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

The Cost of a Late Decision: Why Deferred Design Problems Are Never Free Recent (Part 2 of 3 in a series on why the AE industry’s design schedule is failing projects) Last week I wrote about why the AE industry’s standard design schedule — which allocates only 15 to 20 percent of total project time to Schematic Design — is set up to fail. The argument was structural: too much is compressed into a phase that is already eroded by firm utilization, resource ramp-up, and the enabling work that renovation projects require before real design can begin. This week I want to go deeper on the mechanism that makes a compressed SD phase so costly. Because it is not just that problems get created in SD — it is that problems get deferred there, and deferred problems have a very predictable, very expensive escalation pattern. The cost of change is

Why the AE Industry Is Shortchanging Schematic Design — And What It Should Look Like  The AE industry has a quiet consensus: allocate 15 to 20 percent of the design schedule to Schematic Design, then move on to the “real work” in Design Development and Construction Documents. I think that’s backwards — and in practice, it’s even worse than the numbers suggest. Before getting into why, it’s worth being precise about what Schematic Design actually is — because it is consistently underestimated. SD is not a sketch phase. It is not a placeholder where a few bubbles get drawn while the “real” design waits. SD is where the decisions that govern everything downstream are made: building massing and systems approach, structural concept, MEP strategy, site organization, and program validation. These are not details. They are the load-bearing choices of the entire project. Once locked in at DD and CDs, they