Working drawing management
of a contractor who is going to build from the
structural engineer’s drawings anyway. An early
agreement should be reached to limit the architect’s
role to providing design profiles within which the
structural engineer may work, and against which the
structural details may be subsequently checked.Drawing office programming
The design team programme will have identified the time
available for production of the working drawings, and the
first shot at the drawing register will have revealed the
magnitude of the task. The reconciliation of one with the
other, and of both with the financial resources available,
is one of the essential arts of architectural management
and as such demands more space than can be devoted
to it in this handbook. Certain points may usefully be
made however.
Size of drawing office team
The right size and structure of the team is all-important,
and in many ways it is a case of the smaller the better.
Any increase over a team of one starts to invoke the law
of diminishing returns and as the numbers increase so
do the problems of control and communications. On the
other hand, the diversity of work demanded by most
building projects coupled with the constant and
remorseless pressures of the overall programme mean
that too small a team lacks the necessary flexibility of
response.
In practical terms, the size of the team will be the size of
the tasks in man-weeks divided by the number of weeks
available, and if the latter is unreasonably low then the
team becomes unwieldy and difficult to coordinate. In
any case, the size of the team is bound to fluctuate
throughout the working drawing period, with a small but
high-powered element at stage E, rising to a peak soon
after commencement of stage F, and tailing off towards
the end of that stage as the main flow of information to
the quantity surveyor is completed 5.13.
Working drawing management
When the office is working with CAD it is probable that
for more than one drawing position will be linked to the
printer/plotter, which may well be inoperative for long
periods. Unless the team is very small and its members
are in constant touch with one another it is essential to
have some form of unified control so that the
printer/plotter is not operated from two drawing positions
simultaneously (or that everyone has a small
printer/plotter for check plots).Backing up is also essential. Data are the most valuable
thing you own; guard them well. With manual drawings5.13 This histogram, taken from the records of an
actual project, shows the difficulties of coordinating
multi-disciplinary efforts. The peaking of resources
during the production drawing stage is clearly shown