I’ve been noticing in the past few years that project timelines from clients have been getting tighter and tighter, and simultaneously demands and expectations have been getting higher and higher.
This is unsustainable. Yes, technology advancements have increased our workflows significantly, but not enough to cut our documentation phase down to 1/4 of the time we typically do. That is an extreme example, but across the board, I have seem project timelines cut down to 3/4 - 1/2 consistently. I don’t know if clients view this as a way to save money, but I’m finding we are just having to put more time into work which is eating into our personal time, adding more people to project which becomes difficult to manage, making consultant coordination nearly impossible to achieve, creating burnout for all employees, and honestly leading us to produce sub par documentation that is only going to make CA a massive headache.
In addition to all of this, these constant tight deadlines hinder the growth and development of designers. I notice this is especially effecting younger staff who are very much reliant of the mentorship of their PAs and PMs to promote their growth and understanding of the architectural practice. I hate doing this but I often have no choice but to assign younger staff the same tasks over and over for efficiency’s sake. Having more time on projects allows individuals to think and ask questions and grow as designers, and we just don’t have that anymore.
This all just leaves me to wonder, what is going on here? And what should we be doing to protect our practice?
I only do residential design, but I am open about timelines with my clients--a 1-1.5 year wait and then 6-9 months (or more) to design their project. Many say they can't wait, and I wish them well. The ones that stay are usually pretty good clients and understand that things take time.
I know things are different in other sectors; I'm just saying that your clients' timeline doesn't necessarily have to be your timeline.
Management has no clue what the skills and abilities are of the staff that are assigned to the project and set project timelines based on their absolute “top performers.” Sometimes these people aren’t in the office anymore, or they often fudged their hours (worked 80 hours and only put in 40). Example - a few months after I got my license I was assigned to a project that I was told was “just a precast garage” (I had done 3 of those prior and generally knew what I was doing with small precast garages). It was a high rise with a cast in place garage on the first 8 levels and a 3 story restaurant on top. And there was a retention basin underneath. I was given zero help, was told the project had to be entirely in revit (I had maybe a few months experience in revit) and was told they hadn’t budgeted for anyone other than me. I had a newborn at home. If you were a PM do you think I was the most appropriate person to give this project to? If I was the only person you just eat the cost of adding additional people and immediately tell the client that the schedule will need to be pushed out.
Management failed to understand the potential complexity of the project and didn’t allow themselves wiggle room to either eat some of the extra cost, add time to the project, or ability to get additional services. MEP consultants I’ve worked with are really good at defining scope and asking for add services when something exceeds scope. Architects usually suck at this.
Poor communication: staff are wasting their time on things that don’t ultimately matter. This was a real problem on projects during the pandemic
Too much too early in revit - I’ve run into this multiple times where if a project is started in revit and too much detail/info is put into the model, you end up eating a ton of time fixing random BS if the design is constantly changing
PA spending too much time doing production and not enough on coordination and QAQC.
Client wants to get drawing set filed before new code - this just means drawings are “just good enough” and will need more work after filing. Problem is that some architects don’t understand what this means and will try to do too much.
"Management" in my place of work seems like cilent's reps and will push unrealistic deadlines onto employees with zero compunction or thought. And this is why they will rot in professional hell once they are canned from the firm.
The last place I worked, the schedules became increasingly more aggressive, one client in particular would dress down any consultant that offered excuses instead of results - we just had to work twice as fast and not do any abortive trials of ideas - we can only have time do things once, and it better be right - I think think this is the new normal. As interest rates and construction costs go up, it puts the squeeze on the architects.
It's up to the firm management to push back on stupid client requests. It's not always fun or easy to do, but it comes with being the leader.
If you don't, burning out your staff usually with continuous crazy deadlines leads to the potentially heavy financial and organization consequences that happen when lots of people start quitting. Avoiding high staff turnover, of course, is only an issue when a firm wants to be a quality organization.
If you want to run a burnout shop, you need to have a small cohort of ultra-loyal lifers at the upper and mid levels who can maintain continuity while your entire production staff turns over every few years. Frankly, this is a lot of people's model.
I think a lot of these firms will have to adjust because the pipeline of cheap “talent” isn’t really there anymore. You can’t keep churning through staff because there just aren’t as many recent grads and a lot of experienced people are leaving the profession. Less and less people are willing to put up with sweatshop environments. My last office was looking abroad for cheap labor, but there’s a limit to how many people you can bring over on HB1 visas. They couldn’t replace people as quickly as they were losing them and the firm collapsed.
Unfortunately, this is true. Many firms fail to take into account the cost of turnover, instead thinking "we can always hire someone else." Out of curiosity I once calculated a smaller firm's turnover cost I used to work at years ago. They lost 7 employees in about 2 years (about half their workforce), resulting in over 100k in turnover costs. That's the salary of a fulltime licensed employee.
Why are clients setting timelines? My clients never set timelines, or I never let a non professional set a timeline, my proposal usually has a timeline estimate, and its non negotiable with no guarantee. I am a small project architect and I do not deal with institutional clients, but I don't see how same strategy cant be applied to any client.
It’s often about getting the drawings submitted to hit funding deadlines. Which ultimately is the negligence of the developer for not managing their own timelines properly. I’m not in leadership, I don’t handle the proposals or contracts, but it seems to me that economic uncertainty right now is driving many of these requests being pushed to be met.
Clients can also set schedules do to the project type. For example: school projects typically want to open in time for the new school year. Often these projects can only move forward after funding has been obtained through grants and bonds.
This is 1000% accurate. I have worked (recently) on several projects with very notable clients (not a flex, some we lost, others just unbelievably difficult) and they typically have real estate branches that have THE most unrealistic timelines and operational boondoggles it's honestly baffling.
Every single one of those efforts we qued up the entire deck and presentation around why their "plan" simply is impossible and mostly had to do with regulatory requirements with the city. Showing the client obviously did not do their research well enough.
Regardless I see the same with fees lately on projects and it's still literally a race to the bottom. Nothing like hearing you're principals discussing how to cut project teams to a skeleton crew to get you fired up to work.
I feel like it's a feedback loop of most (not all) clients just trying to squeeze value out of the profession while not understanding operational implications.
Too many owner's reps are just clowns who measure success by how fast and cheap they can get the design and construction providers to do things. Many of them have no meaningful background in design and construction. That lack of knowledge leaves them unable to form reasonable expectations for costs and project delivery times.
I've encountered some really 'bad' owners reps. One of them keeps telling medical clients that design build provides a better coordinated, higher quality building because of the 'integrated design' process. Then I've worked with great owner reps that help everything go smoother and save the project 2-3x their fee in change orders.
Aug 5, 24 1:07 pm ·
·
reallynotmyname
The skill level is certainly all over the map from client to client. Our local church diocese has amazing people in their building department, as does a few of the universities around town. Other places seem to only hire unqualified people. Some require an industry background, but offer such low pay that they only get terrible people in the positions.
"The proposed schedule is unrealistic for us to provide you with a good project. If the schedule is firm, I am sorry to say we cannot help with your project."
Time is literally money in real estate, so the desire to shorten timelines is reasonable. Most architects are not responsive to this, which really annoys clients. A LOT. But there are also inflexible constraints and tradeoffs associated with those time frames. Communicating those effectively and getting everyone's expectations aligned is part of our job as architects. A major reason my company brought architecture in-house and self-perform our own work now is that consultant architects could not deliver in a timely fashion. We do much better than they did. Our delivery timelines are typically more than 50% faster, for design, documentation, and permitting. Keep that in mind when saying a proposed timeline is "impossible."
Is this perhaps because the rest of the organization is supporting the architecture work in a way that a solo architecture firm can't? In other words, architects have other clients and overhead independent of each project. If you look at it this way, of course you're able to accomplish things faster. It wouldn't be to your benefit if you didn't. By the same token, not
all clients can or want to have in house architecture. All this to say, you're describing different business models that work differently. I don't see how this proves the impossible suddenly possible.
BB: it's #1 and #3 that really grind my gears. Buildings as financial instruments.
Aug 19, 24 9:11 pm ·
·
greenlander1
for reasons 1, 3, 4, I've always pushed the client to spend extra money and hire an expeditor (not just a paper pusher but someone who can read the drawings and act as a facilitator with A+E team and the plan checker when things get stuck). They cost extra but the $ saved in construction interest and holding costs make it really worth it. They are also good about pestering the architect about submittals almost like a PM.
We can do in-house architecture because the volume of our work supports it at scale. The per-project cost of our in-house overhead is actually slightly higher than the fees we used to be paying consultant architects, but we are so much faster and effective at it that it winds up being vastly cheaper in time-cost-of-money for us to do it ourselves.
Now, there are a few things we can streamline because we are vertically integrated. We don't have to worry about contract liability, so our construction sets are ridiculously light by the standards of architects who are afraid of getting sued by owners or contractors. But construction sets are not critical path to our timelines (they are done in parallel with permit review, so cost no additional time) so that isn't really a factor in why we are so much faster.
The big factors are that 1) we have implemented a very strong design and documentation system which is focused on speed and effectiveness, 2) as part of that system, we spend a lot of effort on quality assurance and standardization of our work, and 3) we have in-house permit expeditors on staff whose job is GET PERMITS.
It's not really a timesaver, as I mentioned above. It's not critical path. Getting a permit is critical path for construction start, so permit time is really the main concern. There are two parts to that: how quickly can you get through design and create a good permit submittal package, and how quickly can you then get the permit approved? Creating a detailed construction set happens in parallel with permit review, so there is no time saved by doing that faster.
In fast track, integrated design projects, we do bid packages so several permits are issued.
In my experience, most AHJ require complete Civil and Landscape drawings. Structural footings. Full MEP drawings. Arch is site, code / special inspection, plans, sections, elevations, wall sections. If anything in the previously mentioned drawings changes then you need to resubmit for a permit.
I'm certain your integrated design team and process saves you a good amount of time. Being a design build firm that can do minimal drawings and change things on the fly without having the normal review process I'd think would also save you a lot of time. At least it did when I did contract with a design build firm.
Aug 20, 24 3:12 pm ·
·
gwharton
We do structural, civil, etc. too (not MEP, which is all design-build in the PNW). That slows us down a little bit, but not hugely. Adds maybe 4 weeks to the total process, depending. The thing about delivery time is that most architects follow hideously ineffective processes to get through design, compound that by not doing a good job with document QA and coordination, then are really, really slow and passive dealing with permit review responses. That all compounds into a giant time sink.
On the other hand, we can go from blank sheet of paper to full design approval in 3 weeks or less, a finished set of permit submittal docs 3 to 5 weeks after that (mostly dependent on civil), and then get our permits with an average number of review correction cycles of just slightly more than 1 (our typical turnaround time on correction responses is less than a week). Our former consultants, on the other hand, were averaging 3 months for design, 3 months for docs, and 3 or more correction cycles in permit review (with correction response turnaround times in the months, not weeks). That's a really big difference, and most of it is not coming from us being vertically integrated. It's coming from being much more systematic about our work.
Architects love to complain about how time-consuming parts of our work are, but the reality is that it doesn't have to be that way if we change how we do it to be more effective and smart.
gwharton - What types of project are you doing? What size?
I ask because in the project types that I work on - education, government, fire stations, in the 25,000 - 250,000 sf range there is no way a design an building permit could be obtained in six weeks. There are many reasons why - programing, client input, cost estimating, and the complexity of the buildings. That's not including the permit review time (one for site review, one for building review). That alone takes two months.
Aug 20, 24 4:47 pm ·
·
greenlander1
3 weeks for what level of design approval and what kind of project? where are you located? Texas?
Aug 20, 24 4:54 pm ·
·
proto
Gwharton Your model is in some ways worlds different with different forces at play. It seems a bit unfair to compare your model to general practice when it’s efficiencies are bespoke to your business proper and don’t reflect the independent markets served.
Being effective and smart doesn’t have to mean working in the manner that works for your specific development co
My experience with this was we had to do what it takes to meet more aggressive schedules and demands for rapid turn around. This includes creating as many as 10 Revit options to show clients. Working faster and more efficiently. Getting paid became a bigger problem with some clients "stringing us along" getting paid becomes a problem and lay offs become necessary. The key is to be always on your toes and running, no slacking off.
Aug 20, 24 2:42 pm ·
·
Non Sequitur
They key is realizing you're taken advantage of and moving on to another office. You exp is certainly not normal.
Aug 20, 24 3:15 pm ·
·
gwharton
Yeah. That all sounds like a very poorly structured and managed design process. You can meet a fast schedule, but not without being lean in your approach.
well, there is this indecision from 3 or 4 client side people pleasers and the GC, or on one project there is a very authoritarian client who wants to see all the options from every consultant and the architect “it’s part of the discovery process” back in the day we didn’t have design processes - an apartment building isn’t like you’re designing a Stealth Bomber - Frank would just say: “here’s your new house Mr. Kauffman “
You're doing something wrong. I Just handed off a project to my Structural Engineer and Client - laughed and said this is perfect timing! I'm going sailing! Have to set your own boundaries.
Aug 21, 24 12:33 am ·
·
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Trend of unrealistic timelines from clients?
I’ve been noticing in the past few years that project timelines from clients have been getting tighter and tighter, and simultaneously demands and expectations have been getting higher and higher.
This is unsustainable. Yes, technology advancements have increased our workflows significantly, but not enough to cut our documentation phase down to 1/4 of the time we typically do. That is an extreme example, but across the board, I have seem project timelines cut down to 3/4 - 1/2 consistently. I don’t know if clients view this as a way to save money, but I’m finding we are just having to put more time into work which is eating into our personal time, adding more people to project which becomes difficult to manage, making consultant coordination nearly impossible to achieve, creating burnout for all employees, and honestly leading us to produce sub par documentation that is only going to make CA a massive headache.
In addition to all of this, these constant tight deadlines hinder the growth and development of designers. I notice this is especially effecting younger staff who are very much reliant of the mentorship of their PAs and PMs to promote their growth and understanding of the architectural practice. I hate doing this but I often have no choice but to assign younger staff the same tasks over and over for efficiency’s sake. Having more time on projects allows individuals to think and ask questions and grow as designers, and we just don’t have that anymore.
This all just leaves me to wonder, what is going on here? And what should we be doing to protect our practice?
I only do residential design, but I am open about timelines with my clients--a 1-1.5 year wait and then 6-9 months (or more) to design their project. Many say they can't wait, and I wish them well. The ones that stay are usually pretty good clients and understand that things take time.
I know things are different in other sectors; I'm just saying that your clients' timeline doesn't necessarily have to be your timeline.
My experience with unrealistic timelines:
Management has no clue what the skills and abilities are of the staff that are assigned to the project and set project timelines based on their absolute “top performers.” Sometimes these people aren’t in the office anymore, or they often fudged their hours (worked 80 hours and only put in 40). Example - a few months after I got my license I was assigned to a project that I was told was “just a precast garage” (I had done 3 of those prior and generally knew what I was doing with small precast garages). It was a high rise with a cast in place garage on the first 8 levels and a 3 story restaurant on top. And there was a retention basin underneath. I was given zero help, was told the project had to be entirely in revit (I had maybe a few months experience in revit) and was told they hadn’t budgeted for anyone other than me. I had a newborn at home. If you were a PM do you think I was the most appropriate person to give this project to? If I was the only person you just eat the cost of adding additional people and immediately tell the client that the schedule will need to be pushed out.
Management failed to understand the potential complexity of the project and didn’t allow themselves wiggle room to either eat some of the extra cost, add time to the project, or ability to get additional services. MEP consultants I’ve worked with are really good at defining scope and asking for add services when something exceeds scope. Architects usually suck at this.
Poor communication: staff are wasting their time on things that don’t ultimately matter. This was a real problem on projects during the pandemic
Too much too early in revit - I’ve run into this multiple times where if a project is started in revit and too much detail/info is put into the model, you end up eating a ton of time fixing random BS if the design is constantly changing
PA spending too much time doing production and not enough on coordination and QAQC.
Client wants to get drawing set filed before new code - this just means drawings are “just good enough” and will need more work after filing. Problem is that some architects don’t understand what this means and will try to do too much.
"Management" in my place of work seems like cilent's reps and will push unrealistic deadlines onto employees with zero compunction or thought. And this is why they will rot in professional hell once they are canned from the firm.
The last place I worked, the schedules became increasingly more aggressive, one client in particular would dress down any consultant that offered excuses instead of results - we just had to work twice as fast and not do any abortive trials of ideas - we can only have time do things once, and it better be right - I think think this is the new normal. As interest rates and construction costs go up, it puts the squeeze on the architects.
It's up to the firm management to push back on stupid client requests. It's not always fun or easy to do, but it comes with being the leader.
If you don't, burning out your staff usually with continuous crazy deadlines leads to the potentially heavy financial and organization consequences that happen when lots of people start quitting. Avoiding high staff turnover, of course, is only an issue when a firm wants to be a quality organization.
If you want to run a burnout shop, you need to have a small cohort of ultra-loyal lifers at the upper and mid levels who can maintain continuity while your entire production staff turns over every few years. Frankly, this is a lot of people's model.
I think a lot of these firms will have to adjust because the pipeline of cheap “talent” isn’t really there anymore. You can’t keep churning through staff because there just aren’t as many recent grads and a lot of experienced people are leaving the profession. Less and less people are willing to put up with sweatshop environments. My last office was looking abroad for cheap labor, but there’s a limit to how many people you can bring over on HB1 visas. They couldn’t replace people as quickly as they were losing them and the firm collapsed.
Unfortunately, this is true. Many firms fail to take into account the cost of turnover, instead thinking "we can always hire someone else." Out of curiosity I once calculated a smaller firm's turnover cost I used to work at years ago. They lost 7 employees in about 2 years (about half their workforce), resulting in over 100k in turnover costs. That's the salary of a fulltime licensed employee.
Why are clients setting timelines? My clients never set timelines, or I never let a non professional set a timeline, my proposal usually has a timeline estimate, and its non negotiable with no guarantee. I am a small project architect and I do not deal with institutional clients, but I don't see how same strategy cant be applied to any client.
Architects need to stop being such pushovers
It’s often about getting the drawings submitted to hit funding deadlines. Which ultimately is the negligence of the developer for not managing their own timelines properly. I’m not in leadership, I don’t handle the proposals or contracts, but it seems to me that economic uncertainty right now is driving many of these requests being pushed to be met.
Clients can also set schedules do to the project type. For example: school projects typically want to open in time for the new school year. Often these projects can only move forward after funding has been obtained through grants and bonds.
This is 1000% accurate. I have worked (recently) on several projects with very notable clients (not a flex, some we lost, others just unbelievably difficult) and they typically have real estate branches that have THE most unrealistic timelines and operational boondoggles it's honestly baffling.
Every single one of those efforts we qued up the entire deck and presentation around why their "plan" simply is impossible and mostly had to do with regulatory requirements with the city. Showing the client obviously did not do their research well enough.
Regardless I see the same with fees lately on projects and it's still literally a race to the bottom. Nothing like hearing you're principals discussing how to cut project teams to a skeleton crew to get you fired up to work.
I feel like it's a feedback loop of most (not all) clients just trying to squeeze value out of the profession while not understanding operational implications.
Too many owner's reps are just clowns who measure success by how fast and cheap they can get the design and construction providers to do things. Many of them have no meaningful background in design and construction. That lack of knowledge leaves them unable to form reasonable expectations for costs and project delivery times.
I've encountered some really 'bad' owners reps. One of them keeps telling medical clients that design build provides a better coordinated, higher quality building because of the 'integrated design' process. Then I've worked with great owner reps that help everything go smoother and save the project 2-3x their fee in change orders.
The skill level is certainly all over the map from client to client. Our local church diocese has amazing people in their building department, as does a few of the universities around town. Other places seem to only hire unqualified people. Some require an industry background, but offer such low pay that they only get terrible people in the positions.
"The proposed schedule is unrealistic for us to provide you with a good project. If the schedule is firm, I am sorry to say we cannot help with your project."
We've had to say this to clients.
not worth the brain damage
I've said that privately to team members. ;)
Nothing worse than 10% of your revenue causing 90% of the headache.
Clients asking for schedule to be expedited is usually driven by one (or more) of the following):
1. They want approvals quicker so they can move on to construction so they can get a ROI faster.
2. If fees are hourly, they don't want to pay.
3. They owe money to a lender / private investor that they have to pay back in a certain time frame.
4. On some projects, the end users have to be situated in the new space by a certain date (example: schools).
Time is literally money in real estate, so the desire to shorten timelines is reasonable. Most architects are not responsive to this, which really annoys clients. A LOT. But there are also inflexible constraints and tradeoffs associated with those time frames. Communicating those effectively and getting everyone's expectations aligned is part of our job as architects. A major reason my company brought architecture in-house and self-perform our own work now is that consultant architects could not deliver in a timely fashion. We do much better than they did. Our delivery timelines are typically more than 50% faster, for design, documentation, and permitting. Keep that in mind when saying a proposed timeline is "impossible."
Is this perhaps because the rest of the organization is supporting the architecture work in a way that a solo architecture firm can't? In other words, architects have other clients and overhead independent of each project. If you look at it this way, of course you're able to accomplish things faster. It wouldn't be to your benefit if you didn't. By the same token, not all clients can or want to have in house architecture. All this to say, you're describing different business models that work differently. I don't see how this proves the impossible suddenly possible.
BB: it's #1 and #3 that really grind my gears. Buildings as financial instruments.
for reasons 1, 3, 4, I've always pushed the client to spend extra money and hire an expeditor (not just a paper pusher but someone who can read the drawings and act as a facilitator with A+E team and the plan checker when things get stuck). They cost extra but the $ saved in construction interest and holding costs make it really worth it. They are also good about pestering the architect about submittals almost like a PM.
We can do in-house architecture because the volume of our work supports it at scale. The per-project cost of our in-house overhead is actually slightly higher than the fees we used to be paying consultant architects, but we are so much faster and effective at it that it winds up being vastly cheaper in time-cost-of-money for us to do it ourselves.
Now, there are a few things we can streamline because we are vertically integrated. We don't have to worry about contract liability, so our construction sets are ridiculously light by the standards of architects who are afraid of getting sued by owners or contractors. But construction sets are not critical path to our timelines (they are done in parallel with permit review, so cost no additional time) so that isn't really a factor in why we are so much faster.
The big factors are that 1) we have implemented a very strong design and documentation system which is focused on speed and effectiveness, 2) as part of that system, we spend a lot of effort on quality assurance and standardization of our work, and 3) we have in-house permit expeditors on staff whose job is GET PERMITS.
It seems to me the biggest timesaver you have is:
"We don't have to worry about contract liability, so our construction sets are ridiculously light by the standards of architects . . . "
That is to be expected in a design / build delivery method. Even more so in a design build firm.
We'll often do fast track, integrated design projects with select contractors. We can typically get a 265,000 sf school designed and build in 4 years.
It's not really a timesaver, as I mentioned above. It's not critical path. Getting a permit is critical path for construction start, so permit time is really the main concern. There are two parts to that: how quickly can you get through design and create a good permit submittal package, and how quickly can you then get the permit approved? Creating a detailed construction set happens in parallel with permit review, so there is no time saved by doing that faster.
In fast track, integrated design projects, we do bid packages so several permits are issued.
In my experience, most AHJ require complete Civil and Landscape drawings. Structural footings. Full MEP drawings. Arch is site, code / special inspection, plans, sections, elevations, wall sections. If anything in the previously mentioned drawings changes then you need to resubmit for a permit.
I'm certain your integrated design team and process saves you a good amount of time. Being a design build firm that can do minimal drawings and change things on the fly without having the normal review process I'd think would also save you a lot of time. At least it did when I did contract with a design build firm.
We do structural, civil, etc. too (not MEP, which is all design-build in the PNW). That slows us down a little bit, but not hugely. Adds maybe 4 weeks to the total process, depending. The thing about delivery time is that most architects follow hideously ineffective processes to get through design, compound that by not doing a good job with document QA and coordination, then are really, really slow and passive dealing with permit review responses. That all compounds into a giant time sink.
On the other hand, we can go from blank sheet of paper to full design approval in 3 weeks or less, a finished set of permit submittal docs 3 to 5 weeks after that (mostly dependent on civil), and then get our permits with an average number of review correction cycles of just slightly more than 1 (our typical turnaround time on correction responses is less than a week). Our former consultants, on the other hand, were averaging 3 months for design, 3 months for docs, and 3 or more correction cycles in permit review (with correction response turnaround times in the months, not weeks). That's a really big difference, and most of it is not coming from us being vertically integrated. It's coming from being much more systematic about our work.
Architects love to complain about how time-consuming parts of our work are, but the reality is that it doesn't have to be that way if we change how we do it to be more effective and smart.
gwharton - What types of project are you doing? What size?
I ask because in the project types that I work on - education, government, fire stations, in the 25,000 - 250,000 sf range there is no way a design an building permit could be obtained in six weeks. There are many reasons why - programing, client input, cost estimating, and the complexity of the buildings. That's not including the permit review time (one for site review, one for building review). That alone takes two months.
3 weeks for what level of design approval and what kind of project? where are you located? Texas?
Gwharton Your model is in some ways worlds different with different forces at play. It seems a bit unfair to compare your model to general practice when it’s efficiencies are bespoke to your business proper and don’t reflect the independent markets served.
Being effective and smart doesn’t have to mean working in the manner that works for your specific development co
My experience with this was we had to do what it takes to meet more aggressive schedules and demands for rapid turn around. This includes creating as many as 10 Revit options to show clients. Working faster and more efficiently. Getting paid became a bigger problem with some clients "stringing us along" getting paid becomes a problem and lay offs become necessary. The key is to be always on your toes and running, no slacking off.
They key is realizing you're taken advantage of and moving on to another office. You exp is certainly not normal.
Yeah. That all sounds like a very poorly structured and managed design process. You can meet a fast schedule, but not without being lean in your approach.
well, there is this indecision from 3 or 4 client side people pleasers and the GC, or on one project there is a very authoritarian client who wants to see all the options from every consultant and the architect “it’s part of the discovery process” back in the day we didn’t have design processes - an apartment building isn’t like you’re designing a Stealth Bomber - Frank would just say: “here’s your new house Mr. Kauffman “
You're doing something wrong. I Just handed off a project to my Structural Engineer and Client - laughed and said this is perfect timing! I'm going sailing! Have to set your own boundaries.
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