Architects: Software vs Building
Posted on August 21, 2007
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We are currently doing our house up. It is a small-medium size project and as such required an architect to come in design our space. We have learnt a number of things, but let me start by telling you what the typical process is:
- customer instructs architect
- architect designs your space and creates sketches
- architect seeks planning permission from local authorities
- architect turns sketches in detailed designs
- architect works with structrual engineer to verify integrity of the design
- structural engineer makes site visits and creates designs based on architectural drawings
- customer instructs builder to implement the design
- builder implements design to the structural engineers specification
- building inspector ensures that the builders conform to the structural engineers specification
- builders liase with architect to iron our downstream design questions
There are many ways that you can cut this. The customer (as in our case) can be more proactive and take on the project management. This significantly reduces cost but invariably increases the amount of work that needs to be done to get everyone facing in the same direction. What makes things even more difficult is that you have different teams, with different agendas, allegedly working to a common goal. At best, its worse than waterfall and you really don’t want to consider the worst case scenario, there are so many horror stories.
We have not lucked out either our project. Consider the downstream consequences if the architect drawings are incomplete, inaccurate and/or do not meet our original requirements (i.e. must cost less than X). It has a dramatic and scary cascading effect because the structural engineers drawings are wrong. You don’t want this to happen. When the builders come on-site, they discover that they cannot implement the design or the design does not reflect what is actually there. So they improvise, and then get slapped by the building inspector for not conforming to a design that they could never ever conform to. So it gets rejected, and we go through the whole cycle again. And as software developer we know the most expensive errors are those that are live and in production. Same thing when you discover issues like this in your building project.
Like the software architect, the building architect is critical to the success of a project. Unfortunately, we got caught up in the learning curve of this architect and it cost it dearly in time and money. For example, what if your development team was tasked with building a new telephony system and the lead software architect had never designed a system in the telecommunications sector. How confident would you feel? We made the mistake of instructing a commercial architect breaking into the resedential sector. Thinking about it, I realise I wasn’t thinking…but c’est la vie!
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