Was at it as a principal for 40 years and tended to be the only one who cared about making ends meet…gravitated toward management of production for that reason….seen it all…honestly nothing seemed to work, everything we do is a one-off prototype.

The only thing I did that helped was giving the PM a copy of the contract for anyone to read…copious weekly spreadsheets ticking off the time, unyielding deadlines coupled with flex-time basically telling the team they had X hours and they could finish early and go home or run over and work for free.

Think too it has a lot to do with production people not understanding how money/fees work. Think adding a spreadsheet showing how the fee is going to be spent/distributed would help them get over the idea that it’s all going to Ferrari payments…best to present on a PowerPoint instead of a handout…could end up on Facebook these days.

redesign 

clients and maintaining your reputation. quality of production.

From my perspective (starting to take on projects as a PM), it's the lack of top-down communication that kills time and budgets. You can't expect your employees to read minds. Share and explain contracts and schedules. You'll also get easier buy-in from employees, who might not understand the complexities of billing and begin to get frustrated as they sit at their desk while the boss is golfing and making 10x their salary. Not easy.

bowling_ball I agree on the comminications but that is also where it gets tricky. does the drafter, designer, or even PM need to know all the politics in getting a "fee". the boss might be out golfing to seal another job that recoups a bad initial fee to get the developer or whomever as a client and maybe while golfing the developers other architect dies of a heart attack and the boss now has to figure out on the fly if he will agree to take over at a fee the developer wants without ever reviewing the job........in short production can only be imagined efficient in a bubble. ands when you start out as staff etc...you only live in that bubble.

Where you lose money is when you miss deliverable milestones (e.g. stuff you can bill for) and/or have to re-do things you've already done. The first costs you because you can't bill for work you haven't delivered, so your revenue is impacted. The second costs you because you are spending time and money to do things multiple times.

Rework is a killer. Anything that leads to rework is the source of the problem.

But rework is not the same thing as iteration. A lot of people make this mistake. There's positive iteration, in which decisions and forward progress are made. And there's negative iteration, in which you are redoing stuff that was done wrong the first time. That's just waste.

Rework comes from a few different sources:

• Miscommunication: Information was misunderstood or missed
• Error: Somebody did something wrong
• Overdesign: You went too far, too fast, did too much, and have to go back 

Another big problem, related to these issues, is failure to prioritize. Your production plan should be targeting only those deliverables which are a priority to meet the goal of whatever the deliverable is for. Anything beyond that is wasteful. Anything less generates miscommunication and error.

incompetent employees that just done get it - they don't listen , and or they forget stuff, then bust out junk that has to be fixed by those who know how - common in places that are "sweatshops - volume places"

It's because we hire employees (who want to design, not produce) and then we put them to work in production.

Problem starts with school where we try to teach everyone design and let them think they can be the next starchitect ... they won't be.

Then we ask potential hires to submit portfolios showing off their design chops like they will be the next starchitect ... they won't be, and the firm won't want their design input, only their production skills.

Then we put the aspiring designers in front of a computer and expect them to produce something (drawings) they've never done before. We don't properly train them in how to do it right, because we think they should just be able to figure it out (because that's what we did). Then we wonder why we lose money in production.

If we started to educate, train, and hire more production drafters our firms would start to see more profit.

If I was given x amount of time to complete and go home early or work extra for free what usually would take 8 hours would get done in 3 seriously. Where's the incentive in drafting factories where busting your ass finishing something just means more work to do and deadlines pushed forward.

Lack of incentive for junior staff, lack of mentoring, no loyalty or respect between employer and employee.

Bosses that treat employees like shit.

There's your lost productivity. Enjoy the golf course.

+++Everyday Intern

^agreed

The best production people have good design sense though.

If that is really the problem I have a solution: there are community college grads trained in production who do not expect to design and cost less -- hire them. 

∆ That's what we do. it works. And that's what people on this very forum argued, was wrong with the profession. You can't have it both ways.

but more often than not you spend a good deal of time reviewing and revising low grade production drawings, this is not to say someone out of school with an arch degree is any better. even people with 5 years still make stupid mistakes on drawings. and by mistakes I do not mean design, design is the easy part - everyone can design - i mean for contract docs legal and financial consequences, little shit that unless you have it happen to you and you reap the consequences you have no idea what the minor stupid mistake amount to..................for instance my first CD set for a real project I made the mistake of confusing Schlage's 626 finish with US26 and not US26D, cost my boss $3k in restocking fee for all the door levers that had to be returned. if you manage 20+ jobs and have staff its hardly possible for the boss to catch that kind of error. he took it on the chin because this client was a major account with recurring work. since then, I pay good attention to door hardware......don't expect a drafter to have the first clue about hardware.....i would argue there are very few phases and drawings that can be considered pure production.....survey and input you might think, but again if you do not understand buildings the fuck ups are numerous...

in short - drawings are never purely production, they are legal documents with binding financial consequences.

some perspective from (a) guy on the bottom:

things that cause your firm to lose money in production

1) when each PM has their own fiefdom with little quirks and neurotic obsessions about how 'they' like to see things done, and the production people get to bounce between these fiefdoms, interpreting the vague and unwritten rules of the PM as they go along.  

2) when the PM doesn't have work ready for their production team, so you sit for 3 hours on Houzz, then he has redlines but OMG ITS DUE TODAY WHY HAVEN'T YOU STARTED YET!!

3) when scheduling tools are underutilized or completely ignored

4) when the managing principal regularly underbudgets design time, and design revisions are still being done well into CD's 

5) when leadership fancies themselves a sociopaths, treats the PM as a member of the clueless and the production team as losers. 

6) when leadership complains about crappy drawings during quality control, but is unwilling to invest the time, money, and effort into production methods and controls.

7) when a firm half asses investment in production tools

8) work expands to fill the time allotted. 

Junior staff members work on task until they're given something else to do, long after they should have finished. (Work expands to fill the time allotted.)

I'm a junior staff member. I've heard this raised a few times (not directed at me, but in passing at work), and am curious how one becomes more self-aware of this. I do find myself sometimes unsure of how long a given task should take me, but it seems odd to ask a superior how many hours something should take. Often it feels like a thing that is simultaneously defined, and yet undefined. I'm curious what the senior people on here think in how to approach this to become better at dealing with it?

∆ A few years ago, we would sit down every Monday morning and go through everybody's schedule for the week ("John, you're on project A for 6 hours, project B for 14 hours... Etc).

Now that we have double+ the number of projects, we've found it harder and harder to manage down to the hour like that. As a former production staff, I didn't love having my hours so rigidly laid out, but now I get it. The problem is, somebody has to be responsible for assigning those hours, and that's not easy for a staff of 20ish, doing about 70 to 80 projects a year.

I think something like that would be perfect for me right now, at least until I have been in the game long enough to understand timelines in a more comprehensive way. However, even thinking about it, I know that our office is not set up to accommodate that type of hours-setting. Seeing as this is the case, how should one better fall in line with time expectations?

@Bench:  My advice is to get it done as fast as possible and show it to your superior ASAP - even if it isn't entirely correct.  The absolute worst thing is to sit on a mistake all day - better to get any questions or issues resolved early and often so you won't make the same mistakes next time.  The truth is your superiors don't know how long you need to get things done either, but if you show you can get things done quickly and are interested in learning how to do it accurately then they'll be able to better gauge your performance and you'll start getting more interesting work and more responsibility.

Interesting, that seems like a strategy that is easier to gauge and apply across a broader spectrum of work. I'm often conscious of the fact that, A) my superiors have their own work to produce, and B) they're billable rate is huge compared to mine - all this to say that I try to only bother them when necessary.

Is it too blunt to ask if something is taking too long to produce on my end?

Bad design(no coherent underlying logic to the building).

This is the fault of the design principal, not the production staff. 

@bench. No need to ask - Just assume it's taking too long and your goal is to figure out how to do it faster. There are often tricks and workflows that allow you to speed up your own production. Ask around what other people do, but You need to figure out what works best for you.

Some very great points have been raised!

I have found that the more decision makers involved, from the top down adds time. From the Owner to, Principal to, PM to, Designer to, Job Captain to, Senior Draftsman to........whatever. Maintaining an efficient flow of information seems to be a challenge. Also some information gets lost as it flows down, which can result with error and/or more time added to design and production. Not sure if there is a better way.................

Problem at the top: contracts aren't structured adequately for design time, iterations and production with proper review times.

Problem in the middle: communication both ways - to the top, where the padding is in time and fee; to below structured deadlines and expectations of what is delivered when and why.  Expectations of time per task should be clear and there should be a dialogue as to whether the time taken is appropriate or if there needs to be a better work flow.

Problem at the bottom: stretching out tasks to fill time, repeating a slow work process, no care in reviewing own work before bringing it in for review by others, not caring, sloppiness.

The best practices I've seen:

Partners that laid out solid contracts and explained up front what scope was included and what would be additional services.  They also kept an open channel to the client on how the firm would do its best to deliver on time and on budget and when the client would be notified if either the schedule or budget shifted.

PMs laid out work flow and schedule of deliverables both internal and external.  They also kept a contingency internally to allow for changes in schedule and budget.  Taking time to do a 'honest' assessment of how much time needs to be spent, assess where the 'crunch times' would be and communicated that to the team with clear goals.  Communicated that getting work done better and faster would mean more profit and that that would reflect well on each team member at reviews.

Staff took the time to look ahead 2 weeks to assess how much time would be spent and worked ahead to minimize late submissions and communicated to PMs as to how fast they thought the tasks would take.  Worked ahead of schedule and took time to find short cuts, etc online on their own time.  Came in early, stayed after hours to self-evaluate progress against 2 week schedule; maintain feedback if taking too long, or ask for more tasks if work was progressing faster.  Understand expectations and find ways to exceed expectations - suggest higher quality delivery if that can be done on time and under budget.

Incremental involvement and mentoring is important but it's also on the mentored staff to take their own initiatives to get more efficient and learn the materials available in published literature.  Communication, too little or too much, is often problematic.  In general having people who are excited about the work is critical - that it's a passion and not just a job.  Clear understanding of expectations, incentives, and consequences also needs to be clear.  With the market and employment laws as it is, it's not often people are terminated - seeing unproductive staff stay on is as negative as a lack of raise or promotion.  Well structured places that lay out expectations for each task type is very helpful.

"Came in early, stayed after hours to self-evaluate progress against 2 week schedule."  

"Communicated that getting work done better and faster would mean more profit and that that would reflect well on each team member at reviews."

i'm not sure anyone is that passionate to come in early and stay late everyday to self-evaluate their own progress against a 2 week schedule and then ask for more work if they are ahead of it.  

especially with the totally empty promise that it will result in bonuses or raises (i'm assuming that's what is implied in "reflect well").  unless of course that was put in writing and there was evidence that the company did in fact live up to it's word.  

sounds more like employees were expected to basically work overtime to hit deadlines set by someone with little understanding of what it took to do so.  

3tk. The best practices you speak of basically have a good working philosophy. Except for maybe the "Came in early, stayed after hours to self-evaluate progress against 2 week schedule."

I have worked for a few practices and none have worked that way. Most have been more like all of the negative side of the comments here. I guess they must exist somewhere.

A biggy I see:  Communication.  I'm basically a QAQC type reviewer.  Does anyone ask me how this or that goes together or do legwork to figure it out?  Nope.  They draw something (time), that is wrong, which I redline the hell out of (time), which they have to correct (more time), and it could domino into other areas (more time accommodating the change impact).  

Additional side effects include:  The PM's don't like me... these things I do chew through their budgets and can impact schedules/aesthetics.... which then ripples to trying to avoid asking me questions or giving me incomplete details/drawings to redline just to check off some box that it went through QAQC review.

The other I see is cherry picking... Everyone wants to do the "cool stuff".  So the set I'm currently redlining has a lot of design and thought into the facades and even tiny rail detailing.  But it's an infill project so two walls are party walls (which aren't nice and flat and vary in height).  Not a single detail or any time spent actually figuring out how to integrate our new building with the other two buildings so it won't leak or their gigantic rooftop units won't drown out the tenants of our building....  And the team is whining because they only have 30 hours to finalize and I ate up 9 just trying to get the drawings to a point where we won't be sued and it at least looks like some effort was made.