Control And Integration  ›  Integration


The rapidly evolving nature of design practice over the last three decades, that resulted in the loss of control discussed under Control, has brought the design professions to another major “Y” in the road ahead.

As architecture has become more and more complex, because of technology, the exponential explosion in information, increasingly tough and complex constraints, and other factors, the “design as commodity” model has outworn its usefulness and is failing.

As a consequence, the US government and the US military establishment have embraced a concept called Integrated Project Delivery, or IDP.

Australia has developed its own version of an IDP approach, called the Project Alliance. 

The fragmentation of the built environment industry that occurred because of commoditization creates an incredible new opportunity for design professionals. That is one branch in the road ahead. The other branch is, quite simply, growing irrelevance.

Although some might disagree, we are not convinced that most of those in the independent project manager fraternity have the background and knowledge required to meet this challenge. Managing the integration required in the IDP movement requires an exceptional amount of technical building knowledge, along with an equal amount of leadership skill. 

Because of the growing fragmentation of responsibility over the past three decades, few in the design professions presently have the broad skills needed to lead this new paradigm.

Our review of the traditional tools of managing projects shows that the tools themselves reflect the fragmentation of responsibility. The tools we’ll need for the future don’t yet exist, and it is not clear how to build them – this is uncharted territory.

But what we can do, and what we have done in iProjects, is to start to rebuild the familiar tools to begin to cope with the realities of integration and process coordination. We’ve made a very good start on this path, and will continue to develop tools that enable this kind of thinking.

The results?
  • Your Clients will see – at last – somebody starting to take command of whole-of-project results.
  • Other team members will see that someone understands the detail of their role, and how that role contributes to overall project success.
  • Your staff will see the “Big Picture” of the project.