CHAPTER 25
Actions

What Works

For those consumed by projects and running their firms, without time to read, I've done it for you. This section summarizes the best practices shared by the interviewees. This book is about contemporizing and futureproofing two ancient professions: design and construction. The implication? We've got some work to do. If we want to be valued by our business partners, we need to change how we think and practice. Architecture and construction will always be valued services, not just indulgences for a privileged few. But only if we adapt. The following advice comes from the best experts I could find, and it's summarized to help you do just that.

“Go out on a limb. That's where the fruit is.”

– Jimmy Carter

In Search of [Design] Excellence: [Designed and] Built to Last

Emerging Best Practices for Managing Design

Peters and Waterman's book In Search of Excellence offers wisdom based on extensive research. In Built to Last, Jim Collins and Scott Porras share practices of businesses that have prospered long term. This book's interviews, while a smaller sample size and not the absolute truths proposed by Peters, Waterman, Collins, and Porras, offer many insights.

“Do not fear mistakes. There are none.”

– Miles Davis

  1. Strategic Services. Designers and builders should develop and offer early strategic programming and advisory services to owners. The goal of these services is creating programs, design solutions, and budget parameters geared to shape smarter projects. Owners don't always know what they need; they don't do what we do for a living. Henry Ford said, “If I had asked my customers what they wanted, they'd have said: ‘Faster horses.'” Just like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Jeff Bezos, we need to figure out our value and give owners all things they often don't even know they need. (Serrato, Nall)
  2. Collaborate Appropriately. All owners and projects are not the same. If you're executing a proven solution, it may be time to put your head down and get it done, not have more meetings. Tailor collaboration and communication models to the project. Match fees accordingly. (Moebes)
  3. The Right People. Recruit and hire graduates who will foster a collaborative culture. Weed out the naysayers. Accentuate the positive. Find individuals with new skill sets. Your firm may not survive if you don't. (Styx, L'Italien, Paine)
  4. Mentor, Teach, and Train. Ensuring a sustainable future for the industry requires that owners, designers and builders expose their staff to clients and teammates. Collaborative environments will breed life-long collaborators and thinkers. Educators must revise curricula to emphasize collaborative attitudes, behaviors and skills. Excising the loners, skeptics and malcontents will define our destiny. Start now. (Penney, Cheng, Marble, Deutsch, Bernstein, Simpson)
  5. Declare Victory. Architects can reshape their future by “declaring victory” over old ways and thinking and leading with new mentalities and actions. No more grousing and griping. Out with the skeptics and “lone wolf” persona. The future needs positive, collaborative designers who aren't afraid of transparency and team work. Servant leadership takes courage. Begin by wanting it. Join the firms that have found balance. (Penney, Roberson, Moebes, L'Italien, Williams)

“I am always doing that which I cannot do, in order that I may learn how to do it.”

– Pablo Picasso

  1. Be Bold. Be Profitable. Discover ways to deliver more value with higher margins. Focus on profitability. Seed and fuel new value propositions, process retooling, research, recapitalization, and other steps to adapt, evolve, and survive. Try something different to get better outcomes. Discard archaic practices. Stay calm. (Fano)
  2. Owners Must Catch Up, Lead, and Engage. Owners too busy to engage get subpar projects and business performance. Join skilled, passionate teams that want to give their all. Treat the process as a partnership. It is! Be willing to partner financially, contractually, and in every way. Renew and retool your skills (e.g. BIM/VDC, current processes) in owner responsibilities. Give direction, look at drawings and models to communicate with us, so we can deliver for you. (Moebes, Bryson)
  3. Support Diversity and Inclusion. Put women, minorities, younger associates, and diverse views at the forefront. Enable and develop talent. Grow the perspective. (Grandstaff-Rice, Freelon, Williams)
  4. Embrace empowerment, delegation, and self-determination. (Roberson, Freelon, Cousins)
  5. Redefine Design Excellence. Demand holistic, operationally sound, cost-effective, high-performance, beautiful solutions. (Dumich, Willis, Williams, Freelon)
  6. Use Project Design Controls. Build a structure of best practices. Use tools, checklists, and an integrated model to balance projects, including soft skills and tangible baseline metrics to track, adjust, and manage change. Adapt them to your practice. Make them part of your culture. (LeFevre)

Forty Questions

The following questions formed the core of the interviews. [Editorial comments added in brackets.] As question sets were individually tailored to interviewees, not all were asked all questions. Some were reverse-engineered – extracted from interviews – or asked or answered by those who spoke. In closing, I added a few and grouped them. Consider them in shaping your future as a design manager.

To plot your path, maybe you should ask these questions of yourself, your firm, and your clients and partners. Imagine what you might do together if you were to agree on the answers! Even if you don't, you'll each know where others are coming from. Maybe then you'll be able to work together better. That would be okay, wouldn't it? A little dialogue?

Management

  1. Oxymoron? Is managing design an oxymoron? What has your approach to it been? What are you doing to manage design?
  2. Management Culture. How is/was management addressed within the culture of your firm? Are design and managing design separable, conflicting, or an integrated yin/yang duality? Can design and management be done by the same person, or better served by focused experts? Embraced/shunned, integral/separate? Measured/addressed? Occasionally ignored? Do you offer management training in your firm?
  3. Management Structure. How is your firm organized? Does it serve your culture and mission?
  4. Firm Size and Scale. Do the resources of a large global firm help or hurt your process? With increasing globalization and specialization, what's the right firm size? Small/local, mid/regional, aggregated global giant?
  5. Specialization. How can we cope with specialization? Is there an increasing need for generalists to manage it all?
  6. Risk. How can we share, manage, and allocate risk and reward? Contracts, attitudes, processes, education? Are those good at these things willing to help partners who aren't? Are integrated practice or new delivery methods the answer?

Planning

  1. Planning. Why don't we insist on project planning phases? [Who in their right mind thinks we can assemble large disparate groups with no common agenda or protocols, and work at high speeds to create the known from the unknown – then build it – given insufficient time, money and resources?] Can we fix the too-fast project dilemma? How? Why don't we align goals, build teams, and set protocols before design starts?
  2. Visioning. How can we get better at visioning, strategy, planning, and succession, to plot a course for change – and the future? Can we ask each other the right questions early enough?
  3. Future Vision. Have you seen anything new, hopeful, or radical? If you started a project or firm tomorrow, what would you change? What would you do to make it a success? What are we facing next? What we will we see in 5, 10, or 15 years that will be radically different?
  4. Advice. What advice would you give aspiring student entering the profession today? What are new generations showing us? How are they different from old guard designers and builders?
  5. Schedules. Do you do design schedules and workplans to manage yourselves? How? Do they work?

Process

  1. Process. How is design generated these days? Describe your process. Do you still use tools like hand sketches and physical models, or have they been automated by algorithms, artificial intelligence and digital modeling? [If we don't know, how can we manage?] Do you use a different design approach for different client and building types?
  2. Technology. How is technology affecting your processes and people? What impact have machines had on your approach? BIM, VDC, prefabrication … Love 'em? Hate 'em? Unintended consequences? What are you doing about it? Scaling back? Investing more? Prioritizing? Is technology inseparable from process? Has it changed mindsets?
  3. Supply Chain Innovation and Prefabrication. Are prefabrication and supply chain innovation changing thinking?
  4. Process Reinvention. Are you seeing any step-skipping, game-changing processes resulting from automation or process reinvention?
  5. Lean. Can Lean thinking and processes make their way into mainstream design and building?

Stewardship

  1. Stewardship. How can architects overcome the perception that they're good at spending other people's money, and prone to going over budget? How do you estimate, manage, and control construction cost – the perennial elephant in the room?
  2. Management Strategies. What strategies can teams employ to manage design upfront (i.e. “preventative design management and maintenance”) to avoid the inevitable redesign, descoping, and demoralization that result from current processes?

Understanding

  1. Empathy. How can we understand one another better? [clients, architects, contractors, one another] What do you need from me? What can I do to work with you better? What's frustrating you these days? Do you invest in building relationships, alliances, and trust with those outside your discipline? What can partners start or stop doing to work with you better?
  2. Alignment. Can we get better at aligning objectives? [i.e. owners looking for “fast and cheap” should not work with “high design” firms aspiring to produce architecture, and vice versa.]
  3. Client Empathy. How can service providers – designers, builders, and owner project managers alike, get better at understanding different user types, styles, needs, and cultures: client empathy?
  4. Understanding Design. Can owners and builders learn to understand design process and that conventional management methods don't apply? Designers like to “do,” not “manage.” Can that change? Should it? Can partners understand design's nature: nonlinear, explorative, iterative, capable of radical re-redirection, throwing away and starting over at the last minute?
  5. Enabling Design. How do owner and builder partners lead, enable, empathize with, and empower their designers, versus dictating and micromanaging them – to less effect and value? Can clients understand and collaborate with design partners to maximize collective value?
  6. Communication. In complex teams spread out across the world, how can we regain the nuanced communication we had before email? [Building by email, pdfs, and RFIs is hardly working.]
  7. Perspective. What drove you to design? Your career evolution? Share your perspective.

Information, Knowledge, Expertise

  1. Research. Why don't designers, builders, and owners embrace research, reuse data and feedback? [Despite being the biggest industry, we're the least capitalized, most change resistant – and persist in doing things from scratch, ourselves.] Why do designers pursue one-off solutions? Why not add rigor, share research, get Lean? Can we? Should we?
  2. Contractor Expertise. Why don't designers capitalize on contractor and trade contractor partners' cost and constructability expertise to inform design, and manage cost and schedule effectiveness?

Change

  1. Diversity and Inclusion. How are you dealing with diversity, inclusion, and equity in your organization and partnerships, for race, gender, and all types?
  2. Advocacy and Change. Where are the design profession's advocates and activists? Have we reached the pain point yet? How can those who aspire to be change advocates in this profession succeed? How and where do we begin? Who goes first? [The answer to “when” is now!] Courage!
  3. Challenges. What are your biggest issues and challenges? How are you feeling about our collective profession? Do we need to change? What are the issues around collaboration? [Designing, building, or serving as owner managing these processes?] Share your perspective.
  4. Laggards. How can the laggards – the change-resistant majority – get motivated and mobilized to change?
  5. Process Change. When experienced, intelligent, passionate professionals get stuck in an inefficient process [i.e. designing and building most projects], why don't they change it? Or set their process to avoid it in the first place.
  6. Leading from Behind. Forced to operate from a position of “leading from behind,” how can engineers and second- and third-tier consultants cope and “manage” those leading design from above them: architects, owners, contractors?
  7. Owners. How can building owners catch up, keep up, learn new tools and processes, lead, and get engaged in their projects? [They set overaggressive schedules, fail to plan, can't read drawings or use digital tools, are disengaged, and insist on buying professional services and buildings like first cost commodities rather than long-term investments.]
  8. Owner Leadership. Are program owners and serial builders leading the way with R&D, process and policy leadership? [They could be, should be. Or don't they know how?]

Education

  1. Current Curricula. How can educational systems increase their change rate and revamp their territorial curricula to keep up?
  2. Soft Skills and Collaboration Culture. Beyond technical proficiencies, how do next generation practitioners acquire the skills they need (including soft skills, communication, collaboration, strategic planning, and for the business-challenged: business skills?) There isn't enough time in school. How can emerging leaders take these questions to heart and catalyze change? How can we fix the historically closed culture of designers that celebrates ego, individualism and talent over teamwork – and seldom teaches collaboration? Did you learn to collaborate, communicate, or be strategic in architecture school? [Ditto engineering, interiors, landscape architecture, and so on]

Entrepreneurship

  1. Entrepreneurship and Selling. Can entrepreneurship become part of architectural thinking? Integration, vertical, horizontal, changing the game, and the market? [Traditionally, it's been scorned in the AIA canons, commercialism, etc.] How can architects learn to “sell,” explain, defend their designs and speak their client's language?
  2. The Architect's Value. How can architects change perception to regain their caché, respect, and increase their value? Can they move from contraction and risk avoidance modes? (I hope so. Some are.) Can architects care about making money and get better at it? Where can designers find “courage for the future,” add value, and make money?

Design

  1. Architecture, Transdisciplinary, Performative Design. How can architects reclaim their position as champions for art, beauty and architecture, aesthetic issues – via a new holistic architecture that adds value – energy, sustainability, happiness, productivity, everything? Is transdisciplinary, performative, machine-assisted, quantified design the new normal? Expected? Where does that leave the old guard? What does design mean to you?

My Take

Analysis of these questions and interview themes is revealing. Not surprisingly, in this book, the nature of design, and the challenge of managing it in conventional ways was the most frequent interview topic. It's the book's thesis. Reemphasizing customer focus almost matched it. Advocacy, activism, the need for change, and the impact of machines followed closely behind, as did leadership, knowledge sharing, and curricula change. Cultural alignment, communication and institutional change resistance, and mentoring and self-learning, collaboration, and entrepreneurial shifts were popular topics. Surprisingly, issues regarding finance, value propositions, and the perennial favorite, busting budgets, were less frequent. Issues of equity and diversity, while gaining momentum, were mentioned only a few times. Classic “architectural” concerns such as design excellence, holistic, sustainable, and transdisciplinary design, along with practice size and scale discussions, were also mentioned infrequently, and only by architects. In a mild validation of the book's fundamental issue, the concept of planning and scheduling – key ingredient of managing design – was mentioned by only a few experts, and even that was perhaps due to my prompting. Does this support the core premise that design scheduling is an afterthought?

I share the interviewees' sentiments and the themes they present. I've experienced them. In my time on both sides of the line, I admit to making plenty of mistakes. But instead of accepting the status quo, I've worked to overcome my shortcomings and get out of my comfort zone. There were good reasons for every mistake. Our culture, tradition, DNA, the nature of design, and changing market forces were, and are, reasons enough for the challenges we have faced. But we can change who we are. A hallmark of artists (and builders and owners as well) is that we are never satisfied. But making such change takes awareness, desire, and focusing on the right things. Here are a few key focus areas I have seen be effective.

Where to Focus: Drivers

Effective design management drivers are within reach. In the summary recommendations below, each assumes we're working as an owner-architect-contractor team. For reference, I've keyed them to interviewees that spoke to these issues in parentheses.

  1. Budgets. Set smart cost models. Doing so without team input invites problems. Owners must value team input and use programming, options analysis, feasibility studies, and preplanning phases to set project budgets. Projects shelved and awaiting funding or approval need updated budgets for price escalation, market factors, program objectives, technology, and other issues that may have changed. Better yet, create a new, consensus budget with a team committed to stand behind their numbers. Forcing untested budget numbers on teams perpetuates problems. Use cost control tools to get – and keep – costs in line. All team members must get better at cost consciousness, as they are at home or in their business. (Penney, Paine, Styx, L'Italien)
  2. Schedules. Plan the schedule. Don't set timelines without team input. Only the expert performing each work aspect knows their steps and how long they'll take. For fast-track schedules, devise a team plan to achieve them. Prefabrication? Modularization? A unitized systems approach? Concurrent, co-located design and construction teams? Plenty is possible with experienced, creative people, but not if they work in isolation. Consider the ideas and tools in this book to create integrated team schedules, with detailed steps and interim dates. Design may be difficult to do linearly, but interim guidelines and guardrails keep teams on track. Build in front-end planning time to set up projects and build teams. (Cousins, Carnegie, Paine, Thomsen)
  3. Team. Get the right team first. Owners should select designers and builders that get what they're trying to do. If not of like mind you're in for trouble. While participant motivations and mindsets can range widely, designers can display many mentalities. From service-oriented and repeat-building-type efficiency to cutting-edge design-daring-do, design firms are moved to do different things. Nothing sabotages a project faster than finding out the owner is going for fast and cheap, while their designer wants slow, new, expensive, and risky. How do you find out? Ask! (Thomsen, Williams, Gilmore)
  4. Programs. Define problems. Help owners see what they need. Define team objectives and update them. Clear paths to allow divergent design explorations to converge into good documents and buildings. Reject consultants who throw up their hands in exasperation and declare, “I can't get decisions!” It's our job to make decisions happen. Get paid for it, since owners struggle to do it themselves. (Moebes, Thomsen)
  5. Design Approach and Scope. After the right team is assembled, projects that build consensus budgets and schedules need designs and scopes that support them. A project needing fast-tracked packages and tight milestones is not suited to extended exploration of unique solutions. Designers must design their approach to suit the objectives, and it's their partner's jobs to help them. Look for incompatible ideas that stray from the plan and redirect them. Be courageous. Speak up or find a new design partner in synch with what the team is trying to do.

    Plenty of projects start with a program area requirement of x, only to see a design deconstruct it via terraces, balconies, soffits, plazas, atria, bridges, tunnels, forms, and surfaces that couldn't have been contemplated when the program and budget were set. It may be the right design move to destack or dematerialize a box, but when you do, you must do the same to the budget and schedule. Teams must design to “common” goals and limits. Do you really think a building budgeted by a university facility planner using normal comparable costs and assumptions: (i.e. stacked floors, moderately regular shape, historical SF costs) will stand up to being spread all over campus with three times as much roof, footings and skin? (Bryson, Cheng)

  6. Documents, Data, and Technology. Get smarter. Be forward-thinking about how you'll exchange information. Work offline to develop standards and team sharing practices ready for teams when projects come. Develop the skillsets required for digital design and construction. On a project with a team? Work together to monitor and manage information efficiently. Let's not be the last profession on the planet to capitalize on the vast amounts of data and technology available. (Deutsch, Bernstein, Cheng, Kanner, Wolford)

It's Up to You

That you've read this book, or parts of it, says something: you're aware of your limitations. You want to arm yourself to improve your working relationships with partners. I've provided a lot to absorb, so take what works. Skeptics might say, “We've heard it all before.” They may be right, but that doesn't alter the fact that working with designers presents challenges aplenty:

  • Each may have a different culture, language, focus, and mindset. (e.g. form, function, materials, sustainability, engineering systems, digital data, and a host of others.)
  • Designers are not always under contract to the teammates that bear the daily responsibility to manage them. If they don't work for us, why would they want to listen to us?
  • “Nondesigners” (i.e. owners and contractors) stay busy doing their primary jobs. Where in the world are they going to find the time to become practiced at design management skills? If our supervisors don't expect or demand we use them, can't we just leave these design management tools and lectures on the shelf?

Great points. Welcome to the realities of collaboration. Here are more:

  • Owners aren't likely to get better at managing designers anytime soon. The responsibility seems to be falling to designers and contractors. (Owners: please prove me wrong!)
  • Design partners face growing complexity in practicing their trade.
  • Projects aren't likely to get simpler, nor schedules longer. Budgets are always taut.

You do the math. Read the tea leaves. Smell the collaboration coffee. Get with the program or get left behind. That's the real question in managing design: What are you going to do about it?

Design Leadership

In a 2017 article in a Fast Company e-newsletter, Michael DuTillo1 said that design leaders are characterized by four traits:

  • Expansive thinking
  • Dissatisfaction with the status quo
  • A teacher's disposition
  • Managing up as well as down (They demand a seat at the table and are willingly assume the responsibilities that come with it.)

I challenge you to enlist each of these characteristics in working collaboratively to manage design.

Good Enough. Fail.

You'll never solve all problems incumbent in the designer-contractor-owner relationship. Using the ideas offered here can help. Fail, early and often. It's how you learn. It's what defines you more than your successes. Try. Take chances. Calculated risks. You'll regret not taking them. Tailor communication strategies to reach those on other teams. You'll get a few things wrong, but that's okay. Ultimately, it's the only way to get it right.

The Ideal Project

This exposition of industry problems and attitudes begs a few last questions: What would you do if you had it your way? Do you have better ideas? If I started a project tomorrow and had the influence, here's what I'd do to set up the ideal project:

1. Team Assembly

My first act would be to assemble the team. If I didn't have one I'd worked with before, I'd scour the country for the best, interview them, and conduct a simulated work session to get a feel for their style.

I would not select my team based on cost, fee, or qualifications alone. My team is going to pour their guts out working together for a long time. Why would I want to buy them like a commodity based on lowest price or only some of the criteria?

I would not select them in a design competition or imply they bring a free design to the interview. That's an abuse of their professional skills and services, and a ridiculous way to start. Not only does it mean they developed a design in isolation, without my input as a client, without getting to know me, but they most likely did it with no construction or cost input – a recipe for certain disaster.

If we truly believe it takes a team, let's not cast the die before we come together. I've done it and it's no fun. The owner falls in love with an ill-conceived design with uninformed budgets and schedules. It's risky. A design competition might work for a sculpture, a landmark or memorial, but a building is more than an object. Get your team together first and set objectives – together.

2. Program, Planning, Predesign and Project Definition Phase

Before design starts, I'd convene my team to select a site, develop a program, set goals, and conduct a Planning Phase for predesign, programming, and project definition. This would allow us to explore options, establish protocols, and define a path to success. We would include issues or sustainability, resilience, and building and human performance as key design determinants. Pro sport leagues have training camps and preseasons, project teams should too. We'd do this as a group. Then, and only then, would we start design. We'll never get a second chance to plan.

3. Project Analysis

After the planning phase, I'd restart the official design phase by conducting a week-long squatter session with all key players in the room. We'd have read a project orientation package in advance, so we could come ready to interact and add value. I'd set an agenda with these steps:

  • People (Roles, responsibilities, styles. Who's in the room? What do we do and care about?)
  • Project (Facts, givens, requirements, common goals and objectives, budget, schedule, etc.; what we know)
  • Possibilities (Exploring options)
  • Plan (Workplan and schedule for short and midterm design efforts, and design and construction of the entire project. How will we get there together?)

Why a squatter session or project analysis? Reconvening the team, armed with information from the planning phase, and holding them captive in an energized environment capitalizes on the contributors' synergy and expertise. With the immediate, interactive feedback from being together, great things result. After it's over, I'd send the output to the next wave as the team grows so they can join us in earnest.

4. Team Learning and Growth

I'd be transparent. To make the process fun, I'd advocate on the job learning and growth for participants through intentional project sharing, research and development. Personal and team growth would be explicit goals: sharing useful things gets rewarded, good deeds get done.

5. Place: Co-location: “The Team Room”

The next thing I'd do is set up a team workspace. “Facilities” facilitate. We should have a great collaboration space to work in, big enough for everyone who needs to participate – one big central room with easy access, based on Christopher Alexander's pattern “Central Room with Alcoves” in his book A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction. To do away with the warring factions, conflicting cultures, and objectives that plague us, I'd give this room a name: “Team-ville,” “Expert-ania,” or simply “The Team Room.” It would be a conflict-resolution zone where collaboration is the rule, and where grace, mercy, and acts of kindness thrive. I've been in these settings. They work. The team prospers. Occasional dustups would be unavoidable, but we'd work them out quickly, in the room. After our day was over, I'd encourage us all to go home to our families and friends to find balance.

This space would create the atmosphere professionals thrive in – as excited to come to work as a child on Christmas morning. I'd do away with the demoralizing, adversarial ways that infect many projects. In that room, I'd set the schedule and budget with input from my expert consultants: enough time and money to do the kind of project we all want, one that will serve as a great place to work for years.

In projects set up that way the team's energy is obvious. They have a smile on their face. Like in a football game, the team that “believes” has a quickness in their step as they break the huddle. They've got “momentum.” They charge to the line of scrimmage visibly eager. They feel the team dynamic. Setting that atmosphere is the owner's responsibility. They set the rules of the game. Owners who set adversarial rules waste money on their so-called teams.

The team room would be outfitted with technology, infrastructure, and screens (what we used to call the BIM room or BIG room) to connect remote teammates so they feel like they're “in the room.”

On a recent major project, we co-located onsite in huge modular trailers. Each traditional team member was housed in their own: “the architect trailer,” “the owner trailer,” “the contractor trailer,” and “the subcontractor's trailers.” It saved travel time, but the continued territorial divides did little to bring us together. The cultures within each building remained separate.

6. Design

As the owner, I'd state my architectural objectives, something like the work of Norman Foster: thoughtful, sophisticated, orderly, integrated, and of the machine age, with regular geometries, and richly detailed proportions and materials to last for the ages. I'd promote a design philosophy tailored to the project's, mine, and our objectives rather than anyone's singular agenda.

7. Budget and Schedule

If I was under pressure by my board of directors to design and build super-fast or cheap, or both, I'd still do the same thing – bring the team in, and with these additional team objectives, derive a budget, schedule, and concept that achieves them. We wouldn't work separately in opposition.

8. Program

I'd spend time on programming and pay for its development. We'd establish performance criteria for all building systems. I'd leave some things open ended to allow exploring options and new ideas. I'd pay my team to explore, because it's my job to tell them what I want. I'd be smarter with their input and would update the program in process, because things change.

9. Process, Communication, and Accountability

As an owner demonstrating leadership, I'd bring “program-developed” protocols, guidelines, and processes to bear, derived from project feedback. I'd have decision-making discipline using logs and templates. We'd record everything that happened automatically, so we could talk, interact, and work without having to stop, politic, write letters, posture, compile RFIs, cause friction, and perpetuate bad processes. I was part of a recent project that agreed meeting face to face was the equivalent of giving legal notice. It worked because it shifted the team's focus to getting things done, not writing letters and covering fannies.

10. Leader Styles

If I was to cast characters in this project play, I'd choose Tom Hanks to be the lead architect. He's smart, affable, and leader enough to create the kind of team it takes to pull great things from all of us. He's got a great sense of humor too. That helps. I'd cast Robin Wright as a team member. She's an example of a smart, strong leader. (Hopefully, she wouldn't play the manipulator role as she does in HBO's House of Cards.) She'd probably demand to play the owner. In the old-school adversarial days, Ernest Borgnine would've been cast as the contractor. In our new vision, Denzel Washington would be better. His even-tempered, empathic listening style would keep us all on track. If I couldn't afford this cast, I'd still make sure my team had these leadership qualities. That's my idealistic process for setting up right to manage design of a great project. Idealism aside, this list presents strategies for kicking off a project the right way.

“We want the Big Ten championship and we're gonna win it as a team. They can throw out all those great backs, and great quarterbacks, and great defensive players, throughout the country and in this conference, but there's gonna be one team that's gonna play solely as a team. No man is more important than the team. No coach is more important than the team. The team, the team, the team, and if we think that way, all of us, everything that you do, you take into consideration what effect does it have on my team? Because you can go into professional football, you can go anywhere you want to play after you leave here. You will never play for a team again.

Take Action

If you've read this book, your challenge is to take action. Do something! Use the wisdom offered by these experts. They've made the mistakes. Their life lessons provide strategies to a better future. Use their advice to make long-term change. Use the Project Design Controls framework – the parts that make sense for you. This book has exposed you to a range of outlooks. In the end, there's only one way to manage design: work as a team. Find an ally who shores up your deficiencies. Or let the lone genius of one individual rise to the fore and let the team carry their breakthrough idea over the finish line. Maybe both at the right times. That's for you to decide. You're the leader. The book passes the “baton” to you.

  • Owners: Lead. Engage with your teams and direct us. We'll serve you better and create better projects. Learn the new tools and processes architects and contractors use to serve you.
  • Architects: Value yourselves. Change your attitudes to be truly team focused. Reinvent yourselves to be profitable to continue practicing in the future.
  • Contractors: Be kindler gentler partners. With your newfound understanding of design, help your teammates help themselves!

If we can each can do these small things, we just might make it. I believe we can!

The Team

When you're working in teams, individualism is for losers and loners. It's not fun. And it's not as powerful or productive as being a part of a team. If you've ever had a good team experience, you know what I mean. Every team needs a leader – a coach. One who had great influence on me was the legendary coach of the University of Michigan football team, the late Glenn “Bo” Schembechler.2 He led Michigan's team from 1969 through 1989. In a timeless talk before the 1983 Ohio State game, he delivered a memorable oratory. Even if you're not a sports fan, or you're not a fan of Michigan, his comments apply:

You'll play for a contract. You'll play for this. You'll play for that. You'll play for everything except the team and think what a great thing it is to be a part of something that is, the team. We're gonna win it. We're gonna win the championship again because we're gonna play as team, better than anybody else in this conference, we're gonna play together as a team. We're gonna believe in each other, we're not gonna criticize each other, we're not gonna talk about each other, we're gonna encourage each other. And when we play as a team, when the old season is over, you and I know, it's gonna be Michigan again. Michigan.”

A Final Request

If you've made it this far, I ask one thing. In your part as a team member and manager of design, no matter your role, do everything in your power to make it be a team. A team. A team. A team. You'll remember the experience for a long time.

So will “they.”

Notes

..................Content has been hidden....................

You can't read the all page of ebook, please click here login for view all page.
Reset