Building design management in the early stages

Abstract

The AEC is an industry in change due to developing demands in environmental, sustainability, technology, and other regulatory demands. For projects to successfully comply with the changes this needs to be dealt with in the early stages of projects in the design phase, where the influence of solutions are high and the cost of changes are low. This PhD work examines building design management at the early stages of design. The PhD thesis is conducted as a PhD by publication and consists of ten publications, and this thesis as the overarching essay. Each of the publications addresses different topics relevant to building design management. The research is based on qualitative case studies, learning from the practitioners to achieve an in-depth understanding of building design management. The main research question of this PhD thesis is: How should building design management handle the early stages of the design phase in building projects? This is answered first through trying to define what building design management is. The definition used is: Building design management involves planning, organizing, and managing people, their knowledge, and the flow of information to obtain specific project goals and objectives. Further, the thesis examines the challenges in the design phase of the early stages, to provide characteristics of the design process that need to be addressed. The challenges lie in the complexity of the interdependence of the design task, where tasks need to have reciprocal interdependencies to create a better solution, while constraints in time, for example, need the design to stop at a certain deadline. The fragmentation of the AEC also creates challenges at the organizational and personal levels. These challenges need to be handled by building design management. The thesis also examines the success factors of building design management. A list of ten success factors is presented based on the literature and is discussed based on empirical findings. However, the research also shows that the success factors needs to be aligned with the project, the actors of the project, and building design management since they might not have the same relevance for all projects. Moreover, the thesis examines the learning potential in building design management from similar project-based industries, such as offshore construction and shipbuilding. Offshore construction uses the building information model (BIM) in a more mature way in both planning and progress reporting. The shipbuilding design team works almost autonomously, creating ship designs and rapidly responding to changes. To answer the main research question of how building design management should handle the early stages of the design phase in building projects, the thesis proposes a framework. The framework emphasizes the importance for building design management to plan not only the building design process but also the building design management process. The framework is made to be generic and starts with an assessment stage to assess the specifics of the project, then an initialization stage to plan the design management strategy, and then the execution stage to execute the design management strategy to handle building design management in the early stages.