Insights & Resources

Prefer to listen? This article is also available as a podcast episode Residential construction in the UK has its own distinct design management challenges. Planning conditions, Part L compliance, fire strategy post-Grenfell, viability pressures, the interface between the architect and the principal contractor — the residential sector operates within a regulatory and commercial environment that…

Prefer to listen? This article is also available as a podcast episode Quality is one of those words that everyone on a construction project uses and almost nobody defines. “We want a high-quality scheme”. “The quality of the design is not good enough”. “We need to improve design quality”. These statements are made constantly —…

Prefer to listen? This article is also available as a podcast episode Late design information from consultants is one of the most persistent and costly problems on UK construction projects. It delays the contractor, creates claims for extension of time and additional cost, damages relationships and — if not handled correctly — destroys the professional…

Prefer to listen? This article is also available as a podcast episode Many clients and developers find themselves in the position of managing a multi-disciplinary design team without a background in design. You have appointed an architect, a structural engineer, an MEP consultant and perhaps a landscape designer. They are all producing work. But coordinating…

Prefer to listen? This article is also available as a podcast episode Design coordination meetings are among the most common meetings on any construction project. They are also among the most commonly mismanaged. The difference between a coordination meeting that resolves issues and one that merely records them is the difference between a project that…

Prefer to listen? This article is also available as a podcast episode Design team meetings happen on every construction project. Whether they are productive is another matter entirely. The typical design team meeting — two hours, fifteen attendees, no agenda, no action log — is one of the most reliably wasteful experiences in the construction…

Prefer to listen? This article is also available as a podcast episode Listen to Podcast Contractor Design Portions — commonly referred to as CDPs — are design packages that are transferred from the employer’s design team to the main contractor or a specialist subcontractor as part of the construction procurement. They represent one of the…

Prefer to listen? This article is also available as a podcast episode Scope creep is one of the most reliable ways to turn a well-planned construction project into an expensive, overrun one. It rarely arrives dramatically — it accumulates quietly, one apparently reasonable request at a time, until the project the client is building bears…

Prefer to listen? This article is also available as a podcast episode Design freeze is one of those project management concepts that sounds straightforward in theory and proves remarkably difficult to enforce in practice. The idea is simple: at a defined point in the design process, the scope is fixed, the design is locked, and…

Prefer to listen? This article is also available as a podcast episode One of the most common causes of design disputes, coordination failures and programme delays is a simple lack of clarity about who is responsible for what. On multi-disciplinary projects, the boundaries between disciplines are rarely clean — and where responsibility is ambiguous, things…

Prefer to listen? This article is also available as a podcast episode On any construction project involving more than one design discipline, the interfaces between those disciplines are where the most expensive and disruptive problems occur. The junction between the structural frame and the facade. The coordination between the MEP services and the ceiling void.…