Design Quality Capitulation

Happy Friday,

If you really want to find out how your design team is doing, go to a job site and walk the job with the superintendent or an experienced construction manager. Tell them you want the straight scoop. They’ll be glad to give it to you.

Their insights are extremely valuable if you care about your organization’s reputation, claims record, liability, and ultimately its duty to the public.

Chances are, you’re going to hear that design quality has been deteriorating industry-wide, driving up contractor bids, change orders, claims, and lawsuits. Two main factors:

1)    The financial incentive to reduce quality. “Clients” pretend they're protecting the public by making cost a factor when selecting engineers. Obviously, the effect on the project is the exact opposite, and the public pays much more, not less. "Evaluating" engineers on cost rather than value is bureaucratic CYA at the public's expense. Everyone sees it for what it is.

Professional engineers can only reduce their cost by doing less, so of course designs suffer. The need to bid incentivizes engineers to assign less experienced staff, copy and paste construction details, copy specs from previous jobs that often aren't applicable, and spend little to no time thinking about constructibility. "We don't have the budget, let the contractor figure it out."

Then the can gets kicked to construction oversight. But cost is a factor there too, so field staff tend to be cheaper and less experienced, readily defaulting to the highly insightful reply “just build it as shown”, no matter how laughably ridiculous, costly, or unsafe.

2)    Automation. While automation simplifies, standardizes, reduces design time, and cuts costs, it also short-circuits the transfer of knowledge and experience. Young design engineers learn to push buttons and copy and paste, but often don't understand what they’re looking at, how it gets built, or how it’s supposed to work in the real world. Maybe AI will come to the rescue?

As design quality goes south, the really big costs of construction, project financing, and O&M react by going north. Unfortunately, the bill goes to the public. Everyone involved can and should do better.

If you haven't been on a jobsite for a while, go take a walk and just listen. These issues rarely make it back to the home office. And with digital intelligence getting cheaper and more capable by the week, this isn't the time to be a problem that needs solving.

Have a great weekend,

Dave

Feedback and blowback are always welcome: dave@goodnewsfriday.com

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