Better Product Selection = Better Projects
In testimony I gave over thirty years ago to a Congressional committee investigating building failures, I stated the following to explain how design professionals learn from their mistakes: “Good judgment is the product of experience and experience is the product of bad judgment.”
You’ve probably noticed a theme developing in my prior posts — chances of project success increase when you leverage technology to make your design process smarter and more efficient. In particular, we believe successful projects result from smarter product selection, which as you’ll recall, represents fifty percent of the construction cost.
We know this first-hand from the decades of advisory services to design professionals and project management services to owners that we’ve had the honor to provide. Over and over, we realized that the crux of many of the hairy project disputes we dealt with had to do with inappropriate product selection. The ramifications of these mistakes for designers materialized in real terms; unanticipated re-work or in the worst cases, claims against them.
In fact, recognizing and elevating the importance of product selection is why Brad Cronk and I started Arazoo.
Successful product selection is all about easy access to the hard-won product knowledge learned by your colleagues. For nearly all the 200+ firms we’ve spoken with over the past two years, no internal system exists to systematically capture, retain, and supplement product information for future use.
This is a job made simple by technology. When your knowledge is searchable, when it’s sortable, when it’s automatically collected from your everyday workflow, that’s when it becomes an invaluable resource. When you know how products work at the basic level, you can elevate the conversations you have about them with your colleagues. And when you have the most information possible at your fingertips, you reduce the risk of re-work or avoidable RFIs because of a faulty assumption or outdated spec sheet.
When you and your colleagues are not spending chunks of time racking your brains trying to recall what you used, where you used it, in what application, and with which accessories, you’ll see how much faster and more smoothly your work progresses.
An agile, digital-first product selection process takes advantage of the best of both digital and person-to-person communication and translates to tangible benefits: better product information becomes available to your whole team; more and better product insights get contributed (and saved for future reference!) by everyone; and better-informed decisions get made, opening up possibilities for product and material application innovations.
Which brings us back to my original notion: successful projects are the result of successful product selection. And today, successful product selection is the result of adopting digital tools that enable easy access to data-rich product knowledge, ensure automatic saving of new information, and allow you to generate deeper insights about how products and materials inform your designs. Do this, and your firm will possess a new asset that will continue to increase in value from project to project.
Barry LePatner, Hon. AIA, has worked with Architects, Engineers and Designers to make their businesses smarter and more efficient for four decades. Barry is the Co-Founder and President of Arazoo.
Originally published at arazoo.tumblr.com.
