Project Schedule

One thing that's important to understand is when we start thinking about the schedule of a project, as we're laying out the timeline and understanding how the project is gonna roll forward, there are different phases of the project that are for us, as designers, that we have to have a certain amount of time in order to do the work. So, schematic design, design development. Those phases need a certain amount of time, but there are other elements as well. We talked about this a little bit a couple of videos ago about the idea of, you know, what's driving the timeline here.

One thing to remember is that if we're starting the project, we get the contract and the project is rolling forward, and here we are in the schematic design phase, and we get to the end of that schematic design phase, we don't just dive straight into design development, not usually. Usually, there is some sort of period of review by the client, and so then, we get the final sign off. The client literally signs the drawings for the schematic design, and then the design development phase goes for a little while.

And there's an end point to that, and so, there's a time period where we're working, and there's a presentation, and sort of a milestone moment where we review with the contracts, all of that, and then they have a chance to review the work so it's in their court for a little while. And you know, maybe that takes a little while. I mean, who knows? It depends on the situation. Maybe they can do it overnight, but maybe not. So, there's certain things that you don't necessarily have control over, but there's an expectation that you have a generalized control over the entire project. So then, we've got the CDs set that we're producing, and that can take quite a while.

Once we're done with that, well then, we're going in for permit, we're maybe getting our bids right away, so there's a period of time where we don't necessarily have a huge amount of control during that bidding, even though it's something that we're actively working in, unlike some of these other ones, during that bidding phase, the amount of time that the contractors take we would put in the bid package. It would be something that would be our recommendation, but if you decide, okay, we're gonna give the contractors two days to bid, well, that's not enough time.

They are gonna come back and say, "Look, we need three weeks," or "We need a month," or "We need two weeks," or, you know, some amount of time that's sort of a reasonable amount of time. That would be sort of a negotiated thing between those bidders, the owner and you. There's a bunch of these times, where, in terms of the overall time, you have to not only build in your time, but you need to leave in these review times. There has to be a way for the client to have a moment to make sure that this is the right project for them, that you're meeting all of the issues that they need.

It also may be time for, a chance for them to really understand what the funding is gonna look like. They're gonna have to go and show it to the bankers, maybe, and the bankers will talk about how the project will work, because they probably couldn't have had those conversations before they had any drawings, because what would the conversation be about? How would the banker know what they were talking about? There's this sort of build in of these review times that you, when you're proposing overall schedules, remember, it's not just the architect's time, it's actually everybody's time.

You have to include enough wiggle room in there that everything can happen that needs to. And then obviously, at some point, after that you get into the construction time and that's whatever timeline it has, which is its own animal, and so even though the CA portion is roughly equivalent to the same efforts in terms of fee as the schematic design portion, the schematic design portion is likely to be a few weeks, whereas the CA portion is gonna be many, many months.

You start realizing that each of these things, the way the manpower is working on these things starts to become kind of a fascinating experience. I have a fair number of people working during SD, and then maybe I have just the project manager kind of following along during the review phase, and then maybe under DD I have even more people working on something, and then again, the project manager is sort of keeping it alive during the review period.

And then under CDs, you know, maybe I've got even more people, and then I get to bidding and maybe I've just got one or maybe two, and then I get to CA, and I've got one or maybe two. There's this flow of work that, I have people then no people, then people then no people, then people. And so that has to mesh into the overall needs of the office and the overall sense of the flow of work for everyone. It's not just that there's a team and that team moves from the zero point to the end point, it's that it's constantly ebbing and flowing in terms of how much work is needed at any one moment.

Then, if you started to break down, within each of these, you know, if we looked at just the design development, you would find that there would be a certain amount of time where there's a lot of effort spent on creating the basics of what the design development is gonna do. Maybe it's that somebody is working on wall sections or something like that that are gonna be very telling for the rest of the project.

And once that's done, then a lot of people will be able to do details and do material takeoffs and work on the spec writing and all of that. Even within one of those moments, when we have quite a few people working on something, it might well be that it's not just everybody working solidly for that period of time, it's that there is sort of a logic to how they're working, and you might have just one or two people working for a bit of that time, and then everybody working at some later point.

When you're thinking about how these things go, the expectation is that it's not just zero to the end, it's that there are these built in moments, and if you haven't built in those timelines, then who else would have? You have to be able to foresee these things coming. As we've said, each of these elements will have its own set of criteria for how that schedule is going, and that criteria will impact, then, this big overall timeline.

Remember that the pre design is happening before the contract, or it's an additional service on the contract. Pre design elements would be things like writing the program or doing feasibility studies or something like that. That, actually, if that's part of what's going on, that's actually that way, so it's outside of the realm of the normal project timeline. And so, none of these elements would normally show up in the schedule, but somebody has to make the program.

Somebody has to do all that feasibility studies and everything. So if you're talking to a potential client and you're telling them about a reasonable timeline, even if your point is gonna start here, somebody has to be doing that work, and so you should be, you know, warning them that there's that pre design stuff, so the actual timeline will start at some earlier point. They get all the programming, they get all the feasibility, they get the real estate reviews and the market studies and all that stuff done, and then your contract starts and then general contractors contract starts, right?

There's a whole series of these things that have to get done. You have to remember all the other peoples' time, not just your time.

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