I AM [actually] AN ARCHITECT

This week I attended the ENR FutureTech conference in San Francisco, and moderated a panel on Millennials in the construction industry.  The subject was how to balance the knowledge from older generations with the technical alacrity of the young.

Things of note:

• Panels are not the most effective format
• I met James Vandezande, BIM boss at HOK and author of the blog “All Things BIM” and learned that saying “BIM model” is gauche amongst BIM geeks because it is repetitive
• I felt immense gratitude at not having to work at one of those large, stuffy firms anymore.  When it comes to technology, they have the resources to be developing new, exciting things.  But because they’re lumbering and big and important and all that, they don’t have the luxury of being nimble and carefree about that technology.  It causes them to focus on the wrong things.

For instance, there was a big divide between companies who issue a standard phone to their employees and those who help pay the bills for employees’ personal cell phone.

People said it’s too difficult for their IT department to provide support for all these different phones.  People said they are concerned that they can’t wipe someone’s cell phone clean when they leave, posing the danger of losing intellectual property.  See this article if you’re interested in this debate, which I could not be less interested in.

No wonder progress is so slow in this world.  Remember that quote:

Don’t take yourself too seriously.  And don’t be too serious about not taking yourself too seriously. - Howard Ogden

My take: Your IT department doesn’t need to provide support for people’s phones.  People need to be big boys and girls and figure out their own phones.  If they can’t, they can put on their big boy pants and go to their nearest phone store and ask for help.  As for the lost intellectual property, whatever may be on someone’s phone when they leave is of far less concern than the knowledge in that employee’s head.  Better to spend your time figuring out how to retain good talent.

• So far, firms are not measuring morale or life-work balance when calculating ROI

There was some discussion on ROI of various technologies, but several speakers noted that just because you save 10 minutes of time through more efficient technology doesn’t mean you’re spending that 10 minutes doing something else useful for the project or making money.  This is true.

If, however, you happen to work in a firm who’s CEO set “working less” as one of the firm’s values, the ROI would have to count that saved 10 minutes.

• There is a lot of technology happening that I know nothing about.  Wow.  It’s a self-selecting crowd who chooses to attend a conference about technology in construction, so even though I was one of the youngest folks there, I felt a little obsolete at times.
• Software companies who serve the building industry (of which there are not many) are only focused on large companies right now.  That makes some financial sense, except that over 90% of architecture firms fit the government definition of “small business.”  Similar with subcontractors.  So for new technologies to be embraced by our industry, they have to be accessible to and useful to small entities.

This is why our company has been using a bunch of services/apps that weren’t designed for architects.  They’re the best we can do right now.

Overall: Cool conference.  Simple, well-executed (except panels are a little boring), good A/V people.  It made me really excited for the conference that we’re organizing for entrepreneurial women.  Check out our Women’s Entrepreneurship Retreat, March 9-11 in Monterey, California.

Experts in the art of Negotiation disagree on how to employ agents.  An agent is someone who negotiates on your behalf.  You might hire an agent because you are bad at negotiating, or because you lack technical knowledge of the issue at hand (e.g. hiring an attorney to negotiate a point of law), or because you fear prejudice (e.g. you are an Asian woman negotiating a deal with an older American white male, and you think he won’t take you seriously).

Once you’ve engaged an agent, experts disagree on how much information you should reveal to him or her.  Some feel you should not reveal your true bottom line and alternatives because the agent won’t fight as hard as you would, while others say you absolutely must reveal those things if your agent is to correctly work on your behalf.

And what if your alternative to a negotiated agreement is actually to fire the agent?

One interesting scenario to consider is two parties who have hired attorneys to negotiate some settlement.  Your alternative, if you don’t get at least your bottom line number, is to go to court and fight it out.

But maybe you don’t want your attorney to know that, since going to court means a huge financial gain for him.  It could introduce a motive wherein your agent has a personal interest in not reaching a settlement.

This is why some people employ a contract that stipulates the attorney doing the negotiation is not allowed to do any subsequent litigation.

While I was learning about these things, I couldn’t help but see the clear parallels to the building industry.

First, there is this tension about whether an architect is considered an agent of the Owner, or simply a vendor.  Many professional building owners consider the architect a vendor, and view the relationship as a transaction.  Most architects, however, think of ourselves as agents of the owner—a relationship more akin to trusted adviser and guide.

I don’t know the answer to mending this rift, but I do know that what I do on a daily basis is very much akin to negotiating on behalf of the client. 

Sometimes, my negotiating opponent is not another person, but the circumstances limiting my designs.  I must negotiate with the site restraints, the budget, the codes, my own knowledge, and the building technologies available to me, in order to come up with the best design possible for the client.

But if the client reveals ALL their budget to me, won’t I naturally spend the maximum amount instead of trying to save as much as possible?

What if you crafted the contract such that I got to share some of the savings from bringing in the project under budget?  Wouldn’t that give me extra motivation to find savings?

That’s called a performance-based incentive clause.  It’s a key ingredient to Integrated Project Delivery (IPD), but can be implemented into any contract.

If the client lies to the architect about what the true budget is, in order to protect some cushion of money, he or she may be missing out on some value.

As an example, let’s say the client says she has $90,000 plus a contingency pool of $10,000.  The truth is that the client has $100,000 plus a contingency pool of $10,000.

The client has a laundry list of things he or she wants, and the architect tries every move in the book but simply can’t afford the pool.  No pool.  So instead, the architect uses some of that extra space to shift things this way and that.  That’s a negotiation he makes, as an agent of the owner.

If the architect had known about that extra $10k, the pool would have happened.  And a pool adds more than $10k to the house’s resale value, so the client not only doesn’t get the pool, but she also doesn’t get that extra return on investment when selling the house.

And what about the fear of the architect going over the budget?  Just like in a negotiation, the client has a “bottom line.”  The budget.  For conventional delivery practices, the AIA contracts require the architect to re-design for free if the bids all exceed the budget.  So the client already has some protection against that scenario.

Under an Integrated Project Delivery agreement, the architect actually gives up profit to help pay for costs above the budget (as do the builders).  This is the maximum protection the client can obtain against the agent (architect) going past the “bottom line.”

Crafting good contracts that help align the agent’s interests with the client can help alleviate fears and foster trust.  But ultimately, trust is earned over long periods of time.  How can our profession earn back clients’ trusts, so they see us as agents with whom they share complete information, instead of vendors?

Errors and omissions in construction documents are expensive.  Everybody involved in the building industry benefits when there are fewer E&O’s.  Building Information Modeling (BIM) makes it easier to reduce E&O’s for several reasons.  Among them:

• Modeling the building in 3-d forces us to see clashes and strange conditions that we often miss when drawing in 2-d

• The information is coordinated between views.  It is impossible to do things like accidentally draw a door differently on the interior elevation from one side of the wall than on the other side.  It is also impossible to draw one type of door but accidentally enter a different type into the opening schedule.  This is because you model one door, and that same information is then automatically entered into the spreadsheet and viewable from any angle or sheet view.

So it would seem a no-brainer that we architects and engineers should be using BIM to make out documents tighter.  But what if you could make your documents too tight?

We are facing a reincarnation of the problem that first arose when our profession starting using CAD.  With CAD, you can zoom in and draw things accurate to the 1/32”.  But people can’t build within 1/32”accuracy.  So if you design beautiful little jewel boxes that only work if everything is as perfectly coordinated as your computer-aided detail, it is bound to fail.

A recent article in Engineering News-Record (ENR) talks about the first known claim related to an architect using BIM.  The architects and engineers tried to tackle one of the biggest problems with complex buildings: above-ceiling coordination.  

Even with CAD, our profession has continued to draw the mechanical, electrical, and plumbing systems diagrammatically.  Then, during construction, we let the contractor try to figure out how to make it all fit up there.  When they insist they can’t make it work then we step back in and do things like thicken walls and re-route ducts.  It’s a messy, inefficient process.  It’s a grey area that involves finger-pointing.  Is the design unbuildable, or is the contractor just being lazy and unimaginative?

So this team (on an un-named project) tried to cut out that maddening process by modeling the whole mechanical/electrical/plumbing system in real sizes in their BIM.  The problem is, they did it entirely without the contractors’ input.

They designed the system that goes above the ceiling to such tight tolerances that it became very difficult to build.  Had they been doing this along-side the builders, they would have been able discuss how much room a man needs to get his hand in to turn screws, and how accurately they can place things.

When bidding the documents, they did not place a note or special bulletin alerting the builders to the fact that the MEP systems were designed to a tighter tolerance than industry standards.  Even after the contract was awarded, they did not discuss this departure from industry norms with the building team.

It was not until the building team was 70% through assembly that they realized they couldn’t execute what the design team had envisioned.  What do you think came next?  A lawsuit.

It’s a great idea to try to make our documents more accurate and complete; but the purpose of such efforts should be to verify that our designs are buildable.  Buildings are simply too complex to think we architects and engineers can decide what is and what is not buildable without discussing some keys things with the builders who will execute the designs.

Now that we are in an age of BIM, it is increasingly clear that designing without the builders at hand is just dangerous.  I, for one, will not be practicing architecture under a design-bid-build structure again.