Hello, I’m Dennis Diener the owner of Redline Architectural Consultants, LLC.
I am a registered architect with over 35 years’ experience in the industry. I have had a broad range of experience in my career, as director of facilities for a major healthcare system in southeast Michigan, and director of real estate for a major global engineering/architectural firm. I directed and oversaw large capital investment campaigns (Healthcare: $850 million special projects and infrastructure improvements), real estate, programming, planning, design and construction projects. As director of real estate for the E/A firm, my portfolio included over 150 locations nationwide and over 10 million square feet of tenant space. Prior to that, I was the Regional Quality Officer for the same company. In that role I managed the company’s quality management program for the Midwest and New England region. This region included over 1400 employees in 15 offices across Michigan, Indiana, Ohio, Kentucky, Washington DC and the New England States. I worked with other regional and global quality officers in the development of policies and procedures to monitor and increase quality metrics company wide. I had also been involved in numerous constructability and quality coordination reviews for numerous high profile projects, acting as an owners representative and independent peer review consultant.
Over the course of my career, I have seen the struggles architects face with shorter design schedules and reduced project fees. This has directly affected document quality and services. Remaining profitable is key to the firms survival, but something has to go – and it’s typically the time spent on quality. The “cutting back” is typically the time dedicated to the task of reviewing, checking and coordinating documents. Documents may still get checked, but the appropriate amount of time is not allocated to really perform a thorough review. What this does is increase the amount of time spent in the construction administration (CA) phase, by having to answer increased quantities of RFI’s and clarifications for the contractors, inevitability reducing your profitability. It can also expose firms to increased liability due to errors and omissions, increased project costs and project delays.
The number one quality issue is cross-coordination or interdisciplinary reviews. This is the area where the majority of the errors occur, and is the contractors biggest area for increased project cost through “Change Orders”. For architects and engineers, this is also the area where we can get the most bang for the buck in a project’s quality budget. Allocating more time in your budget for these interdisciplinary reviews is well worth the time and money spent. It reduces your time spend in the CA phase, for updating and clarifying your documents and answering RFI’s, and can help to keep you within your project budget. It also reduces the potential for increased project costs from contractor change orders, and helps to maintain construction schedules and can help to minimize project schedule delays. Of course, the additional benefit is the reduced risk of financial and legal liability.
This website is dedicated to helping owners reducing their projects cost and minimizing cost overruns and architects or engineers interested in increasing the quality of their documents and services, reducing their exposure to liability, and maintaining profitability.
If you are an “Owner” and are interested in controlling the cost of your projects, or a “Design Professional” and looking to reduce liability and increasing the quality of your documents please feel free to contact me.
Sincerely,
