Office structure

[Tosh K]

Partners: gets work into the office, ensures the practice is legally and financially sound (reviews revenue/expenditure, contracts, insurance etc).  For projects they do both design review and technical review – design, heavy at beginning and before CDs are done, technical as needed.

Senior staff: manages day-to-day project development (clients/subconsultants), ensures projects are progressing on time, on budget and to the firm’s standard for quality.  Check in with partners as needed but at minimum before conclusion of major phases (concept, schematic, dd, cd), usually also before any presentation to clients.

Pitfalls: clarity of responsibilities is a big one – there are always seams in the process, minimizing them is critical for morale and quality control.  This starts at the top but resides mostly in senior staff.  Additionally it takes time for non-design staff to learn and understand the peculiarities of a design office and designers – allow for that while it they learn to smooth out operational irregularities.

[James Hartley]

Tosh – a two year late word of thanks – I didn’t see an update that you had replied to this!

[Bridger DeMars]

So… give us an update on how the restructuring went.

[James Hartley]

Obviously some degree of lag between my check-in’s here.. but better late than never.
Restructuring is a work in progress… slow change needed on this sort of thing to avoid completely disrupting the workflow. We’ve just opened a new office though… Things going well.
We are however moving to a better position where the project managers handle clients completely (instead of the hybrid we had before) and take full responsibility for projects only checking in at key points.
I’m avoiding my micro management tendencies :)) giving them room for that autonomy
Things are going in the right direction!

[Author]

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