When Did Value Engineering Become a Design Stage?

We have had a fee variation submitted by the engineers.

Why’s that? I didn’t think we had changed the

You haven’t. The VE process has changed the ceiling design so they need to re-document the services.

Sorry, still not understanding. We haven’t changed anything.

On the well-worn path to design nirvana, we can all agree that you start broad, aspirational, and push boundaries. As things progress through design development and documentation, the design is refined, matched to the services and synchronised with the available budget so that when the tender set is issued it broadly matches. Of course, no one expects perfection but close enough is a reasonable goal… or it used to be.

Can someone please explain when we added a new phase called value engineering (VE), and why the client should pay additional fees triggered by this process? Perhaps the fact that we use the euphemism “VE” in lieu of “cutting out the good stuff” tells us something about the approach some designers are adopting regarding their obligation to design to a budget.

I have no desire to stifle creativity. However, the consequences of relying on late-stage VE to bring a job on budget are significant and impact upon everyone.

The designer spends more time, and therefore more fees, redrawing things that should have been addressed earlier.

2. The client incurs fee variations for associated

consultants due to the consequential re-work.

3. The construction manager spends more time

redoing cost estimates (they take time, you know). 4. The design is compromised in an uncontrolled way, and the low-hanging fruit deleted. These are often feature items that give the design joy: signature furniture pieces, specialist lighting, FF&E (furniture, fittings and equipment) and ceilings. 5. It places extreme pressure on increasingly tight

programmes.

Perhaps most importantly it makes the whole team look faintly foolish and reinforces the commonly held belief that building jobs are never on budget.

Checking the design against a cost estimate is a valid activity. If there is a disconnect, the team works together to reduce that delta before launching into presentations and documentation. Checking it again is also prudent before documentation is completed. However, where things seem to be going of the rails of late is the third and even fourth round of VE, hastened by the failure of the design team to modify their work.

It isn’t particularly productive to assign blame here, and I can hear you screaming at the page: “It is the project manager’s job to manage the design and budget!”. This is perfectly true. We do have a buck-stops responsibility for this, and a good project manager (PM) will pre-empt a train wreck. Yet interior designers – and to a lesser extent engineers – also need to stand up and be counted. It is your role to design to a budget, and if you are not told what the budget is, then find out and cut your cloth accordingly. A $1250 per square metre budget will demand a very different design solution from a $2500 per square metre one.

Here endeth the sermon. What do we do?

• Match your design solution to the available funds. • Don’t sell a design until you know that you can afford it. • Partition your available budget into the key buckets to limit the collateral damage of going over on any one bucket.

• Understand and adapt the design to the building. • Finally, don’t rely on supplier pricing.

• So, there you have it. Easy to dismiss as the ramblings of a pompous dinosaur. But before you do, just ask yourself how many other project managers and clients (aka sources of work) share this opinion.