Practice management

Management is key to delivering not only a successful office culture, but also to achieving a smoothly run organisation; capable of delivering high quality projects in an affordable way. Clearly a large practice is going to need management and may well have a team of professional managers to deliver it, but it is also a necessity in the smallest of firms and you need to work out what it is going to look like, how it will be run and by whom.

Management activities include:

• day-to-day running of the practice including general administration, reception, travel arrangements, insurances
• ensuring facilities, equipment and supplies are clean and in good order
• health and safety, security and fire precautions
• utilities, ICT systems, networks, software licences and updates
• accounts, petty cash, VAT, cost analysis
• human resources (HR) including recruitment and dismissal, salary packages, training, CPD
• information management including document control and archiving, library, office manual
• quality management
• internal and external communication.

It may be that one designated person deals with all these activities or that they are shared between different people in the office. If you want to free up the design team from administrative activities, a separate office manager, possibly part-time, may be the answer.

If you are considering appointing an office manager and you are in the process of setting up your firm this should be an early appointment and potentially also a senior one. A good manager can bring to the firm a set of skills that conventional architectural training rarely provides and would add a very valuable voice when working out how the practice should be run. Some firms, especially in the US, are raising the status of the office manager to that of Director of Operations (DoO), in recognition of the critical role played by the person who ensures the practice works to its best ability.

Practice management needs to be at a scale that suits your business. Some aspects of management are a legal requirement or will be necessary for the health of the practice but you shouldn’t set up systems that will overburden you. All the following should be considered but it isn’t necessary to implement every recommendation on day one.

Working methods

You will already have ways of working and you may be happy with them – but at the outset give your approach to work some thought to make sure that it:

• is or will be compatible with that of your partners, colleagues and employees
• is acceptable to your clients, colleagues and families
• maintains quality standards
• is safe, legal, fair and honest
• delivers professional levels of service and behaviour
• complies with your insurer’s requirements
• will deliver the work programme on time and within cost
• permits your own and your colleagues’ aspirations to be realised
• will provide the right mix of self-discipline and authority with relaxation and openness
• allows you, your colleagues and staff to have a good work–life balance.

As you start a practice, you are likely to be making the transition from employee to self-employed, and maybe employer. This requires a different attitude to work – including managing your own tendency to either over or under do it, as well as your ability to work with and to get the best out of others. The working style you adopt on day one of practice may stay with you for longer than you intended – start as you mean to go on.

All practices work to a system of some sort, often one based on the RIBA Plan of Work or versions of it that have developed over the years. More established and organised practices have thought through their work and have developed their own semi- or fully-formalised approach for the analysis of briefs, development of options, presentation of design proposals, design documentation, contract administration, project commissioning, evaluation, etc. Having such a system allows them to produce work of a consistent quality across the firm and enables the development of a house style, if only in the way they approach each job, talk to clients, etc. An effective system will mean that standard elements don’t have to be reinvented for each project; instead they can be improved and developed in the light of experience.

All these elements and processes and more will form part of your Office Manual and Quality Management System discussed further in Stage 6. Template versions of these are available from various organisations including the RIBA (The RIBA Project Quality Plan for Small Practices (PQPSP) or the RIBA Quality Management Toolkit). At this stage in the development of your practice, you should consult them to help shape your thinking on an effective and suitable working methodology for your embryonic practice.

Once in place, office systems and routines are often very difficult to change, at least not without great effort. Many offices still find themselves working in ways that were instigated at the establishment of the practice or were imported from firms where the founders had previously worked. It is important to consider office procedures at the outset with a view to importance, effectiveness and flexibility over time so that you can set up your practice in a way that will remain functional as the firm and particularly the technology it uses changes and develops.

The RIBA Chartered Practice Scheme

The RIBA runs a scheme to help its members run more effective businesses and sets standards to ensure that the title Chartered Practice guarantees good standards of practice. The Chartered Practice Scheme provides guidance and toolkits to member practices to assist with this. For further details see www.architecture.com.

Timekeeping

Maintain reasonable working hours. Architecture has a reputation for a long-hours culture – but no business should expect to run on excessively long days. Quality of work suffers with tiredness and some staff may have other responsibilities and interests that you need to respect. Late working should be the exception, and certainly not the rule – otherwise there is nothing kept in reserve for when it really is necessary. Respect the work–life balance of both you and your staff.

Behaviour

Along with working methods will go working behaviour. What will be appropriate in the workplace, especially as you take on employees? Smoking has now been banished from the workplace, but other activities may also need policing or discouragement, including bad language, personal music players or private email correspondence. At the beginning these may be dealt with individually, but as the company grows a written office policy may be needed. But as with so many matters that arise when setting up and running an office, it is always easiest to start as you mean to go on – so think and talk about these matters right at the outset so that you know where you are heading.

Professionalism

The issue of professionalism is discussed in greater depth at Stage 5, Part 4, but at this design stage you should be considering the implications of running a ‘professional’ firm and in particular what marks you out from a non-professional company:

• You are expected to act in accordance with standards that are above and beyond those expected by the law.
• This also applies to your staff, subcontractors and fellow consultants. They all need to have the freedom to act professionally and in accordance with their conscience.
• Your clients’ and society’s interests are to be put above your own.
• You should be competent to carry out the work that you accept.
• You should deliver a service that is effective, up-to-date and well-run.
• You need to be conscientious, honest and act with integrity at all times.

Much of this is laid out in the RIBA’s and ARB’s codes and commentaries but you need to work out how this applies to you and your practice. Being professional should play to your long-term advantage but you need to act on and communicate your professionalism to gain from it.

Internal communication

If you are setting up a single-handed practice then internal communication may not be high on your list of priorities, although you should still take time out of job-focused activities to think about and plan the direction of your practice. For any larger firm a specific means of sharing information and ideas is essential. This might take the form of a regular weekly meeting or perhaps having established tea breaks and eating meals together. Discuss what is coming up. Keep your colleagues involved in the development of the practice and use them to explore and test ideas and their presentation. But do not let internal discussions overwhelm the running of the office or unnecessarily limit individuals’ freedom of action.

The data trail

As design becomes more interactive, with many individuals and disciplines contributing to a single project model, the need to ensure that decisions leave an audit trail behind them becomes more critical. How, why and by whom were decisions taken, which alternatives were considered and what evidence was used to inform the decision? Some of this background detail may be captured automatically by software systems but the integration of many chains of thought and strands of knowledge into a single judgement is unlikely to be.

A good data trail will allow you to retrace a line of thinking when reviewing or revisiting a decision. At other times it may be essential for helping you to defend a lawsuit. Practices need to ensure that a project log is maintained for each job, and that notes and journals, whether electronic or paper-based, are kept and cross-referenced, so they can be examined in retrospect. Information discipline, so easy to ignore in a fast-moving digital age is essential for the long-term health of a practice.

Filing and storing

At the outset, organising the general to and fro of information will not appear to be an issue; simple filing systems will seem adequate and memory a good way of finding material. Five or ten years later you will wish that you had been more rigorous from the start. This does not mean that you have to invest in elaborate document tracking software; rather, as you put items into files or longer-term storage you need to think about how you will retrieve them quickly when you need to. You should use a relatively standard method, one that does not rely on a specific individual remembering where a particular item is located.

It is not unusual for clients to ring up years later asking for information about their buildings. You may have given them all the information in a maintenance manual, but now they have lost it. You are both their first and last port of call. Schedules of paint colours, specification information on equipment, planning consents and the mobile phone number of the original electrician will need to be retrieved quickly if you are going to maintain your reputation as fearsomely dedicated and efficient. File such information well now, so you do not waste hours looking for it later – if you can quickly produce the information for the client, they might even entrust you with another job.

There is an alternative view that you should securely dispose of all but the most essential information, as having comprehensive sets of files only attracts legal attention and leaves you open to unwarranted and non-specific searches for information, leading, ultimately, to claims. This may particularly apply to information generated by others: including co-consultants and manufacturers. Consider discussing the right level of information storage with your insurers as well as other advisers. Whatever level of information retention you decide on it will require constant vigilance to keep chaos at bay and prevent information overload. Prepare well now, as the volume of information to be dealt with can only increase.

The two primary categories of information you will need to store are:

• administration/practice related
• project related.

Keep them separate. From these two develop further cascading subsets for all the rest of your information. However, most of the material you receive in the office will fit into neither of these categories, and the great majority needs be to be put straight in the recycling bin. Being ruthless with information from the start will serve you well, although the time taken sorting information into categories will take, and will continue to take, far more practice time than is reasonable.

Make sure that the two main storage methods, paper and digital, use a similar system of organisation and classification, and that they back each other up as far as possible. Protect the key information (in whatever format) from fire, theft and damage – if necessary by using an off-site storage location. With digital information, storage media has a worryingly short life before being superseded by newer technology. Copy your old information onto new storage media as you upgrade, before the equipment to copy, or even to read, the information becomes obsolete. Remember that some of the information you hold will be confidential and commercially sensitive and needs to be treated accordingly. You should also ensure that you comply with the terms of the Data Protection Act 1998 and other European information regulations (further information is provided by the Information Commissioner’s Office: www.ico.org.uk).

Computers

You will be a very unusual architectural firm if you don’t wholeheartedly embrace computers. You may still sketch, draw and model and even keep drawing boards and workshops for the purpose, but almost all of your communications, written output, accounts, record keeping, drawings and production information will be done from inside computers. Along with the rest of the modern world you will be both liberated by and extraordinarily dependent on them.

The computer systems and programs you adopt will also influence your work output and capabilities and need to be researched and chosen with care. You will already have experience and skills in some programs and it may seem foolish to jettison this in favour of other systems, but issues of cost, flexibility, appropriateness, integration and maintainability may make it inevitable that you should change or modify the systems you work with. Clients and contractors may also influence your choice if they have their own system and you wish to work with them. But whatever the background story, the choice of computers (Mac, PC or other), mobile technologies (phones, tablets, etc.) and the software to run on them is a major decision and needs to be taken with good external advice, in-depth research and careful consideration. Changing course in a few years’ time could be a very expensive and difficult thing to do. If you are going to change to a new system, now is the time to do it.

BIM

Your big decision regarding computers will be whether to invest in tooling and training up your new practice to work in BIM (Building Information Modelling). BIM is not something you can tentatively adopt even though not all members of the practice or all jobs need to use it. But in order to make it pay its way you will need to have the workload to justify it.

If you intend to grow your practice to any size and particularly if you want to take on any substantial public sector work the adoption of BIM from the outset will be inevitable. The same will apply if you expect to offer specialist skills and work as part of a team on larger projects. On the other hand if it looks as if the practice workload is largely going to be small and primarily domestic projects, the main project type for smaller practices, then BIM in its current state is likely to be overkill and possibly unaffordable. A recent (Jan 2012) estimate of the cost of a single BIM station in a small practice by the architect David Miller, including hardware, software and training, put the annual cost at £10,000, paid back by increased workflow and other advantages.

There is a great deal of advice currently available from the RIBA, amongst many others, on BIM and it is important that you find out as much as you can on the subject before making a decision to adopt it, or not (even if only for now).

Backing up

Everyone knows about backing up information stored and in production on computers – but in practice this essential habit is commonly ignored. The golden rule is that you should maintain three copies (at least) of everything: the original, a copy and a second copy. One of the copies should be stored off-site, possibly in an online storage service; the other copy should be available on-site for quick retrieval of accidentally deleted files, etc. You should also ensure that your backup systems allows for both finding individual files and for the recovery of whole systems when disaster strikes, as it will.

Your IT consultant will be able to advise on the best systems and media to ensure that you are backing up automatically and regularly across all your media devices. There is currently a range of cloud systems available that will allow you to save your data to safe, remote locations; although you should consider the security of your data when you send it off-site and act accordingly. Most computer operating systems now include automatic back up software and these need to be configured from the outset to copy new files at frequent intervals. If you are copying to rewritable hard discs you need to use more than one and switch them over on a regular basis. They are prone to eventual failure. In addition you should also copy files regularly to a permanent recording media such as DVD-R and DVD+R discs that you can use only once and can’t accidentally overwrite.

You will also need to keep some paper files if only to satisfy the rules of HM Customs and Excise who require that you keep all tax invoices you receive and copies of those you issue. Most firms still maintain full paper files with copies of letters, print outs of emails, drawings and all other information generated by the office. A near paperless office is possible but you will need to be very rigorous and organised if you decide to go this way and you should seek expert advice.

Keeping a record

In the current business world, keeping records and maintaining an audit trail on decisions is an essential prerequisite of good practice.

Traditionally architects have carried a bound book everywhere with them in which they record their working lives; making notes of meetings and conversations, doodling and drawing sketch details, jotting down critical information and measurements, etc. More recently such notebooks have been supplemented or even replaced by smart phones and tablets, with photos, possibly annotated, videos, sound recordings and measurements of various types added to the notes and sketches. Either way the record of your working life needs to be organised, labelled and retained in the office archive. Your notes will, or should, be to the standard of a contemporaneous record that you can later rely on in court. Some information in them will need to be copied across into job files, onto drawings or cross-referenced elsewhere in your filing system; but it all needs to be clear in its original form. Dates, times, names and positions should all be recorded, and information entered such that it will make sense on rereading years later, after you have forgotten all about it. The danger is that such records can be full of enigmatic notes – useful briefly at the time, but unintelligible when you need to revisit them.

Make notes on every phone call, even those made on your mobile phone when you are out of the office. Much is said on the phone and in conversation by way of advice to clients, instructions to builders, requests for action and information that needs to be remembered. Write it down as soon as you can, and if that is not feasible, request that the information is confirmed by email. Make it a habit from the beginning. It may take time, but it should also save you time when searching for bits of information later on. When you write down an address or phone number, also remember to transfer it to your main database, possibly with a note explaining who it is and their provenance and relevance. Hours can be spent searching old records for an important number or puzzling over the identity of someone unexplained mentioned in notes. Avoid the future frustration of knowing you wrote it down somewhere but being unable to locate it. Technology has clearly helped by automating filing, enabling word searches and saving information as soon as a connection is available to cloud-based shared servers but you still need to maintain discipline to help it work at its best.

Your record keeping should also include a record of your design thinking and decision making, especially any decision that has health and safety implications and for which there might have been several alternative solutions. See the section on the data trail above. This may be laborious, but it could prove more than worthwhile in any dispute, and it may even sharpen up your own thinking process.

Timesheets

Fill out timesheets. It may be yet another after-the-event item of record keeping that stops you getting on with the job in hand, but it can pay huge dividends in the longer term. The design of timesheets should be considered as part of the overall approach to developing standard office documents. Timesheets should record at least every half-hour of the working day, although some may be even more precise than that.

Timesheets have a number of uses – they can provide:

• a real-time programme of individual projects and a record of work completed on them
• a record of the time spent on a job for billing and invoicing purposes
• information on the time spent on jobs that can be compared with the fees generated
• a means of assessing whether the amount of time spent on a project meets the targets set (including financial ones)
• information on which to base future fee calculations, project programmes and job resourcing
• an overview of staff activity
• information on staff timekeeping and remuneration
• records for assessing staff efficiency and effectiveness
• the ability to balance fee-earning activities with education, research, pro bono work, professional activities, etc.
• a record of CPD carried out.

Computer software is available that will monitor individual activity and provide necessary prompts to supply information on activities and locations that are not directly computer related, such as site visits, etc. These will automatically produce timesheets and job records and may be the best fit for your approach to practice. Alternatively, you may be happy to use self-generated spreadsheets or to fill out paper forms. Consider the options and pick the right method for you and your practice.

Accounting information

Keeping accounts for the purposes of HM Revenue and Customs is, of course, obligatory (more details are given in Stage 4, Part 2). But it will also help to keep your company financially astute and healthy.

Like keeping track of the time spent on projects, knowing how the money is being spent and generated is important information for current and future planning. Information should be recorded in a format that will provide both historical data (the costs of running the practice and individual projects) and current data (which allow problems such as cash-flow crises to be predicted and, ideally, avoided). This will make job costing more accurate and allow calculation of fee proposals to be based on real information rather than rule-of-thumb percentages or, even, simple guesses at the costs of resourcing a project. Having access to reliable information in turn allows for better future planning and for deciding on matters such as monthly invoicing targets or overdraft requirements.

Research

Design inevitably involves research, even if it is only to help make the choice between potential materials in a building. But it can be an essential part of a practice’s approach to working and can form an important element of the service offer to clients. Consider whether gaining new knowledge and information might be a significant part of your working method and how you would handle the results. Would it be for internal use only, for reporting to your client body or for more general publication and dissemination? Being a research-led practice might create wider opportunities, but also requires a more rigorous way of working. Research can also provide an income stream of its own either in the form of direct fees or as grants and awards.

For further information see the RIBA Research in Practice Guide, 2013.

Giving it away

Finally on knowledge, the practice should consider how much of its knowledge it wants to share, either at a cost or for free. Most practices are happy for employees to speak at conferences or write articles in the press sharing part of what they know and getting in a bit of practice promotion at the same time. Others are happy to invite all-comers to their in-house seminars and might combine this with networking and drinks. There are even a few who see the extensive and open sharing of their knowledge as a way of becoming a significant source of authoritative information in a particular field. If the strategy succeeds it can give them high-level access to decision-makers and potential clients as well as providing the incentive and quite possibly the funding to do the ongoing research to keep ahead of their game. Giving away knowledge can, in the right circumstances, be very rewarding.

Practice library

The practice library was once at the heart of every architect’s practice, occupying shelves of space, supplemented by cupboards and boxes full of samples. For many practices this is still true, although online access to the most up-to-date information has made it possible and maybe desirable to operate with only a core resource.

But develop it will, even if it is just to hold information on products and materials used on past projects and favourite publications that it is difficult to do without. In order to be of use, the library has to be kept in good order. Ensure it is someone’s responsibility to look after it and to carry out a regular audit and an occasional cold-blooded cull.

Equipment

Your proposed office systems will require the right computing and other tools to make sure they work well. Choose your office equipment to support and complement what you want to do and how you want to work as it can also end up dictating your working methods. The subject is discussed further in Stage 4, Part 2.