Your turn · exercise 1
Pause and score your practice
Knowing where you stand tells you where to start. Comparing two scores shows where the practice relies on one person's view.
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Knowledge check
Three quick questions
Lesson notes (the full written lesson)
Most architects didn’t go into the profession to write procedures. And plenty of good practices run for years on talent, long hours and a few people who remember everything. So why bother?
Because heroics have a cost, and it tends to arrive at the worst moment.
What heroics look like
You will recognise some of these:
- The fee position on a project is only known by the director running it, and only roughly.
- A drawing goes to site at the wrong revision because the latest one was on someone’s desktop.
- A client says “but you agreed to that”, and nobody can find the email.
- Monday morning is spent working out what everyone should be doing this week.
- A key person goes on holiday and three projects stall.
- An overrun is discovered at the end of a stage, when it is too late to do anything about it.
None of these are failures of skill. They are failures of system. The work depends on a person holding information in their head rather than the practice holding it somewhere everyone can see.
Why it matters more now
Projects carry more information than they used to. More consultants, more correspondence, more regulation, and clients who expect quick answers. The building safety regime has also put more weight on keeping clear, accurate records of design decisions and changes, particularly on higher-risk buildings, and that habit is worth having on every project.
A practice that relies on memory will find this harder each year. A practice with simple systems will find it gets easier.
What a good system looks like
A system doesn’t need to be software. It can be a checklist, a spreadsheet or a shared folder structure. What makes it a system is that it is:
- Simple. If it takes more than a few minutes, people will skip it when they are busy.
- Written down. Not “how Sarah does it”, but a short description anyone can follow.
- Used every time. A drawing register that is updated “most of the time” is not a register.
- Checked regularly. Someone looks at it weekly and spots when it has drifted.
- Owned. One person is responsible for keeping it working.
Where to start
You don’t need to systemise everything at once. Start with the three areas where failure is most expensive:
| Area | What goes wrong without a system | The basic system |
|---|---|---|
| Fees | Overruns discovered too late to recover | Fee and hours per stage, checked weekly against progress |
| Documents | Wrong revision issued, unclear what was approved | A drawing register with revisions, issue sheets and approval status |
| Decisions | Disputes about what was agreed | Decisions recorded in writing, with date and source |
The rest of this course takes each of these in turn, then puts them into a weekly rhythm.
A quick self-assessment
Answer each question honestly for your practice. One point for each yes.
- Could anyone in the office tell you the fee position on any live project within five minutes?
- Does every project have deliverables and fees set out by RIBA stage?
- Is there one drawing register per project that shows the current revision of every drawing?
- Does every issue of drawings have an issue sheet?
- Are client decisions confirmed in writing and filed with the project?
- Is time recorded against projects (and ideally stages) every week?
- Is there a set time each week when the directors look across all projects?
- If your most senior project architect left tomorrow, could someone else pick up their projects within a week?
7 or 8: you have good foundations. Use this course to tighten the weak spots.
4 to 6: typical for a busy practice. Pick the two lowest-scoring areas and start there.
0 to 3: a lot of the practice is held in people’s heads. That is common, and very fixable. Start with fees and the weekly rhythm.
Systems free up design time
The usual objection is that systems are admin, and admin takes time away from design. In practice it works the other way. The time goes on searching for drawings, reconstructing what a client agreed, and firefighting overruns. A few minutes of structure each day saves hours of hunting each week. Tools like Pulse are built to take much of that structure off people’s hands, but the principles in this course work with any tools.
Try this week
- Score your practice on the eight questions above, and ask one colleague to score it separately. Compare the answers.
- Pick the one area (fees, documents or decisions) where a failure would hurt most, and note what you currently do.
- Ask the team which piece of information they spend most time looking for. That is often the best place to start.
Key takeaways
- Heroics feel efficient but leave the practice exposed whenever one person is away or busy
- A good system is simple, written down, used every time and checked regularly
- Start with the processes that hurt most when they fail: fees, documents and decisions
- Systems free up architects for design, not the other way round