Saint Louis College

COLLEGE OF ENGINEERING AND ARCHITECTURE

DEPARTMENT OF ARCHITECTURE

PROF PRAC 03
(Global Practice in the 21st Century)

"OFFICE PROJECT MANAGEMENT”

SAN AGUSTIN, MICHAEL ANGELO

STUDENTS

ARCH. PETE CARL ANTHONE ABRENICA

INSTRUCTOR
 PROJECT MANAGEMENT
STANDARDS OF PROFESSIONAL PRACTICE (SPP) ON COMPREHENSIVE
ARCHITECTURAL SERVICES
(Part of the IRR of R.A. No. 9266)

Part of SPP Document 206

By his education and training, the Architect may perform any or all of the services as stipulated under
Section 2 above. However, when the Owner hires an Architect or a firm to coordinate the whole range of
Comprehensive Architectural Services (CAS), this constitutes Project Management (PM).

Project Management (PM) involves management activities over and above the normal architectural and
engineering (A&E) services carried out during the pre-design, design and construction phase. The over-all objective
is to have control over time, cost and quality relative to the construction of a project.

The presence of a PM does not relieve the designers and contractors of their respective normal duties and
responsibilities in the design and construction of the project. The PM complements the functions of the Architects,
Engineers and Contractors in meeting the broad and complex requirements of projects.

SCOPE OF SERVICES
A. Pre-Construction Phase
As early as during the design development phase, perhaps even concurrently with the Architect’s
commission, the Project Manager (PM) should conduct regular consultations with the Owner and with the
Architects and Engineers (for A&E services) on all aspects of planning for the project.

B. Construction Phase
If the Project Manager (PM) also serves as the Construction Manager (CM) to oversee time, cost and
quality control during the construction of the project, he shall provide the services detailed under SPP
Documents 204-A and/or 204-B.

MANNER OF PROVIDING SERVICES

If a Project Manager (PM) is hired by the Owner, it may be the responsibility of the PM to either hire the
Construction Manager (CM) to be paid either by him or directly by the Owner on salary, or on the basis of
percentage of construction cost or to serve as the CM himself. In like manner, the Fulltime Supervisor can either be
a staff member of the PM or hired directly by the Owner

The Project Manager (PM, whether individual or firm) operates as a member of an Owner-Architect-
Engineer-Contractor Team. In the Team Approach, each member of the team will have precedence in his own field
of operations or expertise. In accordance with this principle:
a) The Architect and the Specialist Consultants (SCs) will have prime responsibility for the plan/design of the
project.
b) The Engineers will be responsible for their respective engineering plans.
 c) The Contractor shall be responsible for his men and equipment and the delivery of the project.
d) The Owner makes decisions on the project and assures that funds are available to complete the project.
e) The Project Manager (PM)’s primary responsibility is the exercise of overall cost control. He will plan,
program and monitor the various activities, and will act as an adviser on material costs and construction
methods.

METHOD OF COMPENSATION
The Project Manager is compensated on a percentage basis, as shall be described in the Architect’s
Guidelines.

If the Architect as Project Manager (PM) performs regular design services for the same project, he shall be
compensated separately for these services as stipulated in SPP Document

PROJECT MANAGEMENT LIFE CYCLE

INITIATION (Starting the Project)

Phase 1: The conceptualization phase
This can be referred as the initiation phase starting point of any project or idea. For the conceptualization
phase begin, a strategic need for the project or service must be recognized by upper management.
Typically involves:
- Creation of statement of work (SOW)
- Presenting the business case
- Creation of a business contract – FIDIC

PLANNING (Organizing and Preparing)

Phase 2: The planning phase
The second phase of the project. Once management has given the “ok” to lunch a project, a more formal set
of plans – outlining initial goals – is established.
Typically involves:
- Determining resource availability
- Creating a project budget
- Beginning to allocate tasks to certain resources

EXECUTION (Carrying Out the Work)

Phase 3: The execution phase
The third phase of the project, this is when the actual work of the project is performed. Required materials,
tools, and resources are transformed to reach the project goals. Performance is continually measured to ensure the
project is successful.
Typically involves:
- Strategic planning
- Implementation planning

CLOSURE (Closing the Project)

Phase 4: The termination phase
The fourth and final phase, also referred to as project closure. This phase begins once the project has been
completed
Typically involves:
- The disbandment of the project team
- Personnel and tools are reassigned to new duties
- Resources released back to parent organization
- Project transferred to intended users

RISK MANAGEMENT
Risk management is the process of determining the risks present in your business and evaluating the procedures
to minimize their impact. In construction, the process involves planning, monitoring, and controlling instances of
risk. As the center of the process is your risk management plan, a document that details the risks and your processes
for addressing them.

As a business or firm, you’re most likely aware of the many risks that come with construction projects. Whether
it’s meeting the terms of a contract, maintaining employee safety on the job site, or dealing with natural disasters,
every project has its own set of hazards. If not managed, these risks can hurt your construction projects and prove
fatal to your bottom line.
 Thus, construction risk management is a must-have for any company. An effective risk management plan must
have easy-to-follow yet detailed processes to help you control the risks, make decisions on how to deal with them,
and turn them around to boost your company. With the presence of rising costs, new industry trends, more complex
projects, and increased safety concerns, having a risk management plan is more crucial than ever.

SOURCES OF CONSTRUCTION RISKS

To craft your risk plan, you’ll first need to identify the factors that could most jeopardize your projects. The
potential sources of risks most common to construction include:

 Safety Risk: Any construction site risks or hazards that can lead to worker accidents.
 Financial Risk: Factors that impact your financial flow, including lack of sales, problems with the
economy, unexpected cost increases, and competition with other firms.
 Legal Risk: Potential disputes in the fulfillment of contracts with clients.
 Project Risk: Project hazards such as poor management of resources, miscalculation of time, lack of
proper policies, or misunderstanding of project deliverables.
 Environmental Risk: Floods, earthquakes, and other natural phenomena that damage construction sites
and make work inaccessible.

HOW TO MANAGE RISKS

To effectively manage risk, you’ll need to develop a risk management plan. The process can be broken
down into six major steps:

Identify the Risks

Now that you know some of the most common construction project risks, it’s time to identify those unique
to your project. Risk identification should take place during the preconstruction phase of the project to allow for
time to manage any potential risks before accepting them.

An effective way to analyze risks is to hold brainstorming sessions with your project team and
stakeholders. The goal is to identify all the possible scenarios that could impact the project at hand. A brainstorm
session will allow all teams to contribute their knowledge and expertise. Past projects can provide a helpful
reference to understand size, scope, and location.
 After the brainstorm, you will then want to hold regular meetings with your project team. This will not help
review current risk plans, but also identify any additional risks that may occur over time.

Prioritize Risks in Order of Importance

Construction risks vary for each company — a risk that may affect another business might not be a concern
for yours. After identifying your risks, it is important to prioritize them based on two factors: (1) the potential impact
on your business and (2) the chance of that risk materializing. When possible, use numbers such as dollar amounts
and percentages for risk analysis.
High-impact, high-probability risks should be handled first, while low-impact, low-probability risks should
be addressed last. For example, a price increase in the materials for your project can hurt your margins, so it should
be handled with medium priority. Natural disasters have high impact but have low probability. If a hired contractor
is unable to fulfill their portion of the project, that risk is an example of one with high impact and high probability.

Determine Your Risk Response Strategy

Once you have evaluated the priority of the risks, you’ll want to select a response strategy for each hazard.
While risks are complex, risk response techniques fall into four main categories:
1. Avoid the risk: If you feel unequipped to handle a major risk or do not have the right risk plan set in place,
the safe option is to steer clear of the project or change the scope. For example, you may want to avoid
building projects in areas prone to earthquakes.
2. Transfer the risk: While costly, this solution may ultimately be less costly than accepting the risk itself.
For example, you could transfer the risk to your insurance provider or forge an agreement with a supplier or
subcontractor to pass the responsibility.
3. Mitigate the risk: When you mitigate risk, you create plans to keep the risk as low as possible. You can
train workers and supply proper safety equipment to lessen the dangers of safety risk, for example.
4. Accept the risk: There are times where you need to accept the risks to complete a project. For example,
you may decide to accept the delays caused by weather but you plan to manage the project better to work
around the problem.
The response strategy you choose will depend on your resilience to the risks and the potential rewards from the
project. You may determine that a higher reward — such as gaining a loyal repeat customer or the opportunity to
break into a new market — may be worth the higher risk.

Execute a Risk Management Plan

After conducting a risk assessment, you’ll then want to craft your risk management plan. A risk plan
optimizes your risk response strategy, detailing crucial information for team members and providing a set of
solutions to either mitigate, transfer, or accept the risks. In addition to stating priority, an effective plan should detail
resources for each of your defined risks.
Risk solutions can impact different levels of your company. The three common categories of solutions and
examples of each include:
1. Strategy: managing risk at the enterprise level, using indemnity clause in insurance, using risk as a means
to improve profit margin.
2. Structure: creating a formal risk department, ensuring insurance protects earnings stream, preventing over-
participation in projects with high risk
3. Operations: setting a process to review risks, creating a safety culture and program, manage subcontractors
and vendors, preparing comprehensive documents.
 In addition to optimizing your company to handle risks, you can also rely on different resources to address these
complexities. Construction companies use the following resources in their risk management plans:

 Software: The right cloud-based construction management software can help you manage and process
tasks quicker, including building design, costs, safety compliance, and accounting. These functions help to
mitigate risk as you handle an increasing number of projects.
 Financing: Construction business credit lines often provide a good precaution if you decide to accept
various risks.
 Professional advice: Legal firms that specialize in construction contracts, as well as bankers, accountancy
firms, and consultants, are good sources of advice from professionals for businesses. Your insurance
program can also advise you on requirements and the pros and cons of different programs.
 Technology: The use of new, essential innovations such as drones, BIM, and prefabricated building
methods can help mitigate or eliminate common risks such as poor time management, safety hazards,
weather.

Involve Members of the Team

Construction risk management is not a siloed activity — it must require the contribution of the major
players in your company. Updates on risk should be communicated at every level.
The three key players who participate in the construction process are the owner team, design team, and
contractor teams. Since each team has its own set of practices and procedures, it is important to look into their
processes and identify and eliminate risks wherever possible. The stakeholders also play an important role that can
impact risks.
The types of information to monitor include cash flows, drawings and diagrams, schedules and cost
information, inspections, project files and logs, contracts, and regulatory documents.

Create Contingencies & Revise

With any risks that you decide to accept, you’ll want to create a contingency plan — an alternative method
for finishing a project despite accepting the risk.
For example, if your company decides to accept a project that provides a considerable amount of safety
hazards, you’ll want to communicate those hazards to workers. Your contingency plan would provide solutions such
as providing a list of chemicals, labeling all containers, and using software that allows workers to check off safety
precautions.
Risk management is not a set-and-forget process. Consistent monitoring and revisions to your plan will
help increase the resilience of your business against any possible risk. Like a dynamic document, your plan should
evolve and change over time.
Even after all risks have been calculated and accounted for, residual risks often remain due to unknown
factors. Risk transfer and risk acceptance are common response strategies to respond to these risks.

BENEFITS OF RISK MANAGEMENT IN CONSTRUCTION

By now, it should be evident that a risk management plan can provide your company with great ease and
security. While building out a plan requires a lot of effort, effective risk management provides some essential
benefits for your company.

Streamlined operations
 Once a risk management plan is set, it helps make your future projects easier to assess. Team members
have the knowledge and tools needed to make decisions and avoid risk, improving the efficiency of your company.

Enhanced safety
Risk management plans also help teams follow all safety and security standards on construction sites. The possibility
of a safety hazard is minimized, moving projects along faster.

Higher confidence in projects

Being equipped with a sound plan allows teams to gain confidence over time in their projects over time as they
balance risks. Since they are able to plan and fix any mistakes, teams can save time and resources in their projects.

Increased profits
Taking on unmanaged risks can hurt your company’s profits. However, a carefully-crafted and actionable risk plan
helps to minimize these risks. Streamlined operations, enhanced safety, lower costs, and higher project confidence
leads to increased profits over time.

Risk Management in Construction

Along with the actual building process, risk management should be seen as one of the most critical steps of a
construction project. The steps of identifying, assessing, controlling, and monitoring risks will make them work for
your company. Not all risks are negative. Positive risks come with accepting a second project from a customer, for
example. By setting the right strategies and using the right resources in your management plan, your company will
not only defend against any disasters but also take advantage of new business opportunities.

INTER-PROFESSIONAL
RELATIONSHIPS
In purchasing as in many other organizational activities, different groups of staff possessing
complementary knowledge bases must usually cooperate in order to accomplish certain tasks at hand). When
organizational units have extensively different knowledge bases, skills and cultures, this may cause challenges for
efficient joint action. Theories of inter-professional collaboration and knowledge integration address these kinds of
challenges, including how differences may influence competence integration between groups of staff.
The literature shows that groups and units within organizations may form distinct communities of practice,
or epistemic communities, sometimes also extending beyond organizational barriers to involve similar functions in
other organizations (Brown and Duguid, 1991, 2001; Wenger 2000). Communities of practice are groups of people
who share a concern and learn from each other to improve their practice. Through formal education and regular
interaction these communities develop a shared repertoire of resources: experiences, stories, tools and ways of
addressing recurring problems. They are efficient in managing knowledge and initiating innovation within the
group, but knowledge integration and creative collaboration between groups is more difficult.
Further, knowledge and skills represent investments and are means for individuals to demonstrate and
experience competency, which is another reason why it is often very costly both to change our own knowledge and
to influence and transform the knowledge of others (Carlile, 2002). Further, there seems to be a general tendency to
underestimate the need for communication to transfer knowledge between oneself and others, and organizations
repeatedly fail to acknowledge the coordination needs that arise when tasks are divided between more people (Heath
and Staudenmayer, 2000). Knowledge specialization complicates such coordination still more by creating cognitive
barriers of understanding between subtasks.
Together, research on policy implementation and inter-professional collaboration highlight that resource
constraints, contradictory goals and differences in both knowledge and identities between the professions involved
may strongly influence the public policy actually delivered. In particular, and in accordance with observations in
general purchasing literature (Driedonks et al., 2010), coping strategies can be expected to involve a reluctance to
engage interprofessional collaboration.

ORGANISATIONAL FRAMEWORKS IN DESIGN FIRMS

The architectural practice needs to be organized in an efficient way to maximize the use of everyone
working for the firm. An organizational framework is an arrangement where the total workload of the firm is divided
among the staff. The organizational frameworks in design firms and the implication on the people involved are:

 The simplest situation is where one architect working on his own. The architect has to accept only works
that he can complete without assistance. In addition, he has to plan the work in an efficient manner as
possible.
 The second situation consists of an architect with one assistant. The architect has to know as much as he
can about the assistant's background, interests and abilities in order to allocate appropriate tasks to him.
Figure 2 shows a shallow framework in which a single principal has a sufficiently small staff to manage. It is

assumed that the firm undertakes mainly domestic work, with some commercial projects. Where possible, the five
technical assistants specialise in one of these two areas. There also a secretary who undertakes the administrative
work, and an office junior, who does some of the simpler drawing job, but is mainly employed to run errands, file
drawings and work the plan printer.
Figure 3 shows a single principal, but this time the firm is larger. He employs three project leaders. They are either
architects or senior architectural technicians, and each one leads a group of people responsible for one or more
projects. The principal also directly manages general assistant, a technical information assistant and private secretary
who in turn manages two other assistants.

Figure 4, it is assumed that there is still a single principal. Directly under him there are two associates, although in a
firm of this size they may have junior partners instead. Both of these associates will manage several project leaders,
whom in turn lead a number of assistants. The principal (or senior partner) directly manages his own private
secretary, and also the office manager who is in charge of the administrative and support office.

Figure 5 shows the arrangement for a firm in which there are three partners, who have five associates working under
them. One of these associates has a special responsibility for the administrative side of the practice, and the others
manage one or more projects, under the overall guidance of the partners. Each associate has a team of assistants to
help him. Each partner has a private secretary and one of the partners controls the work of CAD operators.
THE IMPORTANCE OF TEAM WORK IN DESIGN FIRMS
Clients of the construction industry typically select design firms on the basis of their qualifications,
experiences and capabilities. Once, the design firm has been selected, the architectural team becomes responsible for
delivering the building design that achieves the client’s objectives and meet his / her requirements. A successful and
competent team is the one that succeeds in producing a product that meets or exceeds client expectations within time
frame, allocated budget and quality standard required. Such a team is a healthy indicator of the organization growth
and stability. In addition, team work helps the organization retain and keep its clients loyal and win new customers.
This highlighted the importance that every design firm has to understand the principles of team building in general
and architectural team in particular.

THE TEAM LIFE CYCLE

A number of individuals begin to work at interdependent job often pass through several stages as they learn
to work together as a team, Figure 1. The typical stages of the team life cycle are:

 Forming Members share personal information, start to know and accept one another, and begin turning
their attention towards the group's tasks. An aura of courtesy prevails, and interactions are often cautious.

 Storming Members compete for status, jockey for positions of relative control, and argue about appropriate
direction for the group. External pressures interfere with the group, and tensions rise between individuals as
they assert themselves.
 Norming The group begins moving together in a co-operation fashion, and a tentative balance among
competing forces is struck. Group norms emerge to guide individual behavior, and co-operative feelings are
increasingly evident.

 Performing the group matures and learns to handle complex challenges. Functional roles are performed and
fluidly exchanged as needs, and tasks are efficiently accomplished.

 Adjourning the most successful groups, committees, and project teams disband sooner or later. Their break
up is called adjournment, which requires dissolving intense social relations and returning to permanent
assignments. Lessons learned and feedback will help team members improve their performance in future
projects.

DESIGN TEAM IN CONSTRUCTION PROJECT

The design team for construction projects consists of an architect and engineers. Often, the team
itself may consist of an architectural firm and an engineering firm which themselves employ several
architects or engineers. On smaller projects, you may simply have one architect or engineer who is tasked
with your project. Each of these groups can have individuals that specialize in specific areas of design or
engineering.
Architects
The architect or architectural team is responsible for the design  stage of the project. The architect
will take an idea the owner has and if that idea is feasible, create a design around it. Different types of
architects may specialize in different types of projects. Some architects specialize in specific types of
buildings, while others specialize in a subset of the project itself. For example, on a single project, you may
have an architect who is designing the physical structure for the project and a second landscape architect
that is responsible for designing the exterior portion of the project.
Architecture is both an art and a science. Modern professional architects seek to produce buildings
that are both aesthetically pleasing and functional. Increasingly, architects are focusing on incorporating
sustainability into their designs, and charting out new ways to add value to the client through design
processes.
Engineers
The engineers design team will almost certainly consist of one or more engineers  in addition to the
architect(s). Broadly speaking, engineers are responsible for ensuring that the finished product of the
construction project is safely and appropriately constructed. But this isn’t all engineers do on construction
projects. Engineers make sure that the project is as efficient as possible, reducing costs while maintaining
necessary safety features. Engineers will also conduct an initial survey of the building site to assess
feasibility for the project and get a sense of any special accommodations that may need to be made.
An important aspect of what civil engineers are responsible for is ensuring that all local and state
legal requirements are met for your project. Early on, this means closely tracking changes to the design to
ensure that plans and specifications include any necessary requirements. As the construction project
progresses to the physical construction stage, the engineer will regularly review construction to verify that
everything is being built according to requirements. Effective engineering firms also specialize in
optimizing the building process by finding ways to build more efficiently, reducing both costs and time
associated with the project.