Before you Start: Setting your Project up for Success

Starting a build project can be intimidating, even if you’ve had experience with it before.

There are so many factors that go into a successful project, so where do you even begin? We sat down with two experts in the design field, Ron Dick (Founding Partner and Architect) and Mike Niezer (COO and Architect), to talk about everything you need to know about the entire process. They discussed what to do before you start a project, the three essential parts of a project, developing a contingency plan, and how to set a realistic schedule for your project.

Follow along with this series to hear what they have to say about each step in the process. First, we begin with the “why.” It’s critical for architecture and design teams to ask the right questions and really listen to the answers BEFORE getting started.

In reality, those elements of mission, vision, and values should be the building block that any project starts with.

We try to bring that to the table at the beginning of design exploration with clients. Sometimes it surprises them. They think we’re going to come in talking about square footages and adjacencies, or budgets and schedules. We always get to those things, but not before we cover the why.

For sure, those functional elements and things like budget and schedule are really important. But those should really be viewed as baseline expectations. Our most successful and impactful projects are the ones where, at the end, we’ve met the budget, we’ve met the schedule, we’ve met the functional needs, we’ve met all of those things – but we’ve gone a little bit deeper and helped our client discover or reinforce who they are as an organization.

I’ve also found it really helpful to ask, ‘What do you want the community to feel when they walk into this project?

What do you want your staff to feel when they walk into this project?’ And a lot of times, the answers to those questions are not driven by dollars or practical attributes, they’re driven more by intangible qualities that tie more to the mission, vision, culture-type elements. These types of questions can extend across all markets, like healthcare for example. ‘What do you want the patient to feel when they come into the building?’ Or if it’s higher education, ‘What do you want your students to experience as they enter the space?’ Or if it’s workplace, ‘How do you want your clients and customers to feel when they visit?’ These questions are a great way to start off a successful project.

The big idea can and should drive a lot of the design decision through the project.

An example of this that we hear all of the time in healthcare is, ‘We really pride ourselves on the quality of our care, but our facility isn’t representative of that same quality.’ So, there, the big idea is all about transforming the facility into a place that reflects the high quality of care being delivered, and that serves as the lens our team uses to guide the owner through the design process.

Stay tuned for our next conversation on the design process, when we dig into the three essential parts of a project: quality, cost, and size!