Project Design Controls

Project Design Controls demand the attention of well-managed teams. This section organizes and provides structure for their use. While the generic term “project controls” may have alternative meanings in construction (e.g. surveying and field layout benchmarks, quality metrics, or schedule milestones) or finance (e.g. cash flow and other indicators) a more specific term is used here in the sense of controlling and managing design. Project Design Controls include:

• Level 0: Subsurface “Contractual/Forming” (Contracts and Team Assembly; Parties; Performance Period; Termination; Services & Deliverables; Compensation; Conditions)
• Level 1: Foundation “Planning/Organizing” (Project Analysis Kickoff; Programming & Research; Goals and Objectives; Roles and Responsibilities; Communication Protocols)
• Level 2: Structure “Measuring/Baseline” (Budget: Developing Budgets and Controlling Project Cost; Scope: Understanding What's in Our Project; Schedule: Scheduling Design; Documents: Planning, Managing, and Reviewing Design Documents)
• Level 3: Systems “Relating/Collaboration” (Relationships; Trust; People; Collaboration)
• Level 4: Enclosure “Leading/Strategic” (Change Management; Issue Tracking and Completion; Consultant Coordination; Option and Value Analysis)

Some of these elements are objective and easier to measure. Others are less tangible and relationship-based. Together they form a network of interrelated factors that can be used to manage design. They are called Project Design Controls because managing design needs limits. Control involves planning and intervention, monitoring and action. Without tangible guidelines and baselines to set direction, build guardrails, and keep us within necessary boundaries, teams are directionless. They cast their collective fates to the winds of wherever design process takes them.

To make them easy to understand and use, the Project Design Controls are organized into “Levels” and structured into a “Framework.”

Framework: Intent, Form and Function

The Project Design Control (PDC) model is both simple and complex. Conceived of as a stable, constrained box, it strives to make order from chaos. This architectonic/building-morphic form is designed to help users construct, remember, and employ a cognitive map to manage design. The associative metaphorical Level names – “Subsurface,” “Foundations,” “Structure,” “Systems,” and “Enclosure” – were chosen for easy recall. A memory grid for users, the PDC Framework's form is practically purposed so you can remember and use it.²

New Ideas?

Many of these ideas are familiar. Chuck Thomsen discussed many of them in his book Managing Brainpower almost 40 years ago. Some may soon be replaced by technology. New automation emerges by the second that eliminates steps in manually processing, translating and exchanging information. The principles remain. I celebrate being able to post central files online in cloud-based project portals. It saves time, ensures access to current information and promotes shared intelligence. But we will always need to translate, interpret and evolve that information. That's where we professionals add value, judgment, and experience. Who's got the steering wheel? What information should we leave out? Who decides which tools to use? We will always have to talk to one another to make those decisions.

Not Here. Here.

In Part 2 you will not find techniques that deal with the core subject matter areas of owning, designing, or building projects. As the provinces of their own professions, those subjects are left for professional business, architecture and engineering schools, construction management programs, and their respective subject matter experts. Do not expect to learn how to become an architect or engineer, to create building forms or size beams. Dispel your hopes to learn about cranes, hoisting and site logistics, purchasing and procurement, jobsite safety and cost estimating, construction scheduling, or pure contractor duties. You will not find a lesson on how to get funding for your project or how to run your business.

What you will find is a comprehensive way of thinking that connects and enables designing and building – control touchpoints to manage design. Decades of design and construction practice have taught us that we have to be connected. The advice in this section explains how to better make those connections. With your help, we can.

Applying Advice

This conversation is between us. You have heard the voices of others in this book. Now I will help you apply their advice. Our conversation may continue in interactive form. Media, blogs, papers, digital chats, face-to-face discussions, presentations, or workshops may enable discourse. For now, imagine we are talking, and I have heard your issues, because they are probably like those countless others have faced. These experience-based, cross-industry principles can help you manage design. Adopt and adapt these lessons. Shape them for your own use. The approach is simple: a do-it-yourself, some-assembly-required method, open to interpretation, adaptation, and personalization. Would you have it any other way?

Design Management Prerequisites: Experience, Desperation, and Motivation

Not everyone is ready to manage design. Before you can get it right, it helps to get it wrong. Everything. Be late with your drawings. Change the design concept at the 11th hour. Go wildly over budget, 30, 40, 50 percent – multiple times. I have. Without facing your responsibility for such things, and feeling its pain, you will not have reached the point where you want to manage design. And you can't know how. The motivation to manage design comes from only one place: desperation. If you think you can do it easily, you are either wrong, or not practicing with the risk and invention valued by leading firms.

Your motivation must be fueled by fear, survival, and a desire to succeed at least as great as the desire you had to design, build, or manage a design team in the first place. Such desire comes only from the depths of your soul. Those who believe design can be managed easily or linearly do not understand it. They have not experienced it at the levels required to know how it feels. Start with failure, then decide to do something. Fix it.

Before you read the rest of this book or put its teachings into practice, promise this: design or build a few projects if you haven't already done so. Experience the mistakes and issues discussed in the interviews. Then you will be ready. When you have experienced failure first hand and are as passionate about fixing what is wrong as you are for designing and building, read on. The thoughts shared will help – but only if you are ready to hear them.

Flexible Framework

The original outline of this book considered offering templates and tools for quick, easy use. “Use these top twenty forms, check the boxes and you will have it.” That approach is easy in concept but misguided in practice. Now, we offer a framework for how to think about managing design, called Project Design Controls. If you can grasp the fundamentals of design process and thinking you can manage them. I leave it to you to apply these ideas to the unique way of working with your team, project, or firm. Given the basics, you can adopt this framework, modify it, or design and build your own.

Other Theories

Similar management frameworks have been put forward over the last 50 years, including George Heery's book Time, Cost and Architecture. Published in 1975, it's one of the first books to propose time and cost as a management basis for architecture, engineering, and construction. Few principles for managing design come from advanced fields like rocket science, neuroscience, or quantum physics. Even fewer principles reveal proprietary magic wands or super tools. Rather, most techniques involve ordinary ingredients often lacking in design processes: common sense, experience, analysis, and subdivision of processes into manageable steps.

Control with Target Value Design

Can you really “control” these design elements? It may be challenging, but you must try. As a start, set a target value limit for each, apply the three-question litmus test below, then commit to meet these limits as a team. When you miss one, or creep outside the lines, it is the manager's job to direct the team and make change to restore balance. Figure 16.1 shows such an intervention, made possible by having first set target values that allow assessment and correction.

Target value design is a proven principle in design management circles. It is a simple idea: every element to be designed needs a target. Only with an explicit target in place can teams assess whether it has been met. Apply this concept to budgets, schedules, program and performance criteria, sustainability metrics, safety, and others. This is what you need to know to do it: set a target, track it, and meet it. If you miss something, change it to restore balance or adjust another factor.

In managing design, target values and limits offer vision and guidance that is sometimes not absolute. In sharp contrast to traditional metrics as may be seen in finance, engineering, and purely objective pursuits, the team can sometimes decide to ignore or reset their limits in favor of other “discovered,” “reprioritized” values. They shift targets midstream, allowing deviation in process.

Project Design Controls Overview

Project Design Controls are a framework within which the infinitely flexible, ultimately mysterious dance we know as design can be constrained. Each control provides guidelines to work within, test, or push beyond. Flexible, adaptable and scalable, this framework and its control touchpoints gives order to related moving parts. Although many design professionals aren't thrilled with having to have limits, the smart ones realize they're necessary. Good designers embrace and use these limits for inspiration and guidance. They use limits to manage themselves. Project Design Controls set up, track, and manage design. Kept in balance, they deliver successful projects. Left unchecked they can destabilize projects. Chapter 23, “Understanding and Using the Framework,” shares advice for how to cope with such imbalance.

As seen in Figure 16.2, the Project Design Controls Framework has “levels.” Configured in a way familiar to those who design and build, they are organized in the logic and sequence of building. Construct a mental model of this structure and use each layer to manage change and project balance. When things inevitably change, adjust them to regain balance and keep on track. To understand the framework, we will begin with an overview of each level, share a litmus test to test project health, then explore each in detail. The level names and their functional purposes (in parentheses) are:

• Level 0: “Subsurface” (Contractual/Forming)
• Level 1: “Foundation” (Planning/Organizing)
• Level 2: “Structure” (Measuring/Baseline)
• Level 3: “Systems” (Relating/Collaboration)
• Level 4: “Enclosure” (Leading/Strategic)

• LEVEL 0: “SUBSURFACE” (CONTRACTUAL/FORMING)

  Level 0 of the framework contains Project Design Controls for forming teams and establishing team-member duties. Level 0 is the “Subsurface” level, the bedrock for the project's “Foundation,” “Structure,” “Systems,” and “Enclosure” levels which rest upon it. Some design managers have the luxury of influencing the project delivery method, contract forms, and participants that will comprise their team. Others must accept the contract and team as assigned. There is no greater opportunity to influence a project's collaborative outcome than to get the “right people on the bus,” be clear about what they are to do, and set common incentives.

• LEVEL 1: “FOUNDATION” (PLANNING/ORGANIZING)

  Level 1 of the framework contains the Project Design Goals that establish the rules of engagement, that supporting planning, organizing and defining tasks. This level forms the “Foundation” atop the Subsurface Level to support creating a team. These Project Design Controls include Goals and Objectives, Roles and Responsibilities, Programming and Research, Communication Protocols, and the Project Analysis Kickoff Meeting. Once set, teams rely on these controls to record common purpose and method, and advance to set limits in tangible, measurable categories – traditional management metrics – to “structure” their project and establish a baseline to manage to. Good design managers don't miss the chance to plan their projects. They lay a strong foundation upon which to build.

• LEVEL 2: “STRUCTURE” (MEASURING/BASELINE)

  Level 2 of the framework contains the tangible, measurable Project Design Controls. This level provides the Structure that rests on the Foundation beneath it. These Project Design Controls include program, budget, scope, schedule, and documents. In contrast to softer, subjective controls, these controls can be set, written, tracked, managed, and adjusted. A change in any one likely necessitates a related change in others. Without them, there's nothing to manage. Without balance, there is chaos.

  Beginning with program, or project need, these limits include budget as a requisite. Budget is driven by scope, which is the intent and extent of design solutions that respond to program needs. To reflect those needs, scope describes how much and what kind of materials, labor and equipment is in the project per the proposed design solution. Scope is a key design management driver. Another perennial challenge, design scheduling, is the next core metric, to plan detailed tasks integrated with an overall project schedule. As the manifestation of the first four structural controls, documents reflect them in written and graphic form. As the traditional designer-to-contractor deliverable, documents – in all forms – models, construction documents, or exchanged data, represent the governing contractual basis and written record of the team's work. Planning, managing, and reviewing design documents is essential to managing design, but only if done over the entire project cycle. Little value comes from waiting until the project end to deal with design documents to complain about document quality or content, as if no discussion had ever taken place about what they needed to contain or when they were due. The precarious balance of these five elements is ever-present. Change the program? This could mean more scope and budget overruns and delay the documents. Late with documents? A construction delay is likely. A well-managed team mitigates such ripple effects.

• LEVELS 3: “SYSTEMS” (RELATING/COLLABORATION)

  Level 3 contains the “Systems” Design Controls. In dynamic project contexts, people are the systems. How they work together matters much. No matter how projects are structured at Level 3, or how many tangible metrics may have been recorded and managed, they are not worth much if the team does not trust them. Who cares if some project manager sets a budget? If no one understands, believes, or buys in to it, it won't govern anyone's design behavior. Like their real-life counterparts (e.g. HVAC, and other complex systems with moving parts, thermostats, gauges, valves and controls mechanisms), these human “systems” set and monitor the structure. Communication, trust, common language, interoperability, and teamwork are the relational human systems through which all other control metrics flow in design management.

• LEVEL 4: “ENCLOSURE” (LEADING/STRATEGIC)

  Level 4 of the framework, “Enclosure,” addresses less predictable, strategic factors. I call it this because it acts as the building's skin to protect its occupants from the elements. Used to sense and admit new information, controls at this level form the project's “brains.” How do we understand, manage, control, and lead the myriad of participants, consultants, owners, and experts, with external forces to find consensus, coordination, completion, and closure? Level 4 controls help teams make decisions, coordinate work, and manage change. This layer is the “envelope,” “roof” or “umbrella” under which projects operate. It requires mastery. Teams that allow raised-arm-excuse-making, (e.g. “I can't get answers”) are their own worst enemies. It is their job to anticipate and manage unresolved issues to keep the storms away. Rather than being surprised at rough project weather and changing conditions them should anticipate and respond to these factors.

  Setting and adjusting these Project Design Controls is the art and science of managing design. While change is inevitable, balancing it is required and even possible, if we can tell how we are doing. The litmus test shows us how.

Design Management

Design management is the series of actions, processes, and tools that result in a design that matches its program, within budget, for the agreed scope and schedule, as documented. With the framework and litmus test in hand, let's look at each level and Project Design Control in detail.