Chapter 6
The RIBA Plan of Work 2013
For organising projects by stages
Introduction
The RIBA Plan of Work was devised over 50 years ago, evolving over the years to reflect changes in the industry. This chapter gives an insight into the purpose of each stage and task bar of the RIBA Plan of Work 2013 and how it might usefully be harnessed and used by effective clients.
The RIBA Plan of Work 2013
The 2013 plan is procurement agnostic although it is possible for an architect, project team, project manager or a client to produce their own practice or project RIBA Plan of Work 2013, which sets out more specific tasks for a number of common procurement routes.
It sets out the tasks undertaken by the project team, rather than the design team alone, and it incorporates a new ‘In Use’ stage (Stage 7), recognising the increasing importance of this stage and the benefits of using design data for in-use purposes or to improve a building performance or, more crucially, by assisting the development of future projects by linking Stage 7 to Stage 0. Post-occupancy evaluation studies would usually be a part of this stage.
There are a number of crucial points that need to be considered when using the RIBA Plan of Work 2013:
- 1 Although the stages can be used to define very precise tasks, the plan’s limited word count cannot cover all of the detailed tasks undertaken on a project and it is intended solely to show the general thrust of activity at each project stage rather than the detail. A core initiative of the RIBA Plan of Work 2013 is to provide the detailed support documents that define the specifics of who does what and when.
- 2 The plan sets out the tasks of the project team but does not allocate these to a particular party. As such, is not intended for use as a contractual document although the supporting tools assist in preparation of project specific multidisciplinary schedules of services and a design responsibility matrix for each member of the project team.
- 3 While it is available in a digital format, the plan is still widely used as an A3 pdf either as a generic template or a procurement-specific practice or project.
In summary, the RIBA Plan of Work 2013 is an essential project tool but the detailed and specific requirements dictated by different clients and the subtle nuances of each and every procurement strategy cannot possibly be captured on a single piece of paper. The plan therefore works alongside other tools that precisely set out, for every project, the detail of who does what and when.
What are the eight project stages and how do they impact on the client?
The eight project stages align with the UK government’s suite of level 2 BIM (Building Information Modelling) documentation. The eight stages are:
Stage 0 – Strategic Definition
The purpose of Stage 0 is simple but strategic: it is to ensure that a building is required to meet the needs set out in the client’s Business Case and Strategic Brief – perhaps a refurbishment, space planning exercise or extension would meet the objectives in a more cost effective and sustainable manner? Clients may wish to consider appointing a RIBA Accredited Client Adviser at this early stage to provide them with important help, for example in the form of a route map, the services of a critical project friend and step-by-step guidance through the complex and demanding work within Stage 0 and all subsequent stages.
▯ Figure 6.1: Exploring the Concept
Stage 1 – Preparation and Brief
Having determined that a building project is required, Stage 1 puts more specific detail into the Strategic Brief with the generation of the Initial Project Brief. This brief will describe the Project Objectives in greater detail, including Quality Objectives, Project Outcomes, Sustainability Aspirations and other project parameters including the functional requirements and the Project Budget. Feasibility Studies may be required to confirm that the brief can be accommodated on a given site. These tests can be essential and may flush out core briefing issues before design work begins in earnest. The project team will be assembled during Stage 1.
Stage 2 – Concept Design
During Stage 2, the Concept Design is prepared. The architect typically leads this process although the lead designer (who may be someone in the same practice or the same person on a smaller project) needs to ensure that strategic coordination issues are considered and embedded into the proposals. An RIBA Accredited Client Adviser would provide a range of useful services at this point.
The Concept Design can be presented and prepared using a number of different presentation tools. Many architects still use physical models to convey their proposals whereas others use sketches and freehand techniques, although the majority of practices now utilise various software packages to illustrate their proposals in 3D, including high quality visualisations (see Figure 6.1). Clients (particularly public sector clients) may require compulsorily use of BIM and, regardless of whatever technology is used, the client should require high quality information to be prepared by the design team for sign-off. BIM is described in Chapter 8.
Stage 3 – Developed Design
With the Concept Design signed off by the client, Stage 3 is fundamentally the lead designer’s space. More detailed structural and mechanical and electrical exercises and analysis are undertaken, along with more stringent and detailed cost exercises. The Stage 3 Information Exchanges should comprise a coordinated design aligned to the Project Budget and validated against the Concept Design. While the design develops during this stage and, in some instances, certain aspects of the Concept Design may need to be revisited and discussed with the client, a fundamental reexamination of the Concept Design should not be undertaken. The outputs from this stage should be sufficiently robust to enable a planning application to be made. In some instances, a client may choose to use the Stage 2 outputs for this purpose, to keep cost down before the certainty of planning consent is achieved, although it needs to be remembered that the lack of validation that Stage 3 brings can present significant risks. Normally, it would only be experienced clients working with an established design team who would take this high-risk approach.
Stage 4 – Technical Design
The Technical Design stage delivers the detail required to build the project and consists of a mixture of design information produced by the design team and technical designs produced by specialist subcontractors appointed by the contractor.
The ‘slicing and dicing’ of Stage 4 will depend on the procurement route. On a contractor-led project, design work will be undertaken concurrently, whereas on a traditional project the design team will produce their Stage 4 information which forms the basis of the tender, with the successful contractor’s specialist subcontractors producing their design work after the award of the Building Contract and in line with the Contractor Design Portion (CDP) clauses of the contract.
Stage 5 – Construction
Stage 5 consists solely of the construction process, including any prefabrication activities that may take place off-site. The role of the design team in Stage 5 depends on the form of construction contract used, with the extent of the team’s involvement dependent on the procurement route and the needs of a specific client and/or contractor. The architect may or may not be the contract administrator and have on-site inspection duties.
Stage 6 – Handover and Close Out
Handing over a building has become increasingly complex due to the number of systems that are integrated into constructions. These might vary from a complex Building Management System (BMS) to a home cinema but either way the systems need to be commissioned and the users trained how to use them. Stage 6 acknowledges that the handover process can be complex, requiring consideration at Stage 1.
Stage 6 is currently framed around the traditional one-year period required to close out the Building Contract, tying-in with the initial three year aftercare period suggested in BSRIA’s Soft Landings initiative.
Stage 7 – In Use
The RIBA Plan of Work has predominately been geared to the design and construction stages of a project, although the 2007 plan alluded to some In Use activities. The 2013 plan takes this a significant step further, sowing the seeds for significant tasks during this stage. These tasks are likely to be undertaken by new and different project team members but the crucial point is that Stage 7 will increasingly act as the gateway to a new project and Stage 7 to 0 activities will increasingly be part of framing the Strategic Brief.
The RIBA anticipates that a greater number of clients will harness this stage – particularly those responsible for building estates – to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of their future buildings by using Building Performance Evaluation (BPE) techniques that allow the analysis of their existing estates and for the data from such studies to form the basis of decisions for future estate management, including the briefing, design and construction of projects.
Do the eight plans of work task bars impact on the client?
The task bars and their purposes are as follows:
- 1 Core Objectives
The core objectives are indicative of the high level tasks that are undertaken during a stage. A Plan of Work glossary exists at www.ribaplanofwork.com/Help/Glossary.aspx and defines the capitalised and bold tasks in the plan of work in greater detail.
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2 Procurement
The procurement task bar is generic in the plan of work template, becoming specific when a bespoke practice or project RIBA Plan of Work 2013 is generated.
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3 Programme
The programme task bar has a single core function. It acknowledges that the general thrust of activity goes from Stage 0 to 7 but that on certain forms of procurement stages tasks will overlap.
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4 (Town) Planning
The RIBA Plan of Work 2013 contains planning as a default activity at the end of Stage 3 but allows submission of a Planning Application at Stage 2 in a project or practice plan, subject to the risks being understood and/or mitigated.
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5 Suggested Key Support Tasks
The suggested key support tasks mainly cover the supporting Project Strategies and other core tasks that support the core objectives set out for each stage. They ensure that topics like sustainability, buildability, and health and safety are considered holistically as the design is progressively fixed through each project stage.
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6 Sustainability Checkpoints
The Sustainability Aspirations of a project are set at Stage 1 as part of the briefing process and are a core objective. The Sustainability Strategy is produced by the design team in response to these aspirations, at Stages 2 to 4 inclusive, and the contractor may also contribute to the strategy, as well as driving its content, at Stage 5.
The Sustainability Checkpoints task bar has been created specifically for the online version of the RIBA Plan of Work 2013 where the specific checkpoint activities for each stage are set out.
- 7 Information Exchanges
- The Information Exchange task bar does not contain a great deal of detail but is fundamental in driving cultural change around the information that is exchanged at each project stage.
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8 UK Government Information Exchanges
The UK Government considers certain Information Exchanges (data transactions) to be between the design team and the contractor, and is primarily interested in the data included in the Contractor’s Proposals and the Building Contract and then the data provided at project handover for incorporating into CAFM (computer aided facilities management) or asset management software systems to ensure the more effective running of the project and to assist other Stage 7 activities.
What can we expect in the future?
In many respects BIM is an unfortunate acronym that focuses on information management and/or modelling. Increasingly, the term is being used as a description for change wrapped around many subject matters. The reality is that the disruptive digital revolution has just touched the built environment sector and profound and exciting changes are likely in the next five years, made possible by developments in cloud technologies, big data, the Internet of Things and artificial intelligence.
The RIBA Plan of Work 2013 is fully enabled for this exciting new world. ◼
What are the key characteristics and qualities of successful clients?
Clients are, self-evidently, at the heart of the life of any professional but the spectrum of behaviours that they exhibit never cease to amaze, amuse or infuriate professional advisers. It is worth looking at three specific attributes of the advice or the advisers that could be used as metrics for that spectrum.
Adviser or processor?
The first aspect is whether the client uses their professional as an adviser or as an instrument of process. The more satisfying (for the professional) role is to be a wise and trusted adviser as opposed to an operator of a process. This, however, requires that the client firstly knows what they do not know (cue Rumsfeld quotations) and are more than comfortable to admit it. That, in itself, is frequently difficult for many organisations and individuals when there is potential discomfort (or competitive risk) in admitting lack of Mastery of The Universe. At least as important is the client’s ability to listen to advice, question the logic behind it, understand that logic and ultimately discuss the advice openly and constructively. This process by itself can unnerve and challenge weaker advisers but in so doing can help the client become a more effective user of professional advice. It is worth remembering the anecdotal comment attributed to JP Morgan (when a steel-man rather than a banker), who is supposed to have said, ‘I want a lawyer who will tell me how I can do what I want to do, not whether or not I can do it.’
Proactive or reactive?
The better clients will value proactive advice rather than advisers who wait to be instructed. A good adviser is always thinking about their clients – particularly those whom they value and want either to keep or attract – and will be looking and listening to events and news, and offering an interpretation of either for those clients as a friendly (while never fee-seeking) thought. The better clients will react constructively to such thoughts and respect the willingness of the adviser to put their client’s interest above the natural inclination of compliance people whose instinct will generally be to suppress any such thoughts in the absence of a formal engagement.
Advice or body shop?
There is a great deal of work performed by ‘consultants’ that does not honestly qualify as the provision of robust, independent professional advice but is merely the outsourcing of a task for which the client may not, currently, have either sufficient or sufficiently competent staff to perform the task. This sort of outsourcing of what might generally be the reasonable activity of the client has a couple of unwelcome side effects: first, that the standing and respect of the ‘adviser’ in such circumstances is significantly diminished, since
Perspective
by Dr Timothy Stone CBE
it is not as highly valued as in other cases. These are often the cases that create the pejorative comments about ‘consultants’ around Whitehall and other parts of government – the negativity reflecting often genuine concerns about the value for money of the process. The second consequence of these sorts of engagements is the relative deskilling (or failure to upgrade skills) over time within those firms for whom this type of work is their more common mode of operation.
Conclusions
Firstly, that clients generally receive the advice they deserve over time. The relationship between client and adviser is symbiotic. Most good professional advisers are part of businesses that are more concerned with about the medium term profitability of the business and less about the impact of any action on quarterly sales figures – indeed it is arguable that the best advisers cannot function effectively in such a short-term financial environment as the quality of the advice will almost inevitably suffer.
Secondly, that both advisers and clients can both become better and more effective in their relationships with each other by identifying which mode suits each the best and then focusing carefully on the maintenance of that role with each other.
Thirdly, that the relationship itself, outside the execution of formal engagements, should be nurtured and supported by each side of the relationship continuing to think about the other. Advisers will see market or technical developments emerging before the majority of their clients. A wise adviser will use their acute knowledge to help clients understand the impact of the development – not in endless newsletters, flyers or spam-fodder emails (few of which are ever genuinely read by the real client) but in quick phone calls, coffee catch-ups or the occasional instant message. This on its own can be an extremely effective way of improving the quality of the advice when delivered, in that the adviser and the client can then be far more aware of each other’s skills, concerns, focus and challenges at the point that the work begins. The context can be a strong underpinning of the engagement itself.