Management’s Role in Debugging the Design Plans

            Housing development company owners and managers can lead the way in ensuring the accuracy level of the design plans. 

            Probably in no other area is upper management in a better position to help improve quality and efficiency in the construction, than to secure good building plans.

            Two common misconceptions exist in the building industry, however, that tend to obscure and excuse design errors.  These must be understood before any progress can be made.

            The first misconception is the idea that it is the expected duty of field people to take incomplete, inaccurate, and unclear plans and work-out all the bugs during the construction, using the established means and methods standards of the industry.

            It is widely believed that it is easier and cheaper for the tradespeople to coordinate, to work-out the design kinks during construction than it is for the architect and engineers to spend the time to get the design totally correct while still on paper. 

            In this mindset it is taken for granted that architects and engineers can advance their designs graphically (and economically) only so far on two-dimensional paper, and then the people in the field must resolve the remaining omissions and errors in three-dimension as the construction progresses.

            Many people both inside and outside of the industry believe that part of the satisfaction of working in the field comes from solving design and construction mistakes.

            The stereotypical advertisement in the newspaper that shows a sketch of several people with their shirt sleeves rolled-up, blueprints under the arm, looking through a builder’s level or pointing and giving directions, implies that solving problems in-the-moment in the reactive mode in the field is both satisfying and expected.

            This is a gross misconception.

            If we are to take seriously the goal of approaching the machine-like efficiency of the fixed assembly-line in mass-production manufacturing, with a minimum of bugs, then it must be understood that there is nothing satisfying about being overwhelmed on a daily basis with the incoming barrage of nuts-and-bolts problems in-the-moment that surface without warning over the course of the construction due to incomplete information on the design plans.