for all your team interactions and very quickly most people will see the benefits. Not everyone finds writing the easiest way to communicate though – video and screen recording is now so accessible sometimes this can be an awesome way of communicating and learning. (Thanks to my recent grad who demonstrated that to me one day recording her software troubles on video to share with me).


For individuals and teams who work closely together and need to communicate frequently, scheduling time together regularly and in advance is an easy start. Both group time and one on one time are necessary depending on the structure of your teams. It doesn’t have to be weekly, maybe for some people it’s monthly.  Rather than focus valuable time together on who is doing what (which is easily written down and doesn’t always need discussion), consider discussing project issues and problems as a group so everyone can learn from one another.   


Sharing knowledge with intention means people are going to learn what they need to know and do it faster than if you rely upon  chance.  It has been a long time since I’ve spent a lot of face to face time with my team (long before covid), but I’ve always spent a lot of time teaching and coaching with intention.  One of the graduates I worked with told me she learned more from me on 3 months than she had in her previous 3 years of work.  I probably saw her 2 days a week. Throughout my career, I have experienced different models of distributed and remote work which have frequently meant I didn’t work in the same physical location as people who I could learn from, people I needed to share information with or teach – either inside or outside my organisation. Being open to learning, sharing and collaborating remotely opened up many more opportunities than it would have reduced or constrained my learning.


If the workplace is not for learning by osmosis, what is it for?  One of the things that is much harder (its not impossible) to either learn or do virtually is to network and build ties within an origination outside of your own team.  There is a lot of research starting to come out on the importance of weak ties and this is one of the challenges that remote and even hybrid work will need to overcome. Its not learning stuff that matters but connecting with people. In this way workplaces, real life conferences or networking events all serve the same function. You create connections that can help you later. You don’t need to learn everything yourself, but to know the right people to help you.

Ceilidh Higgins
Image via Marco Chilese on Unsplash

Work Smarter Not Harder

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In theory we all have exactly the same amount of time in our day or our week, but why is it that different situations such as lockdowns, maternity leave or unemployment make time pass so differently – or different individuals feel like they have so much more or less time than others?  While there is a whole host of reasons that impact our perception of time, one of the biggest is how effectively we use it – the common saying to work smarter not harder.  But how exactly do you do that? 

As someone who has gone from a life working a 60 plus hour week to a flexible 27 hour work week, I have a few thoughts on the subject. In architecture and design, many people equate working long hours to loving their job and being creative.  But how much of those long hours are actually being spent on creative endeavours?  Or people think they are simply just not ‘organised’ and believe they can’t change the way they interact with time.  Just as you can train yourself to become better at a sport, a hobby or a language, you can also train your brain to deal with your time differently.  Even if you have trouble concentrating, being organised or have ADHD – you can train your brain and change how you deal with time and organisational skills. (While its not a resource for time management, “The Brain that Changes Itself” is an amazing book about the power and plasticity of the brain)

The first step to doing things differently is to make the decision that YOU want to do things differently.  Maybe you can also bring your colleagues and others around you along for the ride, but maybe you can’t.  At the end of the day though, we can only change our own behaviours and responses and gently encourage others around us to take responsibility for their own choices and actions.

Many people can be very successful in life, but still have problems managing their own time, or respecting the time of others.  Often these people are stressed out and overwhelmed, they know something in their life isn’t working, but they are not sure what it is.  Frequently the noticeable issue is that you feel like every day is spent putting out fires and you may not feel in control of your own time.  This can flow onto the people around you, leaving them feeling the same.  It doesn’t make a great work environment for anyone.

Regardless of our our own time management or our immediate team, often in the collaborative but often combative world of design and construction, external parties are pushing their own agendas and can leave us feeling our day or week is out of our own control.

Set Your Boundaries

People who know me today, assume that I started to set boundaries  around my work life because I have a small child.  Its common that women (and more and more men) will prioritize children, and particularly child care pickups (partially due to expensive fines for being late).  But while this might often force people out the door, it doesn’t always mean that boundaries are set at other times, either on a day off, at night or on the weekends.  For me, I’d actually started to set boundaries around my time earlier.

Particularly in this always on smart phone age, I believe everyone needs to set their own boundaries.   No-one will ever manage all your time for you.  You have to decide when to switch off, when you are available and when you are not.  This includes setting and managing your own notifications on your phone, email and apps.   Its also important to have a culture that makes it clear to team members that they are not expected to be switched on and responding 24/7.  Particularly during lockdown, much of my own work was occurring outside business hours – that doesn’t mean I expect others to be available or responding.  If you know that work emails outside of hours will aggravate you – turn them off (or see below and try meditation).

In this industry you can never avoid deadlines, and occasional overtime is always going to be required, but planning realistic timeframes and negotiating with clients to achieve agreed outcomes can help to manage this process as well as regular communications within teams about current workloads and status.  We use slack and in person meetings to keep track of where everyone is, what they are working on and project resourcing overall.

For many years I have run teams with a significant proportion of part time or remote staff (one team I was the only full time person out of 5!)  As a team we plan our workloads, deadlines and meetings around everyone’s commitments.  Sometimes this takes more work and means agreed hours needs to be thought about and regular meetings might have to be on Teams/Zoom or even to shift days whenever things need to change – but this way everyone is able to plan their days and time around known commitments.  Many teams have seen over the course of the last year that this approach can work.

Delegation and Mentoring

Obviously one of the biggest ways to save yourself time, if you can’t automate it (more on that later) – delegate it.  Many professionals in our industry – be they architects, designers, engineers or even project managers are really really bad at delegating.  Partially this could be because we don’t even get taught how to delegate and many of us have had such  poor examples to learn from.  Delegating is not just handing something over to someone else to do it and then checking every day (or hour) if they did it yet.  Delegating effectively is a mix of training and briefing people as well as a bit of letting go.  

Our industry has been often heavily biased towards a single individual being in control of the project or being the client contact – but this is not always the best team structure – for the client, the project, the business or the time of individuals.  If a less experienced team member is paired with a more experienced team member, not just to draw this and model that – but to take responsibility and get to know the project inside out, it can be a huge benefit to both team members as well as the client and your business overall.  When only 1 team member knows what is going on across the project – you open yourself up to trouble if they get sick, go on holidays or leave your business.

I use a mix of different communication tools for delegating and briefing staff from in person or video chats thru to previous examples, Slack and Trello as well as Revizto.  Just because I delegate a task also does not mean I don’t track the outcome at all, and a lot of these tools help my team communicate with each other when something is complete or any issues or delays in completing a task.

I also spend a lot of my time training and reviewing projects or deliverables (probably actually almost half my time).  In particular, training is often set aside when we are busy but can then be ignored for months at a time as low priority.  Before you know it – you have a team going off in 10 different directions (same goes for regular team meetings or one on one catchups).

Tools

Use the right tool for the job.  Any task you spend a lot of manual time on can be improved – it doesn’t matter if its emails, expense claims or documentation.  Any time I find myself ‘wasting’ time by inputting data twice, or adding up manually, I know there is a better way.  I am constantly on the lookout for tasks that can be improved on and the tools to fix them. This mindset really does help you work smarter.  If you can get a whole team working thinking this way, over the course of a year you can make significant improvements in how you work – and see positive gains in culture as people feel less frustrated wasting time on boring manual tasks.

Slack (or other chat) is frequently a faster way of communicating with team members than email.  Software like Trello, MS Planner or Monday can help you manage your projects, delegate and assign tasks and never forget to do anything ever again!  Is Revit the right tool for the stage you are in?  Do you need to add Dynmo or another free or paid addin to help push Revit in the right direction?  Or do you need to get back to basics and sketch – but could sketching digitally on an iPad make this process faster and more efficient as well as provide consistency?

Your software is just one set of tools though, there are many other tools that can help you with productivity in different ways.  One I like is a music subscription designed to help you focus – Focus at Will. 

For others, trying different ways, places and times of working can make a big difference – if you have the opportunity, then figure out what works for you.  I know some of my colleagues (and much of the world) were surprised at how productive they became working from home during lockdowns!

Processes and checklists

Processes and in particular use of templates can really help you to streamline your time.  The more people or times you are doing a task, the more important templates become.  Templates can range from wording in an email that can be copy and pasted, a standard Trello board, through to your Revit or Indesign software templates.  A template for these kinds of programs is much more than just the graphic look.  Templates also should build on automation, from automating text that is repeated, to page numbering, use of styles and consistency of information.  It surprises me how poorly understood templates are within architecture practices.  Building templates takes time but if done well should pay off quickly and immediately by improving both the time it takes to do something and the quality of the outcome.

Checklists help free up our brains so we can focus on the important and creative tasks.  They also help create a process for ensuring quality of documentation, proposals or anything else you are issuing.

Process is also about how you manage your own time.  Blocking out and committing to time for strategic tasks (whatever than might mean in your role from building templates to business development strategies to one on one meetings with your team members).  Most of us actually know the things we should be doing to take our career, business or project to the next level – we just don’t actually make the time for it.

For me one of the most effective process tips I’ve ever found was around managing emails and keeping a clean inbox – when you open the email, make a decision immediately what to do with it – delete it, file it, move it to your action list (for me that’s Trello) or move it to a folder to be actioned later (I call it _To Do so it sits at the top of my folder lists) – or even better delegate it to someone else.  It doesn’t matter if I’m on my PC or my phone – this is what I do with my emails.  I remember once some colleagues looked at my email when I was out one day and thought it was broken – because my inbox was empty!  You do need to ensure you check and action the to do folder every day you are working for this to succeed.  This won’t work for everyone – find what processes work for you to manage however it is you work.

Sleep and Exercise

When you are tired you don’t perform at your peak, you make more mistakes and things take longer.  You probably also feel like you have even less time (and this is my explanation for over a year of no blogging!)  I have noticed that regular good quality sleep and setting aside the time for exercise makes a huge difference to how productive and creative I am during the day.  If you continue to push yourself to work hard or spend hours awake at night stressing, you will never be able to work smarter.  Having spent the last year dealing with sleep issues in my family, I really recommend taking action – see a doctor, a psychologist, try acupuncture, meditation or even simply cutting back caffeine (much as I love coffee – this is actually the first thing to start with).

Meditation

There is scientific proof that meditation changes your brain.  It can help you sleep, it can help you manage stress and anxiety and it can even help you to become more creative.  I know personally, it is one of the habits that I know I should do more of, but even if you don’t manage to meditate every day, there are still so many benefits.  One of the biggest that I have noticed in myself is the ability to be less reactive and not to take personally emails or other communications I might find stressful or frustrating.   I find this allows me to be more available without pushing up my stress levels, which helps me manage my own boundaries.  Personally I like Headspace app but there are so many different types and varieties of meditation out there, try a few different ones and see what works for you.  Commit to 10 minutes per day for 10-14 days and you will notice a difference.  Mediate regularly for a year or more, and seriously, it will change you (in a good way!)

Other People

The hardest thing to manage is the other people who you work with, but who you don’t necessarily have influence over their processes.  From clients to other consultant members to other teams within your own organisation.  While you can work your best to work smarter – not everyone around you will see the benefits.  That is where meditation and patience comes in!  (if not a change of job) However many of these techniques will also help in managing others around you. By being organised, reliable and setting your own boundaries, you will generally find most other people around you will over time respect knowing what to expect and when to expect things.

Letting go of Ego

One of the hardest and possibly least talked about aspects of not working so many hours is letting go. Letting go and taking a step back from the project or the work, but also letting go of your own ego. To successfully work part time, or likely even at different times means you have to delegate, and sometimes you have to delegate decision making, miss an important meeting or let someone else take the lead. I always try to remember no- one is indispensable – and that if I was indispensable, that would mean I couldn’t take a holiday either!

Different tools, systems and tips work for everyone. Sometimes it really is a matter of giving things a go to see what works. Team environments are a little harder, but being willing to try different ways of working and organising can benefit everyone. What are your tips for working smarter in architecture and design? Or in life generally?

Image Credits: Photo by Victoria Heath on Unsplash

The early bird catches the worm? When to engage engineers

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Breakfast by Ron Wooten, on FlickrWorking as a collaborative team with project managers, engineers and other consultants as well as the client is a topic I have written about or touched on in many of my previous posts.  Some of my earliest posts on this blog were about working together with engineers, starting with this post on Collaborating with Engineers.

Earlier this year, after coming across this post, sourcable.net asked me to comment on why engineers should be involved early in projects.  “I think early engagement with engineers allows you to explore a lot more possibilities and solutions and not be constrained so much”.  As well as discussing the benefits of early engagement of engineers, this article also discuss the barriers to doing so. To read the full article on sourceable.net click here.

And I should also mention – when I refer to sharing drawings…of course I also mean to include models! Really I should have said sharing design information, which is what really working as a collaborative team is about.

When do you engage with engineers?  What stops you doing so earlier? Do engineers want to be involved early, or would you rather wait until the architect has ‘finished designing’? (Now there is a topic for another day!) Do you see benefits to sharing more information across the consultant team?

Ceilidh Higgins

Image Credits: “Breakfast” (CC BY-SA 2.0) by  Ron Wooten 

Can we have a workplace of the future without a boss of the future?

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No more boss ... by Bousure, on Flickr
For some years now, but with increasing pace – books, blogs and videos are all predicting a new (and often idyllically portrayed) world of work where workers are empowered to choose where and when they work, teams are built on a project basis to find the best workers, and personal and family life are interwoven around the way we work (this example is from Microsoft). The idea of the physical workplace itself, as a service or as a consumer item forms part of this world, along with technology that is now becoming very real – on demand video conferencing (often with holograms).

 I first remember encountering theses concepts some years ago reading Thomas W Malone’s “The Future of Work” which predicted decentralisation of organisations and more freedom for employees to determine when, where and what to do.  At the time I read the book, the technology wasn’t quite real for me yet, but was already starting to change the way we work. In the 5 or 6 years since then, I know that my iPad and iPhone have drastically changed how I can work, in particular while I am traveling.

This new world of work is sometimes given a timeframe as in this study – Workplace 2040. But what’s stopping this from being Workplace 2020? I don’t think it’s technology, I think it’s the people. One of the key things these scenarios all rely on is the independence of the workers and the ability of these people to work together regardless of physical locations. For the majority of workplaces today, these are already no longer technology issues, any difficulties come down to human nature.

Very few jobs are yet structured around only around doing a set amount of work. Most are still structured around an expectation of set working hours, although perhaps these hours are more flexible now than a generation ago. It is still much more usual to see people staying back because the work is not finished, than for them to go home early when all the work is done. One issue in many workplaces, after of years of economic downturn – is that its pretty rare the work is ever all done, and if it is we worry that to leave early would make us a target for redundancy. But most of the time there are simply insufficient numbers of staff for the work to ever actually be finished. The other issue is that there is still a very common view that we are employed just as much to “be” at the place of work, as we are to “do” work. People are afraid if they finish their work and leave early (or even on time) they will be judged both by their managers and their peers as being lazy, slacking off, not contributing or not being team players – when in actual fact they might be more efficient and better at their jobs. To many employees, flexible has come to mean flexible for employers (I know of one firm where when employees raised the issue of flexibility the employer genuinely believed this meant flexibility in how the work was done – in the office, with no idea staff were wanting flexibility in how and when they worked!)

Even in organisations which already have activity based working or other forms of agile working, these same kinds of problems are occurring. I heard a story about one large ABW workplace which has a working from home policy, but the main workplace is often too full. Is it full because the environment itself is so successful and staff can’t stay away, or is it because there is a least one manager who wanders about every morning ticking off a role of staff and then contacting anyone who hasn’t been in the office for 2 days?

In an ABW environment, the distrust managers have of workers whom they can’t see can manifest even when staff are working within the office but beyond the managers view. It’s the same emotional motivations that lead to workplaces with beautiful but empty breakout spaces – staff are afraid of being seen as slacking off.Perhaps it’s also this fear behind why some middle managers are also so reluctant to give up their offices, it’s not so much about the work they do, or even the status, but their belief that they have earned  their right to not be watched over by the boss.

Another working model enabled by technology and affected by the same issue is distributed working, where company employees are based in different geographic locations.  I have worked in this model and it does present interesting challenges as a team leader.  Whilst staff may have a manger in their physical location, as a team leader you only know your staff are working on your project by the work they produce. You do have to manage differently for performance based outcomes – if you have your team sitting in front of you they are more likely to communicate with you more directly both with questions about the work, if someone else asks them to do something or when the work allocated is completed. Managing a distributed team does take more work – but not only does it allow more flexibility in team structures, where we can work and deliver projects – but it actually teaches managers and team leaders to be better at their jobs, better organised and better communicators.

Managements fear of the invisible employee is not a problem of architecture or design – it doesn’t matter what sort of office you have or how amazing your design team are. If your managers don’t trust their staff and are not trained to manage remote staff (from on another floor to in another country), then ‘new ways of working’ won’t work for your organisation. Very few organisations actually train people to manage teams, we don’t learn it at university either. Historically managers usually start out on the management path because they are good at the technical thing that they do – not because they are good at managing other people. If they make money for the organisation, they are likely to be promoted further regardless of their people management skills. Maybe at some point their organisation will decide they need some extra ‘soft skills’ but is likely they have developed their style and habits by then, and it’s now long past when they really would have benefited from them. Maybe as part of a new office fitout someone will have realized that a change management program is required. But in a large organisation, is it thorough enough to go right down through all levels of management and is the whole of the organisation seriously aligned to the goal (even when their own bosses are not looking)?

Perhaps a self managed team structure is the answer? Some organisations are now starting to abolish middle management in favour of this idea. I wonder how it will work, will natural managers and leaders start to emerge? Or does it only work if the whole team is highly organised and motivated (in effect naturally good at managing themselves at least)?

Is it possible the fear of flexibility and remote working is generational difference, and one that will simply disappear between now and 2040? I don’t think so. Whilst I see many more younger managers who are comfortable with remote management and who have more trust in their teams, than older ones. But I don’t think its necessarily a distinction of age, but one of culture and of an acceptance that the way we work has already changed. I am frequently shocked that anyone could suggest that we might work the same way now as back in the eighties or even nineties. In the 15 years since I graduated architecture the way we work has changed fundamentally. Not only has technology and software changed, but these changes – in particular the mobility and automation they have enabled means that new ways of working are not something of the future – they are already here, it’s just that some people don’t seem to have noticed it yet.

Ceilidh Higgins
Image Credits: “No more Boss”
Creative Commons Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.0 Generic License   by  Bousure 

Architectural services – Apple or Amazon? Or both?

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happy pills by lism., on FlickrIs architecture a product or a service? Can it be both? This week a number of different conversations got me thinking on this topic (again). Whilst I have written before about the idea of a workplace as a product indicating status, the conversations I had this week came from a different angle. Are our clients actually interested in the process of architecture or design – or do they just want a product at the end?

A friend had been asked to ponder the suggestion that architectural clients do not actually care about the process of architecture -its only architects that think they do.  As so often is the case in conversations about design as a product, the suggestion was framed based on Apple. Do we as the consumers and purchasers of Apple products care about the design process behind the Apple products? Or do we just care about the product that we find innovative, beautiful, simple, elegant and easy to use? Biographies and movies about Steve Jobs aside, I would agree it is the product that we are buying and not the process. (I’d say our interest in Steve Jobs is more about celebrity than about the process of design).

When this suggestion was made – that our clients are not interested in being part of our design process – I immeadiately responded that this was not true in my particular area of specialty – workplace design. Most of my clients feel deeply about the workplace – and quite rightly given how much time most of us spend there. For me as a workplace designer, I do feel that the client has to be part of the process. For me to give them the best design solution for their staff and business I need to understand them, their culture and the work that they do. This is a key part of the design process. Not just for office fitouts but for any type of space which is to be designed for people to work in…and to me that really that means just about every kind of space.

Whilst you might be shopping or eating out, or seeing a movie – there are people  working in all of these environments.  Schools, universities, hospitals and laboratories are all workplaces too. These days so are our houses. So the kinds of buildings that wouldn’t be workplaces are pretty limited. How can our clients not be part of the process of design, when we are talking about understanding what they need and how they work? Even landlords or developers should be part of the process defining quality and expectations, and hopefully working towards ensuring better outcomes for their tenants – whose needs they might understand better than the architects.

But the design process is not just about functionality. It’s also about creativity and aesthetics. It’s about us as architects and designers taking the functional brief and turning it into something special, something unexpected. Do our clients want to be part of this process? Do we want them to be? This to me becomes a more difficult question to answer. There are some clients that I have enjoyed engaging with as part of the whole design process, there are others who are quite happy for us to come back with design concepts based upon their functional needs that they will comment on in relation to function in an open minded way, giving us full responsibility for the design itself . Both of these kinds of clients I am happy to work with, and I enjoy the project process.

There is another kind of client that is much more difficult. The kind that makes it difficult for the design process to happen.  They are the kind who criticise without understanding, who direct the design process so closely but without regard to design, who value process above outcomes and who actually end up sabotaging the design of their own projects – even if its unintentional. The behaviours and examples of this kind of client differ widely but one example would be the project manager who tries to change the breakout chairs, because he just doesn’t like the look of them. Firstly he hasn’t even sat in it, and secondly, he isn’t even someone who is going to work there. (It was quite pleasing when the project manager who sat next to him told him to stay out of something that wasn’t his job).  Another would be the client who requires endless reports but doesn’t allow enough time for both the reports and the design process as well.

At the end of the day, whichever kind of client we have, it’s still our job to deliver the project. We have been engaged to provide a service. This customer service aspect of our role was raised in my office last week during a lessons learnt workshop. One of our clients had suggested that the design team might need to take some happy pills. I am sure you are all familiar with that point on a project where everyone is working long hours, stressed and has just had enough. Most of us are not at our best perky happy customer service mindset then. It was this that our client was commenting on. For us, it raised the question, how often do we think about architecture as a service industry? Whilst we frequently refer to Apple in conversations about design, how often do we compare ourselves to Amazon?

Amazon has products too, but their focus is on customer service. If you have ever contacted their customer service department, you will know what I mean.  The way they communicate both by phone and email is all about how can we help you and solve your problem as easily as possible.  Their email ends tagged with “Your feedback is helping us build Earths Most Customer-Centric Company” which I think is a great aim and encourages customers to engage in providing feedback.  This customer service oriented culture is integral to the Amazon brand.

And actually the customer experience is central at Apple too. The philosophy behind the design of their products is all about the customer experience.  The Apple store, is also all about the customer experience, different to many other brands due to the level of staffing and the amount of space  given over to allow customers to try out and learn about their products.

So maybe we shouldn’t be worrying about if our clients are part of the process, but we should be framing the question differently. What’s your client experience?  While we bend over backwards by working long hours trying to make our clients happy, are we actually achieving it? Do we survey our clients and ask for feedback about their client experience? Do we need to be smarter about how we create our client experience? The language use, our website, our meeting environments and our staff all contribute to our clients experience as well as the design and contact deliverables we prepare. Do all these things send the same client service  message? And are we even aware of the messages we are sending? It’s certainly something that has got me thinking.

Ceilidh Higgins

Image Credits:
Creative Commons Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 2.0 Generic License by lism.

Are your clients part of your design team? Do you want them to be?

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Monkey in the Middle by Mark Dumont, on Flickr This week I read that nearly 2 thirds of industry representatives surveyed believe that the UK Government target for the uptake of Building Information Modelling is unachievable – largely due the lack of a collaboration between clients and construction contractors, hindered by contracts that do not support collaboration (here’s the link).

This came as no great surprise to me – I have always wondered how the UK Government was actually managing this whole process and program, particularly because here in Australia, the Government contracts can often be the most onerous and the client specific expectations and requirements – for reports, meetings or documentation which are outside the actual requirements for building design and documentation – are often excessive. This article got me thinking generally about clients and collaboration. Collaboration is essentially another (more trendy) word for teamwork. Do our clients understand that they are a part of the design team?

For many types of projects today – workplace, hospital, laboratory – the input of the client representatives into the functional aspects of the design is critical to a successful project. Frequently clients have their own in house project managers, designers, architects and engineers who may be involved in briefing, reviewing and responding to the queries of the external design team. Contractually these representatives are part of ‘the client side’ and not considered part of the design team. This can become a real problem for actually delivering projects.

All to often the client side creates delays for the project. Delays in providing information about types of equipment, numbers of staff or delayed feedback at review points. Every time we ask a question, the lack of an answer or a partial answer can impact upon our ability to push on with the design process. Information as well as creativity drives design, good design generally cannot occur in a bubble separated from the client organisations functional needs.

Frequently it can get to the point where there are so many question marks it becomes almost impossible for us to progress any part of a building due to the number of fuzzy areas. If the client was truly collaborating and part of the design team, they would take responsibility for this. Instead of blindly insisting that the end date for delivery remain the same they would work with the design team to minimise the delays. They would also accept that they are accountable for the additional costs that their consultant teams incur due to their organisational delays.

This comes to the heart of the problem. The client in these cases is not an individual person. It’s an organisation. And it’s probably an organisation that doesn’t have a collaborative culture internally. Usually it’s not so much the individual project representatives who are facing the design team who are causing the delays or not understanding the importance of the information – it’s other people in their business who don’t necessarily understand how design works. It seems a simple concept to me – to design you an office I really do need to know how many staff you have (or wish to have)…

Sometimes it is those client representatives sitting across the table at project meetings every week that are causing the delays. They pretend they don’t understand why you need that information or decision so urgently – because they don’t want to be stuck with the blame inside their organisation. If the individuals running the project are going to be blamed and have negative performance reviews because the building project they were involved in ran late or cost more, then it’s no surprise they push all this back onto the external design team. Or to other teams within their organisation. (Although with IT, it almost always is true – somehow they never seem to understand that their equipment can have a very large impact on the physical space, but if we didn’t provide enough room or enough air conditioning there would be trouble!)

Perhaps it’s no surprise really – as long as collaboration and an attitude of cooperation or a best for project approach does not exist inside of large organisations then it probably won’t exist in construction either. But that doesn’t absolve individuals of responsibility either. Whatever your role in a design team – architect, interior designer, engineer, client or project manager (yep, I think you too are part of the design team, and these comments apply just as much to PMs as to clients), if each person on the team makes an effort to work openly and collaborate then as an industry we will get so much further. Over time, if project teams actually tried to work together more, the demand for more collaborative contract styles will increase as teams realize the benefits.

By the way – I don’t let architects, designers and engineers off the hook here either. While my discussion above has focussed on the role of the client and the importance of their collaboration in a design project, the rest of the design team has to be willing to collaborate too. This means we as designers have to understand that the client has a real and valid input to the project – after all they are paying for it and do have to live with it – we don’t. That doesn’t mean design by committee or that the client always knows best. It does mean that we should take the clients comments, concerns and functional needs seriously, and that they need to trust us to work with these needs and come up with the best design solutions.

In most western economies, construction is one of the most inefficient industries – and without collaboration by all parties involved, but particularly by clients who are the drivers of projects and the ones who select the contracts, then this will never change.

But the best thing about working on a project where everyone involved is interested in collaborating and ensuring a great project – its actually more enjoyable to work on when we can all focus on the things that matter – like design – instead of bickering over missing information and missed project deadlines.

Do you feel your clients should be part of the design team? Do they want to be? If you are a client – do you want to be? What are your barriers to collaboration?

Next week I’ll be at Worktech Melbourne, so I hope to bring you some great ideas back from there. Perhaps also I will see some of you there.

I am also now on Twitter find me @ceilidhhiggins.

Image Credits:
Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic License  by  Mark Dumont 

Are you an architect if you don’t draw? Is a design manager still an architect?

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7597713652_c246737d9c_oAre you an architect? Do you draw?  In the sense I’m referring to that question today, it is usually meant to include modelling as well, and usually means more than just mark up or do a quick napkin sketch. Are you still an architect if your day job doesn’t involve drawing? What does an architect actually do day to day if they don’t draw? Today, the tasks that an architect do can be so broad, that many architects don’t even seem to understand what other architects they work with actually do. If we don’t understand what our colleagues are actually doing, then is it any surprise that many of our clients don’t really understand (or value) all the tasks that go into creating a building project.

I’ll start by saying, technically, I’m not an architect (although I do still draw depending on workload and projects). The reason I’m not an architect is very much a technicality, and whilst its not about drawing, I think it is relevant to the way in which the profession seems confused about itself and what architects actually do. I studied architecture for 6 years, have worked in the industry for 15 and I have even sat for and passed the Board of Architecture exams. However, I don’t pay the annual registration fee to the board, so that means I’m not an architect. (That’s my choice though, as I work as an interior designer – the relationship between designers and architects being a story for perhaps another post sometime). In Australia, anyone who not passed the exam and registered is not supposed to call themselves an architect, but a graduate of architecture, even if they have been practicing for 30 years.  It’s not this kind of semantics or industry protection that I’m really wanting to talk about today (though personally I don’t think architects really benefit from the protection if the term), it’s the tasks we actually do to deliver our projects. And can often apply just as much to other building design disciplines such as interior design and engineering too.

For any architect (or graduate of architecture) or interior designer that works in an office of more than a few people,  you won’t do everything yourself. Some people will undertake business development and bring in the work, some will have face to face client roles, some will draw, some will use BIM, some will know all the graphic software, some will write specifications, some will be good at the overarching idea, some will be focussing on construction and technical detailing, and someone needs to ensure that the subconsultants are briefed, the team is delivering on time and the team size and mix is the right one.  Most of us do a mix of these things, very few of us are good at all of them. The whole point of working in a team (to me anyway) is to benefit from these different mixes of skills.

Given that delivering a building project is therefore very much a team sport of many different positions, it therefore surprises me then when I hear comments like “as architects is job is mostly drawing” or “what are you actually doing on the project – you are not drawing or writing the spec?”  That fact that the later was made by an architect who was managing more than 20 architects (and happened to be involved with the board or architects), is to me, quite disturbing. Do architects really not understand and value what their team mates are up to on the job, thinking that only certain parts of the project are actually important to the architecture?

I guess that partially it is related to the increasing complexity of large construction projects. When I first graduated a bit over 10 years ago, we didn’t have sustainability consultants, access consultants or BIM managers – every project our consultant teams seem to grow ever larger. (Recently I saw a consultant team list which included a wind consultant – a new one to me).  Managing all of these people, briefing them and coordinating their work is a big job on its own. You can then add the work often involved in meeting client stakeholder management and reporting processes, quality assurance processes and code compliance checking (which whilst we have consultants is still so much the responsibility of the designer be they architect, interior designer or engineer). Between all these tasks n a larger project you easily have a full time role, commonly referred to as design manager.

It is really important that this is understood as a different role to the project manager – whilst one person may do both, just because there is a project manager doesn’t mean you don’t need someone undertaking the tasks of design manger. In fact, sometimes it can become even more critical to  ensure that these tasks are actually undertaken and don’t fall through the cracks when the independent project manager consultant is the lead consultant. They won’t generally do your  co-ordination checks for you. Whilst a project manager ifs often at arms length from the actual design and documentation, and may have very different qualifications and skills to the architect – to me, the true design manager needs to understand what is being designed – they need to be an architect (or a designer or engineer depending on the project/design team being managed). However, there seem to be a lot of architects and designers who don’t understand that this role is very much a valuable and necessary one (whatever it is called), and, if the project team is structured well, not just another layer of management.

If I told an architect who sat at the computer all day writing specifications that they weren’t an architect because they couldn’t manage a 20 person team to deliver a multi million dollar project they would scoff at me. Same thing if I told the autoCAD technical detailer she wasn’t an architect because she didn’t use BIM (and had no interest in learning or even understanding why you would use it). But many these kinds of team members seem to think its ok to put down the work of those managing the projects (or even those brining in the work) as not being real architects because they don’t draw.

One of the funny things to me in all of this, is that in Australia, the registration exams actually focus on these management and practice management tasks – not on design, drawing, technical detailing or specifications. This knowledge is taken as assumed (through your studies and your log book of experience) – neither the written exam or the interview deal with these topics. So maybe it’s the opposite – real architects don’t draw? (But of course in my world they are all expected to use BIM!)

Image Credits: Mennonite Church USA Archives via Flickr

Why is delivering on time so hard? Is it that architecture, engineering and time management don’t mix?

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Time Jumper by h.koppdelaney, on FlickrThis week I’m struggling to find the motivation to write – not because I don’t have anything to say, or even that I don’t have time – but because my brain is currently in a state of post tender lethargy. I’m sure you are all familiar with it – the stress and extra hours leading up to issuing architecture, interior design or engineering documentation for tender seems to be a routine part of working on the consulting side of construction. Design programs seem to get ever shorter, staff numbers always reducing and the complexity of projects increasing, it is a scenario that just seems to get worse and worse. Personally, for me, I find it’s not actually the hours that get to me – even if I don’t work really long hours in the lead up to a tender – it’s more the stress of will be on time? Will all the team deliver on time? Does being late impact the end date for the project? How annoyed will the client be if we are late? Will we be able to issue an addendum?  It’s worrying about these things that gets to me. I care about being on time – whether that’s arriving for a meeting or delivering something on the date I’ve promised – and for me when this becomes impossible or outside my own direct  control this is the biggest cause of stress.  And I don’t think this is just me, I know a lot of colleagues agree (and many former colleagues who went over to the client side to avoid it!)

Why does it seem to be impossible? Is this deadline driven stress something we just have to accept as being part of our industry?  I’d like to think not. But I’m not sure how we change this. One loyal reader (Thanks Jase – he also asked me to make this post controversial) suggested that its a lack of planning and felt that no post on the last minute nature of delivery in architecture and engineering could be complete without the 5 Ps – “Proper Planning Prevents Poor Performance”. I agree there is a lot of poor planning goes on by all parties involved in construction – and it all begins with the client and the fee proposal.

At proposal stage (where ironically we usually have to be on time or we are disqualified), the client typically sets out some sort of milestones that they have in mind for their project. Sometime these are ‘real’ and fixed milestones such as a lease end, a university teaching holiday period or a certain date on which staff are returning from off site locations. At other times the milestones are not so much functional fixed requirements and may be based on internal performance measures or arbitrary dates (or just plain silly things like government money that somehow evaporates come end of financial year).

Often the dates set at this stage are crazy – the client has left it too late (due to poor planning or process at their end, or even simply not understanding the time these things take) and suddenly they need a new office for 200 staff in less than 6 months (I mean seriously – you did have a 10 year lease…). But of course we architects and interior designers can sort this out – we will do anything to win your project. And the bigger the project is the sillier we are likely to become.

So we have agreed to your program –  actually at that point it shouldn’t be too bad should it? We will have planned for this right? Allocated extra resources, thought through the minimum time frames things will take, the interactions that need to take place with the engineers, when and who would be doing design reviews, what software and technology could help us and we would maximize our efficiencies at every step of the way. Maybe we have…and maybe we haven’t.

But to compound the situation we then allowed you the client just 1 or 2 days to review and make decisions. And you forgot to tell us that there is a certain person who must be consulted, a board meeting the design must be presented to, or someone in IT who needs 2 weeks to provide feedback. But of course that’s only a small area of the building isn’t it? That need not delay the whole program right? Wrong. All of a sudden we have lost some of our efficiency in how we work and the order in which decisions are made and parts if the project documented.

Its even worse the project goes on hold and staff are reallocated to other projects – it can be difficult to get them back when suddenly the client says (without warning of course), here is that feedback and signoff – so when can the tender documents be ready – next week as planned? No, we can’t usually do 4 weeks if work in 1. I’m sure all my readers know, it gets to the point where throwing more people at the project just isn’t enough. Things still have to be done in a certain order, particularly if the client would actually like the engineering to consider the architecture and vice versa. (and it would be a strange project if this wasn’t a client requirement, much easier though!). It would also be nice for us to have time so that the documentation can be checked, and cross checked properly, so we can minimise errors which inevitably result in extra costs (and potentially time) on site.

Of course this isn’t every project and clients aren’t the only people to blame. Jason’s comment on proper planning is a big issue. We need to better plan reviews – doing them at the right time by the right people. We need to better understand what is a review and what is a design change. We need to respect the work of other members of the team, be they architects, engineers or interior designers. We need to incorporate buildabilty, engineering and cost earlier in the process of design to help reduce last minute changes (and clients need to understand some of these things too). We need to spend enough time and resources at the briefing and concept stages to better think through the design solutions at the point when we do have the time and we are not making quick decisions without thinking through the implications. We need to better understand and leverage off the technology and the process of automation. We need to embrace BIM for the productivity gains it brings, so our reviews can focus on construction and coordination instead of detail reference checking. Autodesk needs to make Revit less buggy and prone to doing strange things on the day tender docs are due (much as I love Revit – somehow it knows and conspires against you).

Revit (or other BIM software) changes this design and checking process in other ways too. For those that don’t understand the process of modeling, early drawings can seem rubbish and not worth checking. For those of us who use scheduling, the temptation is there to think the schedule is just being generated as things are modeled, without any checking. The process of checking changes and the worst thing is to throw too many people on the job in the last week. Final checking should move forward and all sorts of coordination, clash detection and checking should be ongoing throughout the process. It’s not really any different to what should have happened using CAD, it’s just that BIM highlights process deficiencies.

Maybe some days we just need to admit we can’t do it. That this tender won’t be on time.  But not the day after it was due. Nothing annoys me more than when team members haven’t delivered on time and I am calling the next day to ask what is going on. Then I have to start building contingencies into their delivery dates, further reducing the time they have – and I know that the project managers and clients are often doing this to me too. But because we are all late way to often, I can understand why they do.  Maybe if we could reliably deliver fully coordinated documents on the planned day the builders could afford have a few days less tendering or on site building, giving us a few more days working?

Whilst for many of us its true that deadlines can motivate and drive us, we function better when we are not stressed and tired. No matter how much we love our jobs most of us have lives outside of work – partners, kids, hobbies, the need for sleep and exercise. Maybe if we all accepted this of each other then our documents would actually be more accurate…and maybe we’d all have the time and inclination to do other things – blog more! Or teach and mentor more, or contribute to our industry more – and maybe this would help improve the quality of what we do, how we are treated by our clients and the inefficiency of the construction industry generally. Now that is revolutionary – could we improve our productivity by taking more time off? (Controversial enough?)

I certainly noticed when I was not working and was pretty relaxed,  when I sat down to do anything ‘work’ (like write a blog post or prepare Revit models for conference papers) that I did it a lot more efficiently than I’d expected, and with less mistakes.  I’ve always noticed this on a smaller scale in relation to my stress levels/working hours in the office too.

What do you think? Can we make on time stress free quality delivery a reality for architecture, interior design and engineering? What do you think we need to do to achieve it? How can our industry change? And does time off make you more productive?

Image credits:  “Timejumper”

It is mandatory that external walls are waterproof: What do client design guidelines, specifications and requests for tender have in common?

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Red boat - Venice by MorBCN, on FlickrSeriously I am not joking – this sentence came out of a client design guideline document. I am a little worried about the standard of their existing building given that they feel the need to write this out for their future architects to read. Surely for any building waterproof external walls is a pretty basic design expectation? The client shouldn’t have to ask for it. If the walls aren’t waterproof I’d say its a pretty big mistake, I’m pretty sure it’s negligent either on the part of the architect or the builder – so why write it down? It’s also pretty unlikely that it was deliberately designed that way, so putting it into a design guideline isn’t going to fix it. All it does is create work for someone to write it (the client organisation probably paid an architect to write this down) and more work for their next architect to read it. And whilst we all want more work,I think as architects and designers we would rather our clients were paying for something of value – for example our design skills – than this kind of bureaucratic process that wastes everyones time and in the end achieves nothing.

Originally when I started thinking about this post I was only thinking about client design guidelines, but then I realised that a similar problem exists with the specifications we write for builders, the briefs we or our clients write and request for tender or proposal documents written by our clients. We all spend a lot of time writing down things that are obvious, standard practice or a stautory requirement. How often have you read any one of the above documents that says the building has to comply with the BCA (Building Cde of Australia)? Doh – of course it does (assuming its in Australia!). What is much more important or relevant is specific details of how this building needs to comply – such as the levels of fire rating required. But that’s not defined. It’s left up to the project team to resolve – no problem, but they would have done that anyway without being told the building had to comply with the BCA.

All of these documents are often necessary and valuable documents for communication between parties in a construction project – but frequently seem to provide no value – just waste everybodies time.

In looking at client design guidelines what I like to see is actual requirements and details. For me, dealing mostly with interior design guidelines, I find that usually finishes, furniture and signage requirements are reasonably well defined, not surprising, as this is the look and feel as well as interchangeability of components – one of the main reasons for a large client organisation to have design guidelines in the first place. However, even with these items, often you start to get into the finer detail and things like materials or construction are not so well defined – is that Parchment white laminate table on 25 or 33mm thick board. And the thing is, if a client has gone to the trouble of having a design guideline more than likely they care about this level of detail, so then I have to ask what seems like a million questions.

It tends to get even more poorly defined when it comes to construction of fitout – partitions, doors, door hardware. Again, it seems misty definitions are typical. If you have a standard expectation for how partitions are constructed to achieve a certain level for acoustics – how about instead of referencing the Australian standard you just give me the details? That way you will save yourself getting a different acoustic engineer to give you advice on the same partition construction over and over again.

For some reason building services often seem to be a little better defined, but maybe this is because I’m not getting into the detail of it, and its a similar situation to the furniture. Perhaps some of my readers out there want to comment on this?

The problem seems to be that clients want to have design guidelines but they don’t want to take on any of the risk or liability for the design. They want to tell the consultant architect or designer what to do, but not to tell them too exactly, because then it somehow seems like the architect or designer has some kind of choice or responsibility. This is a ridiculous situation, wasting everyone’s time and money (and one I wonder which would stand up in court if tested anyway). If you as client have certain requirements or ways of doing things that have worked in the past – just tell your architects or designers – and if you do it the same way all the time, have someone write it down.

Moving to the other side though, we architects can be just as bad when it comes to specifications. I usually use Natspec (an Australian standard specification package) to put together my specifications. I want to point out that none of my comments are specific against Natspec but apply to the industry and the way we have come to write specifications generally. To me, specifications basically come into 4 parts – schedules/items of stuff that go into the building, installation methods, standards and submission requirements. So – the stuff that makes up the building, that’s pretty critical, if we don’t specify that we will have a problem. Now how to install it – is that our job or the builders job? And what’s the point of writing ‘install to manufacturers specifications’, that’s pretty obvious? Or even more stupidly why copy out the manufacturers specifications and standard details? As for standards – why do we need to reference them? Shouldn’t it be expected that glazing will comply with AS1288 as that’s the standard that is applicable? As for witness points and submissions, we frequently request loads of items that no one might ever look at. That is, until something goes wrong. And that is the point of most of the specification, it seems to be there for when something goes wrong and isn’t done properly – on many jobs I bet its not ever even read by anyone on the contractor team. It’s a shame we put so much time into something that’s almost just in case.

So what can we do to change all of this? Part of the problem is that our industry, so frequently all of the parties are separated by contracts which seem to actually prevent people from working together to sort things out and do things better, and everyone is trying to pass risk onwards down the chain. Outside of individual projects, when do clients, architects, engineers and contractors actually talk to each other about how to improve the way we work and construction industry productivity? Not so much in terms of making money – but in terms of all of us working smarter. Not very often.

One of the few times I see consultants, clients and contractors together is in the BIM space – although there is still not enough participation across all levels and sectors of the industry – and the lack of collaboration across the industry is has been one of the hinderances to BIM uptake to date. By coincidence, at the same time as I was thinking and writing on this topic, I received an invitation to be part of one of the Collaborate ANZ working groups on Level of Detail – now while Level of Detail might be a BIM issue (read a good explanation at Practical BIM) – in the end, it comes down to the same things I’ve been talking about in this post – making sure that the right information is shared across the industry and across projects with the people who need it at the time they need it. Whilst Collaborate ANZ is BIM focussed, most of the people involved are passionate about improving collaboration and communication across the industry as a whole. If we can get people talking about collaboration on BIM, and if BIM becomes a standard tool across the industry and starts to cover things like client guidelines and specifications – hopefully this will start to solve some of the problems across the industry. If my client could give me a full BIM package – template and families – maybe I wouldn’t have to read through all the irrelevant wordy guidelines and maybe my BIM model could go to the contractor with all the information they needed, but nothing extraneous included – and that could be our documentation. No specifications, no design guidelines. (It still doesn’t solve the problem of requests for tender though does it?)

However maybe I am being too optimistic here? What do you think – how can we streamline the way we work and reduce unnecessary documentation? What are the strangest design guidelines or specification requirements you have seen? Or should things stay as they are – are these kinds of documents generating work for architects and designers?

Image Credits:
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.0 Generic License by MorBCN