Effective Project Management

Section O Design

Don't be buffaloed by experts and elites. Experts often possess more data than judgment. Elites can become so inbred that they produce hemophiliacs who bleed to death as soon as they are cut by the real world.

General Colin Powell

The design phase is the link between the owner's business development process during the feasibility stage and the production, manufacturing, fabrication, or construction phase. More importantly, however, it is the link between the owner's concept for making money and the realization of the benefits during the operational phase.

The danger is that because of the remoteness of the home office from the physical activities of the project, people often start to believe that they are producing an end product in its own right. This is, of course, not the case ‐ the home office is providing a service to the later phases of the project. It is the construction people who are actually producing the end product. Further, as the people who have to interpret the design, they need to be involved in these earlier definition stages. Additionally, the people in the home office need to constantly bear in mind the fact that small mistakes in the early paper development phases can cause a vast amount of work in the later physical execution stages.⁴

1 Getting Organized

1.1

Get the right people; see Section D Mobilization, paragraphs 1.1 to 1.5.

1.2

Line managers may want to introduce new systems and ways of doing things so that the ...