AIA “Hot Topic”: Target Value Design
January 13th, 2008 by HalBack in the fall 2007, the AIA Practice Management Digest asked Greg Howell, Executive Director of the Lean Construction Institute, to convene a panel of design and construction lean thinkers to write on lean design (for construction). I was one of the invited essayists. I wrote a paper with Greg and John Barberio. Our topic was Target-Value Design.
We proposed that Target-Value Design (TVD) turns the current design practice upside-down.
- Rather than estimate based on a detailed design, design based on a detailed estimate.
- Rather than evaluate the constructibility of a design, design for what is constructible.
- Rather than design alone and then come together for group reviews and decisions, work together to define the issues and produce decisions then design to those decisions.
- Rather than narrow choices to proceed with design, carry solution sets far into the design process.
- Rather than work alone in separate rooms, work in pairs or a larger group face-to-face.
TVD offers designers an opportunity to engage in the design conversation concurrently with those people who will procure services and execute the design.
We outlined 9 foundational practices that taken together can create the circumstances for producing designs that excel at meeting client concerns while minimizing waste along the way. These practices were inspired by observing integrated design builders and by studying Toyota's new product development process and the agile software development community.
Here are two of the practices:
- Lead the design effort for learning and innovation. Expect the team will learn and produce something surprising. Establish routines to reveal what is learned and innovated real-time. Also expect surprise will upset the current plan and require more re-planning.
- Design to a detailed estimate. Use a mechanism for evaluating design against the budget and the target values of the client. Review how well you are achieving the targets in the midst of design. When budget matters, stick to the budget.
Visit the AIA site to have a look at the other seven practices…Target Value Design: Nine Foundational Practices for Delivering Surprising Client Value.
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January 14th, 2008 at 10:05 am
Nice work. I’m glad AIA is tuning in to lean design concepts. It was good that AIA had a representative at last summer’s lean construction meetings in Chicago. And these concepts apply to all sorts of project work. I want to remind myself to think that way.
January 14th, 2008 at 11:53 am
Thanks Karen. There’s quite a bit going on with AIA and lean at this time, particularly in the realm of contracts and BIM. I’ll be writing more on it.
January 25th, 2008 at 11:21 pm
The concpets you describe seem to embrace design less as a single threaded event driven process and more as collaborative process leveraging team knowledge. Interesting read!
How would you suggest capturing learnings generated during design that may not contribute directly to the current project/
Tom Cagley
Software Process and Measurement Cast
www.spamcast.net
January 27th, 2008 at 8:42 am
We use a number of practices to notice and share what we are learning. Teams do frequent retrospectives. They range from simple plus-deltas at the end of every meeting to organized facilitated retrospectives at the conclusion of design cycles. Teams also maintain a shared space — “not here, not now” — for capturing topics that don’t fit with the current design activity.
January 30th, 2008 at 9:03 am
Thank you for this - great reference material for software design disciplines.
February 8th, 2008 at 11:14 am
I was particularly struck by bullet 3 “…work together to define the issues and produce decisions then design to those decisions.” which product design folks would call the “design rules”. It’s really difficult to get people to articulate design rules, however, the resulting products tend to have very long lives.
Kim Clark and Carliss Baldwin have some interesting stories about the success of the IBM system 360 and its design rules in their book “Design Rules”.
February 20th, 2008 at 10:36 am
Hal,
Other than the paired working, in aerospace and defense this is called Cost as an Idepedent Variable (CAIV). CAIV creates the “trade space” for making those decisions described in the post. More importantly CAIV allows the buyer to make those trades and understand how cost is seperated from technical performance. The notion that cost and performance as connected remains, but what are the trades between cost and performance when Cost is an Indepedent Variable.