A Question for Building Owners: Did Your Project Experience This? Recent
(Part 3 of 3 in a series on why the AE industry’s design schedule is failing projects)
For the past two weeks, I’ve been writing about a problem inside the AE industry: design schedules that compress Schematic Design to 15–20% of total project time — and why that compression creates predictable, expensive consequences downstream.
Those posts were largely aimed at design and construction professionals.
This one is for the owners.
If you’ve hired an architecture or engineering firm to design a building in the last ten years, I want to ask you something directly:
Did your project experience any of the following?
— Change orders during construction that felt like they were solving problems the design should have already caught
— A value engineering conversation that happened in the middle of Design Development, after you thought the scope was settled
— RFIs from contractors that revealed coordination issues between the structural, mechanical, and electrical systems
— A budget that looked fine at SD sign-off but had drifted significantly by the time you got to bidding
— Stakeholders — department heads, facilities staff, end users — raising concerns in DD or CDs about things they felt weren’t heard during early design
— A construction schedule that slipped not because of weather or supply chain, but because design conflicts were being resolved in the field
If any of those sound familiar, you likely experienced the downstream effects of a compressed SD phase — whether you knew it at the time or not.
Here’s what owners typically don’t know going into a project:
The phase schedule percentages in your AE firm’s proposal aren’t a regulatory requirement or an industry standard derived from project outcomes. They’re a convention — largely inherited from the era of hand drafting, rarely examined, and almost never explained to the owner in terms of what they actually mean for project risk.
You are often asked to sign off on a Schematic Design package that doesn’t yet include a reconciled cost estimate. You are often given a stakeholder engagement process that moves too quickly to surface real conflicts. And the problems that result aren’t always visible until months later, when they’re far more expensive to fix.
I’m genuinely asking: is this your experience?
I’ve seen it consistently from the construction consulting side of the table — the late-stage rework, the change order patterns, the budget conversations that shouldn’t be happening at 60% CDs. But I want to hear from owners directly.
What has your experience been with the design process? Where have you felt like the early phases moved too fast? Where did the problems show up?
The more owners can articulate this, the stronger the case becomes for changing the way the industry structures design schedules — and for building projects where the expensive surprises have already been resolved before construction begins.
— Eric Person | Ranaverde Consulting