Tag Archives: time management

What’s so critical – why the long hours?

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School Memories by lehman_11, on Flickr
Is it really necessary for us to accept a long hours culture in order for architecture or design practices to thrive, or for us to succeed as individuals?

Earlier this year I started a new role.  I’m a senior associate in an award winning interior design studio. In my last practice I managed a major workplace fitout project of close to 8,500m2.  I also work 3 days per week.  A lot of people are surprised at the last sentence.  Whilst it is not uncommon for women in our industry to work part time after having children – what is uncommon is that I changed jobs and managed a major project without switching to a full time role.  Numerous women, both in design and other industries have told me that my job change is inspiring them to start seriously job hunting and not putting it off, “until they are ready to go full time again”. If you are a man thinking this post isn’t for you – think twice. Would you like your evenings and weekends back too? It’s all part of the same problem.

There seems to be a belief across our industry, from architects and interior designers through to project managers and clients that you have to work more than full time hours to lead a project.  That part time won’t work.  That you should be available to answer questions from clients and contractors at least during all business hours, but preferably during any hours they chose to work.   This isn’t just an issue for women – I know plenty of men sick of the hours and the pressure too.

Why has our industry culture developed this way? Sorry to say – but what we do isn’t all that critical.  We are not emergency services – no one’s life is at risk.  To be really brutally honest – not even that much money is at risk.  Your clients payroll for a week is much much larger than a week’s corporate rent.  So why have we developed this crazy notion that everything is super urgent, that a reply can’t wait a day and that everyone has to be working all the time?

Mobile phones and email are part of the problem.  In days gone by, contractors might have had to wait for us to come to site, or even send a letter – that could take days!  Somehow even a fax was never as urgent as email has now become.  It sat in the office until you returned.  The pace of things has changed for everyone, but why do we let it drive us? If we are part of the problem, we are all a part of the solution.  As long as we all accept the status quo, nothing changes.  But what if we push back, if we look at alternative ways of working and managing our teams and our clients? Why shouldn’t everyone work part time?  Especially if automation is going to mean less work for everyone.

My choice to work part time is partly about the fact I have a toddler, but its not just that.  Working part time also gives me more time for other things – to write, to be part of the BILT ANZ event committee, to meditate and to try to fit in some exercise.  I had already spent some time working more flexible hours a couple of years ago and had realised that working less hours makes me more productive, more creative and better at my job and my life.  Especially in a creative role, sitting at your desk for 40 hours plus a week doesn’t help you do a better job, it just gives you repetitive strain injury or a mental health problem.

Right now, we have a shortage of senior interior designers in Australia.  Why? Partly because so many young designers dropped out of the industry during the GFC but also because many senior designers are women with children who just don’t want the stress of feeling that they can’t meet the hours and workload expected of a senior design role.  Architecture has a similar problem with a shortage of senior women, particularly in mid to large size practices.

It doesn’t help that many part timers are forced into roles that undermine their confidence and capability.  Being a senior associate given the same work as the part time student is pretty demeaning (and it has happened to me, along with many others I know).  Just because you are part time doesn’t mean you can’t be client facing.  If you chose not to be – there are plenty of tasks in every studio that can really benefit from the knowledge of part time senior staff.  Quality reviews are a really easy start.  Internal staff training and mentoring.  Partnering a part time senior staff member with a more junior team member can be a great way for a junior to get more client exposure and more responsibility.

Its true that looking for a new role as a part timer is harder – one practice told me they wouldn’t hire a part timer for a senior role – it’s too hard to manage.  It’s different to manage – it is only harder because it’s not what we are used to.  I know this as a manager, I’ve managed remote teams and I have managed a team in which I was the only full timer.  Both of these kinds of management are different to managing a team who sit right in front of you, available every day of the week.  The secret is being organsied, communicating and setting expectations.  It takes adjustment on both sides.  Managers have to realise that staff are not there at their beck and call.  Micromanagement won’t work.  This applies as much to other kinds of flexible and agile working as it does to part time.  As an individual you have to take control of your role, your tasks and your relationship with email.  Team members have to learn to balance taking initiative with when something is truly urgent and worth bothering someone on their day off.  Finally, clients have to learn to respect boundaries too.  Most of our client organisations have part time staff (and many of them work shorter hours than your typical design studio anyway). Given the knowledge and the chance, most clients seem to respect the fact that I’m not in the studio every day.  Usually things are not so complex or critical that they can’t be solved by another team member, or wait a day or two.  More often than the client having a problem with part timers, its our own industry perceptions that assume a client will have a problem.  It is not unusual for a senior staff member to be regularly unviable several days per week due to existing project commitments or travel – why is the fact they are at home rather than in another client office that day any different? For some reason our culture seems to think it is.

It’s up to individuals and their practices to figure out what will work for you.  How do I manage my part time week? I chose to spread my work days out, working Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday so I am only ever out of the office for one day at a time.  This won’t work for everyone. I also keep an eye on emails on my days off, again this is my choice, and it can lead to difficult conversations around boundaries.  The challenge is to be able to see an email and not freak out or feel you have to respond straight away, as well as for others to respect that you won’t respond to everything. If you and your team can’t do that, then maybe checking email on your day off won’t work for you (but maybe you want to train yourself to try to be less affected by email bombs – its something I am getting better at by practicing).  If things are urgent, I might contact team members via email or on slack.  The team know they can contact me if its urgent too.  I don’t respond to client emails on my days off.  My email signature tells people the days I am in the studio and I find most people respect this and don’t call my mobile on my days off.  When I’m running a project, I make sure all the team members are fully briefed on the priorities for the days I am away and we have a shared to do list (I have been testing out trello) for when anyone finishes up all their allocated tasks.  For my teams, its working.  In my previous role, I delivered tender documentation on time for a fast paced 8,500m2 fitout project, thanks to the help of a great team working alongside me.

Its highly unlikely anyone else will ever tell you to go home, or not to respond to emails on your day off.  Its true some clients, team members or managers will always be difficult and expect everyone to always be available.  But rather than expecting this to be the case, expecting organisations not to hire part time staff – why don’t we all start expecting the opposite?  That’s how change will come about. Once we start accepting that part time works we will also realise that no-one needs to work 24/7 and we can all get our lives back.

 

Ceilidh Higgins

Image credits: “School Memories” (CC BY 2.0) by lehman_11

PS. Are you coming to BILT ANZ in Adelaide in May? I’m really excited that we have a great range of presentations lined up this year, particularly of interest for anyone interested in Interior Design and Technology – Daniel Davis from WeWork will be presenting.  See more on the RTC Events blog.  You can register as well as enter our competition to win a free Golden Ticket here.

Is design ever ‘finished’?

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Finish it by Pedro Travassos, on FlickrOne of the greatest challenges of architecture and design is the fact that there never seems to be enough time.

From student projects onwards there never seems to be enough time to finish designing, detailing and documenting everything about a project.  Essentially, almost every building or fitout is a prototype and to detail every single junction, item or assembly might mean we would never actually finish.  Couple that with the fact that as detailed design and documentation progresses, we may need go back and modify or redesign different parts or elements to improve them or accommodate engineering or product details or the inevitable new client requirement, and at times it feels like design can be a never ending cycle.  Then even as construction takes place, the built reality doesn’t match the ideal, or the contractor has alternative suggestions for products or details.  The client then moves in and the way the space is actually used may differ from their original intentions, or their organisation may have changed over the time the project has taken to come to fruition.  Generally, there  comes a point where further modifications to the the project stop. Its often because of limits, of programs, fee budgets or client expectations –  But does this mean the design was actually finished – can it be and should it be?

To many engineers, it seems that architects and interior designers are notorious for changing their minds and never finishing design.  While it is true that many architects and interior designers are indecisive or looking to constantly keep improving the design at the cost of program (or engineering), it is also just as true that many of these ‘design changes’ are driven by technical or functional requirements.  If the mechanical engineer hasn’t advised the architect of sufficient space they require for plant at the concept stage, the structure may have to change to adjust.  If the client has decided they really need to keep their Comms room onsite instead of using a data centre, then the Comms Room is certainly going to be getting bigger with all the flow on effects to services and other parts of the building that may have.  Many clients and engineers don’t realise that even the smallest of decisions on audio visual or appliances can have flow on effects to the sizes of whole rooms and hence the whole building.  An example is that a corridor with no door in it could be 1m wide, add a door and you might have to increase the width to 1.6m for wheelchairs.  Obviously as architects and designers we try to build some tolerances into our designs from the beginning but extra space gets quickly eaten up.

In every project there has to be points where certain decisions are frozen, and will only change for a significant reason.  Usually we label these points as client sign offs or reviews.  Points at which the client agrees to the design.  The challenge though is always about what level of detail the client signing off.  Unsurprisingly many clients like to leave their changes and decisions as open as possible as late as possible. Its not only the architect or designer that wants to keep their options open.  Even with defined milestones, some clients can be quite difficult about what they believe they have agreed to, particularly if they want design changes and don’t want to pay for them.  Its easier to blame the architect than to concede the client organisation has changed its mind about how they want a space to function.  On one project, we proposed a combined reception and breakout space, initially the client stakeholder group really liked the idea and the images presented.  Some time after signing off on the schematic design and well into our detailed design process, we were informed that the client did not want to proceed with this space.  They wanted a traditional separate reception area, and questioned why we would ever have thought a combined space was suitable.  We found out later that they had decided to temporarily move a different user group into the fitout, and my guess is that the head of the new user group didn’t like the concept.  Thats their choice, but why should we be the ones paying to go back to the drawing board so to speak?

Even without any need for significant client changes during design and documentation, there comes a point where contractors have to price a design and be appointed, and critically construction has to commence.  In an ideal world, the design should not actually be complete before the contractor is selected.  Contractors, and particularly the sub-contractors who are actually doing the work, have their own ideas and suggestions about construction.  These ideas can be a real asset to cost and buildability, as they are the ones that have to actually make it happen.  However, it is rare on larger scale projects (in my experience anything bigger than a single dwelling) or anything put out to competitive tender that this happens in a meaningful way – even on supposed design and construct projects.  Changes and questions inevitably seem to be last minute and often ‘value management’ happens without the input of the designer. Often only the head contractor has been appointed when the design is being finalised, and later the sub-contractors have their own suggestions.

During construction design still continues.  If we detailed every tiny piece of every project then construction documents would be ridiculously complex and would really never end.  Shop drawings and site instructions resolve the finer detail of design.  This phase tends to become the only opportunity for sub-contractor input to design changes.  Whilst we all dream on zero RFIs and variations, is this really a feasible reality?  I’d say not within our current documentation and procurement systems.

When the day of practical completion arrives and the client moves in, many clients think the design process is well and truly done.  However the best clients realise that as you inhabit your spaces you will understand it and realise things you didn’t see during the design process.  Almost everyone can relate to this through their own homes.  Did the furniture you thought of before you moved in suit the spaces in the way you pictured?  It’s the reason why many architects like to camp on a site, or live in their own unrenovated or under furnished homes before they make all the final design decisions.  Its a great idea for clients to save some of their design contingency to continue to work with their architect or designer in the months after they move in to undertake those additional little projects that can make that space just right.  Even with the best design and planning, organisational, technology and other forms of change mean that design should never be static – a building should never be considered finished ‘forever’.  Maybe the built elements are complete, but the lightweight furniture type elements will always need to change over time.

So I believe the answer is no – design is never ‘finished’.  But that shouldn’t mean that we avoid decisions or sign offs, whether by the designer or the client.  If we don’t say stop here and allow the team to move on, then the building will never be built.  In his book, Linchin, Seth Godin talks about the concept of ‘shipping’ which he defines as getting a project completed and out the door.  It is better to have something that is not perfect out there in the world than to have nothing at all.  To me, this is the ‘finished’ that we need to realise as architects and designers, otherwise we could still be working at 2am every day.  To quote Seth Godin “If you want to produce things on time and on budget, all you have to do is work until you run out of time or run out of money. Then ship.” Maybe its not quite that easy, but apparently the more we try the easier it gets.

Ceilidh Higgins

Image Credits: “Finish it” (CC BY 2.0) by  Pedro Travassos 

The Midnight Lunch: My favourite apps for busy consultants

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toddler apps by jenny downing, on Flickr

A few people have commented to me recently on the number of apps on my iphone and ipad or have told me they are unsure how to use their ipad for business and which apps to use. So I have put together my recommendations – and most of them are around organsing yourself, communication and business rather than specifically interior design or architecture – and so are equally useful for engineers, real estate or project management professionals.   While I’m talking specifically ipad as thats the platform I use, most of these apps are available android as well.  Where I’ve mentioned them, prices are the USD prices on the itunes store.  You will notice I’veexcluded all the social media apps from this post.  While social media and apps go very much together, I am writing my next post as a follow up to go into more more detail about social media for designers and architects.

Evernote
Evernote is one of my favourite apps for so many things. Evernote is designed as a digital notebook library. You keep notes in notebooks. Notebooks can be sorted out into groups to easily separate them. Notes can be words, images taken with your device camera, snippets captured from the web or even recordings. The notes can be tagged and can be searched for words they contain (think like having google for your notebook). You can share notebooks and you can have a business account too. You can have Evernote on all your devices and on your desktop PC, and you can access it via the web. Supposedly (and I would agree  having experienced this), Evernote gets more useful the more you have stored there – because you really then benefit from its power to find things. I use Evernote with a premium subscription (for more space) for work, blogging and research and personally too (its great for your tax return). A great example of how I use it for work is an event like InDesign, a big trade show. During the day I take photos and make notes for each suppliers showroom or stand I visit. I tag the notes with “lounge”, “planting”, “lighting” and things like that. Later in the office when I am looking for planting ideas, I can filter the notes by tag and find all the notes I have made (in the past 2 years!) related to planting ideas. It’s amazing. If you want to know more, there are some great books out there plus lots of blogs, websites etc with tips. If you are really interested in how I am using it, let me know – I could easily write a whole post on it.

Evernote Hello
So I’m not quite finished with Evernote yet. There are a large number of apps that work alongside Evernote for added functionality and one I use is Evernote Hello. Hello allows you to scan and store your business cards as records in your Evernote account. You can make notes on where you met people and add links to their social media at the same time as you add them into the app. You can search within the Hello app or later in Evernote. Because you can make notes and in Evernote you can add reminders, you can also use it as a basic client relationship management software.

Remember the Milk
One feature I don’t use much in Evernote is the reminders. This is because for many years (even before iphone) I have used Remember the Milk. Like Evernote its available on multiple platforms (However only with the ability to sync between them all if you pay for a premium subscription), you can also share lists (I haven’t personally tried this feature). RTM allows you to create multiple lists (for example I have one for work and one for personal, plus a few more specific ones), set prioritys and deadline times, send reminders (you phone moos!) and set location. It can now also be linked to Evernote (I just set this up yesterday) as well as google, outlook and a whole host of other platforms.

Numbers
I spent ages looking for an excel app and tried at least half a dozen. My advice – give up and go tablet native with Numbers, Apples own spreadsheet app. It costs $10.49 but its worth it. Its so easy to navigate, creating and formating spreadsheets is so much easier with this app than with the apps that try to mimic your PC. And compatibility with Excel seems to be pretty good, I’ve been using some pretty complex spreadsheets back and forth and they seem to be OK (Formatting, formulas and multiple sheets included).

Dragon Dictation
This is an awesome app. Turn your iphone into a dictaphone, as as you record it types. Its not 100% accurate, but its not bad. I use it sometimes for blogging and also on site for recording defects.

Goodreader
This is my go to for a PDF reader, there are free ones, but at $5.49 I have been happy to pay for the extra functionality and useability of Goodreader – I’ve been using it for over 2 years now. It opens up your PDFs, allows you to sort them into folders and annotate them. One thing I like is that your PDFs in Goodreader are stored on your device, not on the cloud, so you don’t need wifi to open them up. I use this for everything from drawings, to meeting minutes, to programs. The day I realised my ipad was super useful for work beyond just the internet, was when I sat in an airport lounge marking up drawings that had just been emailed to me. I use a stylus pen for marking up in goodreader.

OneDrive and Dropbox
I have both – too much cloud strorage is never enough. Both OneDrive and Dropbox allow you to store your files in the cloud instead of on your hard drive. You can download the apps to access your files from your mobile devices and you can install on your PC to save files directly to the cloud. Both give you a certain amount of free storage with bonus storage available by installing apps, recommending to friends or purchasing a premium subscription.

Flipboard and Feedly
Flipboard and Feedly are both RSS readers with beautiful magazine style formatting. This means you can add all the blogs you follow as well as online magazines and social media.  The app has built in recommendations you can pick from too (for example under Architecture Arch Daily).  The app then builds you a magazine with a mix of articles from your selected sites. Flipboard gives you a separate magazines for each feed (site) which I don’t like (it used to be able to integrate with Googlereader to give you one magazine only). I just went back to Feedly again which seems to have developed a bit more since I originally joined last year and I’m going to see how that goes.

Project Management Systems – Acconex, Conject etc
They seem to be something we all have to live with these days. For me personally being on the interior design side, I find PM systems seem to be a lot of work with very little project benefit, but hopefully the PMs get some benefits out if them. Anyway most of the systems have an app,so that at a minimum you can read and send messages on the go. The Aconex app for ipad seems to have pretty full functionality, I am able to upload documents while I am out an about.

Turboscan
This is a great little scanning app – it works better than a photo because it takes 3 photos and adjusts out the fuzziness and converts it to a PDF.  I find it worth the $2.99 I paid.

Slideshark
This app allows you to run your PowerPoints from your ipad. You can choose if you want to view your slides full screen or with speaker notes and you can set it up also on your phone and use your phone to control the slides remotely. Whilst there were no compatibility issues with displaying PowerPoint, you can’t edit PowerPoints on this app. Maybe I will have to switch to keynote…

Bluebeam Vu
I haven’t personally used this app but one of the guys in the office has assured me it’s awesome for defects. You can take photos, annotate them and link the to locations on a PDF of the floor plan. Bluebeam Vu is free and then you can upgrade to Bluebeam Revue (not sure what the features for that are)  It’s the next app I’ll be testing.

Kindle
I have had a kindle for ages, however when I first bought it there were a lot of architecture and design books I would still buy in hard copy – black and white for images was not really worthwhile. However, now I get these books delivered to my ipad and read them using the kindle app. It syncs with your kindle and your amazon account and the images look great on ipad.

Teamviewer
This app allows you to remotely view your PC screen. Create an account, Install it on your PC and on your ipad and you can view your PC screen on your ipad. Pretty cool…but clunky to use. Good really for quick changes to word documents or emailing or moving files to the cloud. Free for personal use.

Facetime and Skype
Especially if you need to contact people overseas, both Facetime and Skype are great simple to use apps for making video calls over the web. Yes, sometimes they drop out – but hey it’s free.

Unroll me
This is not an app but it’s a super useful service I discovered recently. You sign up and it scans your email account for subscription services. Then you choose which ones to “roll up” into a daily digest, and at the same time, easily unsubscribe from any you don’t want anymore. It then sends you one email per day at a time of your choosing for all your ‘rolled up’ emails.  I have all my linkedin subscription emails arrive just before breakfast instead of getting 20 or more scattered throughout the day.

So there you have it – my favourite apps. I’m always on the look out for new ones, what are your favourite apps to use to keep you working whilst out and about or make your work life easier?

P.S. Come Out to (Midnight) Lunch. Meet fellow The Midnight Lunch readers at an informal industry event to be held next Friday 11 April from 5.30pm at Chicane bar in Sydney (10-20 Bond St). Email me at [email protected] if you are interested in attending or just turn up on the day.  Note the event is not sponsered, buy your own drinks and food. 

 

Image Credits:

Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic License  by  jenny downing 

Did you forget to program in the holidays?

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back alley christmas by Darwin Bell, on Flickr

Come the beginning of December, people seem to start to panic – clients, contractors and our project teams. It’s similar to the shops shutting for a day (which also happens at Christmas). Everyone is in the supermarket the day before stocking up on everything, just in case – and the shelves look so empty you might think that some sort of siege was about to happen and that we didn’t really expect the holiday shutdown to come and go every year.
In Australia, the Christmas holidays coincides with summer, and for us, this period becomes the main holiday period of the year. Most architecture, design and engineering companies will close down for at least two weeks, some for three. Construction contractors and manufacturers are usually closed for longer, although these days its pretty unusual for anyone to shut down for the whole of January, ten years ago that was pretty common in construction. However, into January many staff will remain on holidays, or come back to work for a couple of weeks prior to taking time off.

This emergency mentality starts to pervade the business and construction world from around the beginning of December (or earlier). Everyone starts thinking about all the things they feel must be completed prior to Christmas. By the time we get to the last week before Christmas, you would sometimes almost think that no work will ever be done again.  That if its not done by Christmas it can’t be done. When you have a project currently under construction, due for completion in February, this panic always intensifies. Shop drawings have to be signed off, engineers out to site, all decisions made – by this Friday when we are all shutting down for our holidays. But the funny thing is – the site is going to shut down for the holiday too. So are all the manufacturer’s and suppliers. No one is working again till 6 January. So in actual fact, if something doesn’t get done by this Friday, what happens? Nothing! It just gets done on January 6. Yes, that’s 2 weeks away, but as everyone is closed anyway, there in no impact. Get that everyone?  It’s almost like many people forgot to program the holiday period into the project timeline and only realised last week that Christmas was coming.  During the 12 hours between writing the first draft of this post, I’ve even been invited to a tender interview – before Christmas of course!

If everyone is taking holidays, there is no delay over this shutdown time. Common sense, but a lot of people seem to forget that this time of year. Now of course if you are working on projects in other countries or with critical infrastructure perhaps you don’t have the luxury of a shutdown at all, and maybe you do have to achieve certain things prior to the shutdown. Otherwise, relax a bit – and maybe by 26th December you won’t feel like you need at least a month off!  Sometimes I think we do just as much work in December as every other month of the year, we just squash it all into the first three weeks.

So enjoy your holidays if you do have them coming up at this time of year. This will be my last post for the year – and till February! I am taking the long Australian summer holiday, off to enjoy wintertime in Spain. I will be back next year – thanks for reading this year!  I’m really enjoying writing this blog, having the chance to think, research and write about issues affecting our industry.  The amount of comments and discussion often happening on Linkedin or here on the site is great.  Just recently this blog hit the milestone of 100 subscribers which was very exciting.  Keep reading and commenting, and keep sharing with your friends and colleagues!

PS. I’ve kept this post short this week, firstly I know you are probably all suffering from the pre holiday panic. Secondly and more importantly though – so you can read this article on I provided comment for – Avoid Poorly Administered Projects – in the ZwiegWhite Newsletter. I’ve linked the article here 1034-TZL.   You can subscribe to ZweigWhite here (its a paid subscription).

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The value of time off…even from blogging

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Maldives - Fesdu: favorite place 40.098 by Juergen Kurlvink, on Flickr

This week, I’m taking my own advice from my last post – Why is delivering on time so hard – and I’m taking a vacation, not from work, but from writing a blog article. There has been so much discussion and feedback on this post, I’ve spent a fair bit of time reading and responding to comments on Linkedin. Discussions have ranged across diverse topics including IPD to human nature and technology and fee bidding. Below are links to a couple of the discussion threads.

BIM experts
Revit Users
Design Managers Forum

My other reason for doing this is that I needed to use my usual blogging hours to spend sometime to contribute to the Collaborate working group I belong to, we are preparing a white paper on Levels of Development, the draft of which will be released soon and I’ll discuss it on this blog when it is. In the meantime, you can find out more about Collaborate and volunteer to contribute at their website.

In the meantime, I’m attending the Refurb and Retrofit conference in Sydney today and tomorrow, and I’m sure I will find some inspiration for my next blog post there. If you happen to be there too, find me in a break and say hi.

Image credits:
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.0 Generic License by Juergen Kurlvink

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”