4.3 There must be integration of the work of designers and specialists. A design team for building work may include an architect, structural engineer, electrical services engineer, heating and ventilating services engineer, public health engineering consultant, landscape architect and interior designer. Some or all may have further specialists working either with them or for them. Installers - contractors, subcontractors and sub subcontractors - are. also likely to have design responsibilities.
4.4 A graphic description of the complexity of the design process, and its potential for lack of co-ordination, was submitted to the Review by Mr James Nisbet, a senior chartered quantity surveyor12 and former President of the Quantity Surveyors' Division of the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS).
"Architects are expected to produce working drawings and the builder is expected to carry out works in accordance with such drawings. The structural engineer relies upon the manufacturers to design the connections for a steel frame. The services engineer expects a subcontractor, appointed after the builder, to prepare all installation (i.e. working) drawings. Design co-ordination before construction starts is therefore impossible and ad hoc alterations on site are inevitable. Further, the tender and contract procedures adopted by architects and service engineers are at variance one with the other and this leads to difficulties and animosity in the management of cost and the administration of the contract conditions. Architects' designs are usually the subject of Bills of Quantities but services engineers resolutely require tenders to be based on drawings and specifications. The common range of conditions of contract place responsibility for the cost of a project solely upon one person, usually an architect or engineer. The procedures adopted by the services engineer effectively prevent the architect or engineer from exercising control over the cost of the services element of a project. Urgent attention should therefore be given to the elimination of this muddle."
4.5 A detailed check list of the design process is required so that responsibilities can be clearly allocated amongst the designers13. The British Property Federation's Manual contains a detailed check list in its Appendix I, and a draft Building Services Research and Information Association (BSRIA) report14 does the same in more detail for building services engineers. The client should ensure that all consultants are appointed under mutually interlocking contracts which specifically define their duties and responsibilities and set timescales for their implementation. The lead manager and/or design leader should then take responsibility for co-ordinating the work of all the consultants15. This also needs to be set out in the main contract documentation. It is vital that the contractor knows who is responsible for which elements of the design and when they will be available.
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12 Evidence by Mr James Nisbet, March 1994. Mr Nisbet also kindly supplied a copy of his book "Fair and Reasonable - Building Contracts from 1550", Stoke Publications 1993. Conditions of contract in the Middle Ages were clearly onerous. A contract in York in 1335 required the carpenter to complete work within three months on pain of excommunication. A mason failing to complete a contract for the Duke of York in 1434 was threatened with prison and confiscation of property and goods! (Nisbet, op. cit, page 12)
13 There is a schedule of services to be provided by the architect in SFA/92 ("Standard Form of Agreement for the Appointment of an Architect"). But it clearly does not satisfy some clients. "The standard document is very poor in this connection, particularly the RIBA Agreement SFA/92" (BPF final report to the Review, page 4).
14 "The Allocation of Design Responsibilities for Building Engineering Services - a code of conduct to avoid conflict", compiled by CJ Parsloe, unpublished draft of May 1994. Publication of the report was scheduled for July 1994 as this Report was going to the printers.
15 In some projects the client's representative, the lead manager and the design leader may be the same person.