Key Highlights
How do you compare architecture proposals effectively?
Comparing proposals well means looking past the bottom-line fee to what the documents behind it will do to your construction budget. The fee is the most visible number in a proposal and it is rarely the number that determines what the project costs, because the completeness of the drawings drives your exposure to change orders, and that exposure is measured in multiples of any fee difference you are weighing.
How much does poor construction documentation cost?
The National Research Council, in its guidelines for federal facilities, holds that construction changes increasing cost by more than 10% over the contract award should be considered unusual and warrant a management review. That benchmark is a useful way to see the scale of the problem, since document quality moves a project across or under that threshold while the fee gap between two firms rarely amounts to a fraction of it.
Read the full federal guidelines
Do owners expect design mistakes during construction?
Experienced owners largely expect added costs from design mistakes, typically estimating them at 3% to 5% of total construction value. A 2014 study by McGraw Hill Construction and the AIA Large Firm Roundtable surveyed 155 owners and found that 80% of them anticipate these errors on future projects, which says less about what is possible than about what the market has trained owners to accept. The useful goal when comparing proposals is finding a firm structured to beat that expectation.
Read the full McGraw Hill and AIA study
What role does plan completeness play in budget control?
How complete the documents are before bidding is the single most important variable in controlling change orders. An eleven-year analysis of Texas DOT projects by the Transportation Research Board found that 31% of all change orders, averaging $45 million annually, traced directly to design errors and omissions. Even for an organization with a dedicated in-house review department, the thoroughness of the design firm's own drawings remained the deciding factor.
What should you look for in an architecture proposal?
Ask every firm you are considering for a sample drawing set from a project comparable in scope to yours, and put the sets side by side. Sheet count tells you how much forethought went in, level of detail tells you how much ambiguity a contractor will have to resolve in the field at your expense, and clarity tells you how likely the work is to be built correctly the first time. That comparison will tell you more about your eventual project cost than any fee number on the cover page.
