The Perfect Design

Happy Friday,

Two crazy misperceptions about consultants have been allowed to take root, driven mainly by a lack of awareness and the fear of being second-guessed. The first is the normalization of bidding, i.e., the notion that ‘you get the best price’ when consultants bid. Not so. The lowest consulting cost inevitably comes at the expense of the really big costs of construction, O&M, legal, and financing. Rarely, if ever, does the cheapest engineering produce the best project value. See ‘Design Anything for $85’. https://good-news-friday.ghost.io/ghost/#/editor/post/645cf7bc7e17a80001416268

The second fallacy that should be quashed is the nutty expectation of perfection. Nutty indeed. And it’s the height of irony. By making cost a factor in selecting consultants, clients incentivize minimal experience and minimal thought on their projects. Then, when it shows, they suddenly expect perfection?! Not rational, not good for the public, and certainly not fair to the consultants.

A mid-size design project might require ten thousand individual decisions. Please stand up if you answered every question correctly on every test in every class you took in high school and college.  No one? Bueller?...... Bueller?

Problems and lawsuits arise when expectations aren’t aligned with reality. Here's a typical scenario: During construction, the contractor points out a design flaw and submits a change order to cover the added cost of making the change. A mid-level client rep, afraid to go to the council/board for any more money, declares that the consultant must pay for it. ‘You’ve got to take responsibility for your design. Don't you stand behind your design?’ they say. The consultant, conditioned to feel bad about any error, looks down and accepts the blame, and the company eats the cost in the name of good client relations.

Meanwhile, the other nine thousand and some design decisions, many of which cleverly reduced the project cost, go unmentioned and unappreciated.

There’s only one ‘perfect design,’ and that’s the design that never gets built. Imperfections and inadequacies exist in every document and design, so it’s silly and ultimately counterproductive to feign indignance and pretend they don’t. If you want perfection, double the consulting fee. That’ll get you real close. Or, to get the best value for your money, select the most capable team proposing the most thoughtful scope, not the cheapest. Pay your consultant to save big money on the big project costs and allow for a few minor and inevitable human imperfections.

A human consultant is legally obligated to meet the professional Standard of Care. That is, what a reasonably competent consultant would have produced under similar circumstances. There's no expectation of perfection in the legal standard.

Punchline: Get expectations aligned before a project begins if you can. Talk about the risks. Agree on how to deal with issues before they inevitably arise. But don’t perpetuate the notion that perfection is a reasonable expectation. That’s precisely how silly fallacies like 'bidding saves money' and 'perfection should be expected' take root. 

Have a great weekend,

Dave

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Written by me, not ChatGPT, with speed assist and blunder avoidance by Grammarly.