Programme: how long a design takes

Orders of magnitude

The permit design for a shed is a few weeks. The detailed design for a complex public building is months.

Everything lies between, and the difference comes not from the floor area but from the number of disciplines and the proportion of bespoke solutions.

Why we do not promise optimistic

Because a programme’s job is to be keepable. An optimistic programme becomes worthless at the first slip, and nobody believes it after that.

We give a programme after the first discussion — one we can keep.

What most often causes delay

The design disciplines build on one another, so delay rarely arises at the drawing stage. The design programme.

Waiting for a decision

The most common cause, and the one least within our control. We ask and get no answer.

Missing data

Ground investigation, utility data, survey. Obtaining these takes weeks of lead time, and it can be started in the first week.

Authority lead times

The duration of the permit procedure is not design time. It has to be counted separately.

Late change

Amending a closed stage affects several disciplines.

What you can speed up

Decision time and data gathering. The design work itself cannot be sped up indefinitely, because the steps build on one another — but those two items are entirely on your side.

Stricter with prefabrication

If the structure is LGS or steel, the design has to close before manufacture. Changing it afterwards means the member made becomes scrap. Coordination between disciplines.

The point

A programme is an order of dependencies, not a list of deadlines. What you can speed up is the decision and the data. The rest depends on the order of the disciplines.