Deal management in IT architecture documentation

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Hey, Eric here with 30 by 40 Design Workshop, this week we're talking about time management in the design process. So, before I waste any more of yours let's get into the strategies I have for you. This is precisely what it sounds like, subdivide your project into smaller tasks and assign each one a box. Each box gets a fixed deadline and a set of deliverables. Now, in business terms time boxing involves 3 sometimes 4 variables: time, scope, cost, and usually quality. It's impossible to change one variable without affecting the others. Now, for our purposes, let's strip it down to just the basics, time and scope. As you approach a fixed deadline and it's clear you're in danger of not meeting it, you have two choices: either reduce the scope or increase the time. Now, with time boxing you always reduce the scope. For an architect, this can be any number of things, fewer drawings or fewer design schemes let's say. Basically, less of what you were planning to do. When you add back in the real-world variables of cost and quality the puzzle becomes even more complex, because you could, for example, add more team members to help keep to the schedule. But, doing so would certainly increase the labor cost. Or, you could reduce the quality of the deliverables say by using hand sketches on trace rather than hardline CAD drawings. I think you get the idea. To keep to a fixed schedule, you must reduce the scope. Prioritize and do the high value tasks first. These are usually also the most difficult ones and by putting it first you're investing your best resources in solving the most important problems. And these tasks are the ones that will actually save you time later. For example - building a model - it's one of the more difficult things you'll do as an architect or a student. But when you do, you start to learn about all the three-dimensional relationships of the parts and pieces. It forces you to confront many of the decisions you'll be making along the way in the entire design process, ones you're probably not ready to answer yet. Models introduce more problems initially than they solve, but this is why they're significant. The model actually helps you design the site plan and the floor plan, the elevations and the sections too; it can help you figure out the materials, and the details. Those are the things that ultimately need solving and having them in your head will help you better manage the time it will take to solve them. If working on the model means a few of the lower impact things don't get done they sink the project because all your design thinking will be baked into the model. If it means you can't draft the site plan, you can use the model to show someone the street relationship or a side yard setback. If you divided your time equally amongst the site plan and floor plans and tweaked those endlessly to get them perfect and didn't have time to build a model, then the massing isn't quite right, and the elevations aren't resolved, and maybe you missed the fact that the neighboring structure actually overlooks a rooftop terrace you've designed. Ever notice how when you're in the late stages of a deadline how much you actually get done? Somehow you manage to crank out an incredible amount of work in a really short period of time, right? Well, you can actually trick yourself into working at this faster pace by imposing deadlines on yourself. You may remember, what I call the goldfish principle, which is actually Parkinson's law. Now, I've talked about this before and it's the idea that goldfish grow to the size of the tank they’re in. The time it takes to do a given task will expand to fill the time you allot it. Now, everyone does this. You have a tendency to overestimate what you can do in the short term and underestimate what you can do in the long term, and it doesn't magically change when you're a professional either. I need to constantly manage it and ask myself, “am I being realistic about the time I think this will take?” Now, if you're really serious about making this a habit, you can even incentivize meeting deadlines by setting up disincentives where if you don't meet the deadline there's an automatic -say $100 - donation to a charity you really dislike. Negative reinforcement can be quite an effective tool. Similar to sprints, this technique, suggests you work as furiously as you can for 25 minutes and then reward yourself with a five-minute break. Rinse and repeat. Now, this will help establish good habits for blocking out distractions and pushing ahead on really difficult tasks. The optimal interval here may be different for you, so experiment with what achieves the best result. If your phone isn't cutting it for timing try eggtimer.com. Set up sprints for different aspects of your work: plans, sections, elevations, details, models, massing. If you're spending a lot of time on any one thing you might not be effectively managing your time. If for example you spend an entire day developing the plan without touching the sections or elevations, you're investing too heavily in only one dimension. The Pareto principle states that 80% of your results come from just 20% of your efforts. When people think about time management often their first inclination is to write out a to-do list, but the reality - given the Pareto principle - is that most of the tasks on there are low value. Ideally, you want a list that has only the 20% tasks those that lead to 80% of your results. Now, to find these you want to take your to-do list and assign weightings based on impact and effort. And I know, this sounds like too much effort already, but if you have difficulty managing your time doing this illustrates where the problems with a standard to-do list are. Let's say on your to-do list are the following hypothetical tasks: draw a site plan, develop a code checklist, build a context model, and generate three design concepts. Start by ranking your to-do list from lowest to highest ing to the amount of effort it will take to do a certain task. Now, rank these same tasks for impact. What does the task stand to realize for you; how important is it? Then, I want you to make the following diagram. Now, each task will fall under one of the following four quadrants: high impact and low effort, high impact high effort, low impact and low effort, and low impact and high effort. And so, once these tasks are in each one of these boxes you're going to begin with the tasks that are in the high impact low effort box first, followed by the high effort high impact ones, and then on to the low impact low effort ones, and finish off if you have any time with any low impact high effort jobs. Make sense? If you find yourself wasting time on repetitive tasks you want to create a template to deal with those. And, you can do this with email, texts, details, specs, drawings; almost anything. Template your marketing funnel, or code checklists, or your responses for new client inquiries. Rather than waste mental effort on crafting an original response each time, I like to think about what the outcome I want to achieve is, and then put systems in place to accomplish those goals for me without my involvement. Automating tasks with programs is a good place to start, but this strategy also includes - by the way - hiring someone to take over tasks that don't make the best use of your time. Now, you know the drill here: files, tools, assets, folders, materials, documents. Managing your time efficiently means you can't waste time searching for the basic things you need to do your work. And, of course keep your workspace organized. Alright, enough said. Recognize that your phone calls, texts and emails are all someone else's to-do list and priorities being imposed on you. Managing your time means keeping a schedule of what's important to you. If you want to manage your time better, you have to get selfish with it and guard it. If you're always responding to someone else's demands, you're helping them manage their time, and their schedule. They're effectively outsourcing their important tasks to you. Owning your schedule is your only chance to accomplish the goals you've highlighted as important. Find your most productive working times and do your work then. For me, I divide my day between making and managing. In fact, I've recorded a few videos on this topic already and I'll post the links in the cards. Mornings are strictly set aside for making, afternoons for managing. Finding your most productive time of day to work ensures your effort inputs achieve similar results and outputs. Trying to fit too many design tasks into your schedule only divides your time and increases the chances you won't complete all of them. As time boxing requires you to reduce scope to meet a deadline, saying no provides you the latitude to spend more time doing the things you deem most important. Eliminating tasks prioritizes those things that are significant. This doesn't only apply to your bad social media habits - the places you click first when you're bored or stuck on something - but your email, texts, phone calls, visits by vendors, or consultants, and even friends and family. And, these things, these are designed to make us pay attention to them and they're exceedingly good at that. Recognize that anything that says urgent needs to be intentionally managed by you if you're serious about getting things done. Urgent things often pretend to be important, but they can actually keep us from getting the things that actually matter done. Set aside time for these activities and try not to use them outside of those times, they'll steal as much of your time as you let them. Don't waste time here. Getting stuck can disrupt all the good time management practices you've put in place and it can do so very quickly. If you get to a point where you know you're grinding and not making forward progress, stop, take a break; put some room between you and the design problem. Seek out counsel from someone else, someone not familiar with the project that can look at it objectively. Ask yourself what assumptions you've made that might be false or that might be holding you back. Everyone gets stuck, but pros recognize it quickly and don't waste time fretting about it. At times like these, I like to get away from the studio and get some exercise. In fact I've made it a daily habit to leave at a set time of day. I put a podcast on, listen to something completely unrelated to the problems I'm trying to solve. Now, your unconscious mind will still be working on the problem, don't worry. This is actually a studied and documented part of the design process. It's called incubation and it immediately precedes illumination and that's the part where the idea is revealed or discovered. It's not something you can necessarily rush or force to arrive more quickly. If you continue to try and work through the problem once you reach this point, you risk taking time away from other, maybe less resource intensive, tasks that could benefit from slightly less of your design horsepower. Now, good time management requires recognizing these waypoints and redirecting your energies elsewhere. Often we struggle to put something out there that isn't perfect. Yes, with an infinite amount of time and budget you can get close to perfect, but that's not the game. You can't let perfect be the enemy of the good. The perfect version of your architecture does us no good if it's never built, or we never get to see it. As you search for that perfect scheme, others are actually completing things that are less than perfect. Your work has no value without execution and execution means managing your design time in a way that delivers your ideas to the world on a schedule. You've heard the expression, “what gets monitored, gets managed.” For pros, tracking time is a must, even if your agreement with a client is a fixed fee rather than just a straight hourly billing rate. When you're running a business, your profit is directly linked to how accurately you've estimated the time it will take you to deliver what you promised. As a hypothetical, let's say you've been doing this long enough to know roughly how long it takes to complete a given project, and in turn, how long it takes to complete each phase of the design process. For my practice, this is linked to both the project size and the budget. Now, let's say I have a project with a budget of 10 million dollars and my hypothetical fee for that project is 5% of my client’s budget. So, the total fee to complete the work would be $500,000. To figure out how long each phase will be, I need to allocate that fee amongst the different phases. Now, an important thing to understand here is that your fee - whether or not you're billing your client hourly - is probably going to be tied to an hourly wage or a series of hourly wages if you have employees. For this example, let's say I'm the only employee. If my billing rate is $200 per hour, I divide the total fee by my billing rate and that leaves me - the $200 guy - 2,500 hours to complete the entire project for my client. Taking it a step further, let's say that I know I'm the kind of designer who spends a lot of time on concept development and I know, from experience, that I usually spend, let's say, 40% of my fee working through the early design phases. But, once I get to the drafting phase I know I'm really efficient and I can put together a set of drawings very quickly. That part, historically, has taken me, let's say 20%, of the fee. Again, hypothetical situation here, these aren't good percentages to use. To figure out how long I have to design the schematics I would take the total fee and the percentages for each phase of the work and divide the fee up ing to these percentages. So, in our hypothetical example, I'm sending 40% of the fee toward schematics, and let's say 20 percent to document production, and the remaining 40% to construction observation. By taking 40% of the total allotted 2,500 hours I get 1,000 hours, and if I divide that by 40 hours a week I see I have 25 weeks to get through schematics. In reality, I know my billable time and percentages are actually much lower per week than that because I have other things to manage for the business. But, you get the idea. Then I track the time I spend working on each phase each day and at the end of the week I can see if the time I'm putting in tracks with where I expected it to be. Checking in often like this gives you the chance to make course corrections along the way, rather than checking in once a month or once a quarter at the end of the billing cycle. As I'm getting ready to invoice my client for my services, I generate a report to confirm that things are actually proceeding on track. Now, you don't need to go to this extent if you're a student necessarily, but the point is to put in place systems that track the time you're actually spending and ones that also support your personal design process. All this is good practice for developing the accountability skills you'll use in your professional life. Now, if I've helped you at all with any of these please smash that like button below, share this with someone who's always up against deadlines, and let me know, in the comments, what are you blowing off right now to watch YouTube? As always, I appreciate you guys! Thanks for coming back each week. Cheers!