Project Teams - In-House Staff

One of the first things when you have to think about when you start putting together the sort of overarching plan for a project is who's gonna do the work? What's the thinking behind how the team gets put together? There's a lot of strategy, there's a lot of kind of everyday, do we have enough time for this, do we need to move people from here over to there? There's a lot of sort of different types of issues that are gonna be going on. But just take a second and step back and think about what would be the issues specifically for putting together a team.

Let's look at it for putting together a team on the staff of the architecture firm. So, the first thing we gotta think about is does anybody have experience in the project that we're doing, in the project type? Maybe the experience would be in that particular project delivery method. It might be in that particular building type. It might be that they have experience with that client. It might be that they just have experience. So you're trying to find somebody who can have a lot of information about that particular project type so that that project can sort of roll forward without any difficulties.

Political connections sounds a little odd, because it makes it sound like everything's just about politics, but all that really means is the people who should be there, in terms of getting the resources that you need for that particular project, the people who have the relationships with the clients, the relationship part of the thing should be handled as well. So it's not just resources in terms of man hours, there's also a whole wide range of other types of resources that need to be managed.

And so, somebody who has that set of connections needs to be part of the team. And then clearly, there's the skillsets, the specific skillsets that are needed for any particular project. Now, there's a couple different types of skillsets that we're talking about here. There are the skillsets for a particular project type. So maybe certain types of prototyping, or certain kinds of energy modeling, something that would be very useful for a particular type of project, but also the different skillsets as a project moves through time.

It's not exactly the same set of skills to be thinking about kind of massing models, and kind of urban impact that you might be thinking about in predesign and in schematic design, whereas under contract documents in the CD phase, you're probably thinking much more about specific detailing and water infiltration issues and low E coatings on windows and things like that. So, the skillsets will change as they go through.

One of the things that architects tend to like about architecture is there's a process where everybody's involved at some level in a whole wide range and that you see all the different aspects of a project. But, there has to be the right skillset in the team at all those different points, and for all those different types of situations. Production capacity is the idea that you could have a brand new high-rise hospital being designed, and all the architectural work being done by one person might take a while, so is that the logical choice?

Probably not. You're probably gonna have a whole team of people. But at the same time, if I have a whole team of people and then I get to the bidding phase, I don't really need to have a whole team of people sitting there while one person is writing the bid documents. So, understanding the appropriate capacity, the appropriate abilities at the appropriate time in the timeline of the project, and that that's something that will change at various points along the way, and there'll be sort of logical moments of deadlines and things where more effort is needed.

Issues of the schedule, making sure that, it's kind of the same issue of the capacity, but the schedule is sort of understanding that this project fits in to a whole wide range of other projects that are going on in that firm, so you don't get into situations where the capacity issues are bumping up against each other with other projects.

So you're kind of seeing it in a kind of a larger, kind of wider range of possibility. And then the idea of diversity. Now, diversity means many things in this context. For one, just diversity of skillsets, diversity of background information that people are bringing to the project. The reason for that is that, as we just said, different skillsets will be important as a project moves through from the beginning to the end. So, a really wide range of diverse skillsets is a useful thing on any one given project.

But also diversity of other kinds, just sort of diversity of viewpoint. Especially in the early phases of design, you're always looking to get the best information to bubble up, the best design ideas to bubble up through the process, and having everybody have exactly the same backgrounds doesn't necessarily always lead to the best design decisions. So, having a diversity of the people involved can have meaningful impact in lots of different ways. So that's about the staff.

Now we'll take a look at what about our consultant team.

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