Predictable performance: Strategies for ensuring that the ‘deliverable’ matches the promise By Stanley Stark, FAIA Organizations, companies, and the public are all particularly animated and stimulated about research laboratory design and what it can achieve. Yet frequently the process itself is laced with disappointment, and the building that results from all of this ferment falls short of its promise. In the high-stakes arena of R&D facilities, this gap has serious consequences. We are in a period of intense excitement about the power of design and what it can achieve. Frank Gehry’s highly publicized Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, and New York City’s Ground Zero proposals should get at least partial credit for igniting this public attention. The expectation level is particularly high within the science and technology community because fresh design and innovation promise to confer substantial benefits to the parent organizations: more collaboration; increased creativity; tighter control over the space’s environmental conditions; increased speed to market; magnets for attracting and retaining talent; and reduced operating costs. Architectural and engineering design is clearly seen as a means for augmenting and advancing the organization’s business and scientific mission. But disappointment is often harnessed to the great goals that the designs are meant to achieve. Schedules and budgets have been known to stretch, bend, and break. The levels of quality, the close integration between disciplines, and the tightness of fit do not always emerge in the final product. The promises of transformation might not materialize as rapidly and dramatically as was anticipated. Something has been lost in the execution of the design, and clients may feel a bit disappointed. Disappointment quickly mutates into consternation, annoyance, and anger. Every problem, no matter how minor, can become a provocation. Clients, especially clients in an enterprise as risky as R&D, are likely to be unforgiving about the risks and hassles that burden them when a building’s performance falls short of expectations. In the face of these strategic risks, architects, engineers, and clients can employ useful tactics to bridge the gaps. Vigilance, procedures for control and verification, a commitment to open and continuous communication, and methods for sharing responsibility inform the major strategies. These initiatives, which more strongly connect promise to performance, are organized into four major categories of action and attention: • Create alignment and manage user/client expectations. Do the A/E and the client understand each other? Do the architects and engineers understand what the client wants? Does the client understand the A/E’s method of working, design or engineering capabilities and limitations, and the client’s own responsibilities in the process? Does the client know the organization’s needs, and have a realistic idea of what the A/E can deliver (given budget, time, and other restrictions)? Is the client aware that designing a research facility is not like buying a car? Answer these types of questions, and you are a long way toward achieving success. Unfortunately, these questions tend to get defined too slowly and far too late to always ensure a positive outcome. • Manage the cost equation. The three biggest expectations driving client satisfaction are user satisfaction, cost, and schedule. In today’s inflationary environment, it is critical to establish the cost parameters early and to stay ahead of the cost curve. This requires a surprising amount of vigilance, managerial savvy, and agility, and a considerable dedication of resources. • Navigate change. Change happens throughout the process, and it tends to disrupt the linear predictability we generally rely on for project control. Like the weather, change cannot be managed, but it can be predicted and coped with. Do you have a detection mechanism? Do you have sufficient agility to respond effectively? • Recognize and reduce risk. Science and technology facilities are complex, with tightly linked systems, stringent performance requirements, high construction costs, and delivery situations that impose risks on all participants and stakeholders. But if the risks of failure or non-performance that would impede the mission are identified in advance, steps can be taken to reduce or eliminate those risks during the project process. The following discussion expands on the discrete tactics associated with each of the larger initiatives of action and attention. As an addition to the massive array of tasks necessary to plan, design, and deliver these projects, this list can help focus attention on what architects and owners must do to keep a project’s execution closely aligned with its original motivations and goals. If the project is an interweaving web of activities, these are the pegs that hold the tasks together. Create alignment and manage client expectations • Share leadership roles. The architect’s project manager and the client’s project manager should be bonded at the hip. They are mutually dependent. The architecture/engineering team needs the support of the project champion to get information and decisions from the user community. The A/E team must show initiative and pursue information on behalf of the users (e.g., conduct equipment surveys). No one should think of himself as a passive, innocent bystander. • Clearly define roles and expectations for users and other stakeholders. Clients need to know early on what the A/E team expects of them, and when. • Engage constituencies but control them. Engagement is critical to project success, but it must be done in an adventurous and satisfying way. For instance, design games can be a highly effective tool for eliciting important information and ideas. At the same time, users and clients also need boundaries within which to operate. • Use benchmarking as a guidance tool. Benchmarks set boundaries and targets for decision-making. These are for guidance and direction-setting, rather than slavish imitation. Properly employed they can accelerate decision-making and dampen controversy. • Consider a user satisfaction survey as a template for design. Develop the survey questions and weighted values for user satisfaction early, during programming and predesign. This tool can serve as a template for the design process. It can also serve to focus the attention of users. • Expand the mock-up program. Think about it: You can test a lot of things physically before they are embedded in the design. Room layouts (even in model form), furniture and equipment placement, and material and color palettes in a true full-scale application are potential examples. Prototypes help to achieve success because 3-D versions of things are closer to humans’ sense of reality. • Fund the process, not just the design. Attention guarantees results, but it’s only possible if sufficient resources are available to support a high-quality, vigilant design and construction process. • Complete the post-occupancy user satisfaction survey. After the client has been in the space for at least six months, go back and interview the owners and occupants. Administer the satisfaction survey that was designed back in programming. Everyone will learn a lot, and it will be possible to close some of the gaps between expectations and performance. Manage costs and avoid buyer’s remorse • Develop a cost model as a tool of design guidance. A well-defined cost model can serve as a powerful and flexible design tool. It can relate design choices to cost consequences and help keep the construction cost budget on track. • Make cost estimating and cost control a vital and continuous part of the design process via parallel estimating and cost monitoring. Parallel estimating by both an independent cost estimator and a construction manager or general contractor is a good approach to creating a balanced, accountable costing method. Maintaining expert cost scrutiny throughout the design process rather than just at specific milestones will help ensure cost predictability. • Together with the client, create line-by-line project budgets. Quantify everything. Typically, project budgets are either overlooked or kept too close to the vest by clients. Much of this information should be shared. The construction cost may only represent 50 to 80% of the project cost, but many of the project cost items are designer-dependent or -influenced. This effort requires the same attention as the construction cost. Navigate change • Find the gatekeeper/oracle. This is the senior executive who drives science/technology change. This person peers over the horizon to detect change turbulence, risk, or opportunity on behalf of the organization. The project needs this person’s insights to anticipate and elude risk. • Employ a renewable project initiation conference as the project mission evolves. Every phase of the project deserves the same level of team alignment and managerial refocusing as the initial kick-off meeting. It is also an opportunity to review and corral the vectors of change that have worked their way into the project. • Contain change at the defined point. There are certain points where it makes sense to freeze a design and defer change until later. This is particularly true of the construction phase, which seems to be a period of intense user-driven change. Unfortunately this is also the phase where change entails a much higher cost than if it had occurred earlier in the process. Recognize and reduce risk • Establish a predictable tolerance for error. Every client has limits for how much A/E error and change they can tolerate and the degree to which they can acknowledge that A/E’s aren’t perfect. It is generally identified to be 3 to 4% of the construction cost. This limited tolerance is a real factor. This should be discussed and put into the project definition. • Treat the regulatory process as a project-within-the project. Regulatory processes have a life and a dynamic of their own. They should not be treated as afterthoughts. Disruptions here can thwart every reasonable expectation your client has for the project. • Employ invasive exploration in renovation programs. Too many problems emerge from what is assumed but invisible. Even sites where apparently decent documentation exists often entail unpleasant surprises—to say nothing of sites where the documentation is incomplete or unavailable. • Use an empowered QA/QC process. The lack of coordination in documents is a major contributor to cost overruns. An empowered QA/QC process can lessen these risks. • Create procedures to manage mistakes when they happen. Problems do occur, mistakes do happen, and frequently there are shared responsibilities. Procedures created ahead of time to cope with problem-solving could remove some of the adversarial tensions that further erode the client-A/E relationship. • Map the end-game commissioning and close-out. These two activities are different. Commissioning is a process of verification to ensure that building systems are working as planned and are interacting as intended. Close-out is the finishing of all aspects of the construction and regulatory processes that lead to a Certificate of Occupancy. These vitally important activities require more attention and vigor. Start the commissioning plan during design. It is a design responsibility, and it needs to be prudently built into the schedule. Close-out similarly needs to be well-organized with a checklist and a schedule. Without that it becomes an endless open-ended commitment. This can be avoided. These four big initiatives containing 20 specific activities will help connect the excitement generated by the promise of design with predictable outcomes that deliver on that promise. The R&D facility environment is complex and fraught with risk. The relationship between the promise and the delivery is frequently faulty and occasionally even thwarted. But attention to these tactics (and there are more) can go a long way toward ensuring harmony between the promise and the result. Stanley Stark, FAIA, is a managing partner at HLW International, New York City. This article was the basis of Stark’s keynote speech at R&D Magazine’s Spring 2006 Laboratory Design Conference in Atlanta.