PRACTICAL CONNECTION ASSIGNMENT 1
PRACTICAL CONNECTION ASSIGNMENT
Pranav P. Shauche
University of the Cumberlands,
Hutton School of Business and the Plaster Graduate School of Business,
Williamsburg, Kentucky
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I am an Architect by profession and most of the projects we work are collaborative effort.
Each design project typically goes through 5 phases to architectural services. These phases are -
Schematic Design, Design Development, Construction Documents, Bidding, and Construction
Administration.
By studying about Execution of the Project, I realized it is the phase where most of the
deliverables are developed and completed. This frequently feels like the meat of the project since
a ton is occurring during this time, like status reports and gatherings, improvement updates, and
execution reports. A "kick-off" meeting ordinarily denotes the beginning of the Project Execution
stage where the groups included are educated regarding their duties.
To relate this with Architectural projects, we typically have project kick-off meetings
with the client who acts as a prime sponsor. After understanding the scope of the project, and
getting clarity on design vision, executing stage starts with Construction Documents.
Here, we majorly get the subject matter experts together and put together a dedicated
team for the project. The project manager picks interior designers, life safety experts. Project
architects, and support staff like associates to get a package ready of delivery. Architects and
their support staff work on the exterior shell of the building and create three-dimensional model
as well as physical scale models of the building. The interior designers start work on casework
details, wall coverings, ceiling designs and floor types. Life safety experts make sure the
building codes are complied as per National Safety Standards. Project manager organizes regular
team meetings to keep updated with work progress.
After initial sprint run of work, a defined project management plan is put in place.
Deadlines are marked and team members are notified what level of work completion is expected
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from them. Depending on how the team move ahead, reallocation of resources can be considered
if any team needs extra support. Work load is shared to meet the deadlines.
Sometimes, we don’t have inhouse expertise on certain topics. To provide a recent
example, we were working on redoing the parking layout in the Emergency Department of a
hospital. Helipad needed to be installed as a part of expansion of the project and making it world
class. We collaborated with experts on this topic to understand circulation, clearances, context
and functionality of the helipad. As per directions received, we made necessary updates to our
design. The proposed design was successfully approved by the code officials of the city. I
personally worked on the parking plan and felt accomplished after this incident.
A part of our work involves getting inputs and drawings from lighting consultants,
plumbing consultants and mechanical consultants. We have set up a tracking system in our
collaborative cloud model of the project. It smartly tracks any new updates that are made by
consultants and make the changes in real-time so everyone is aware and no time is wasted of
unnecessary meetings.
Project Manager sets up bi-weekly meetings to check on the status of the assigned tasks.
These status meetings are important to plan the pace of project deliverables. Now a days we have
started using the MS Project, where each team member can separate their tasks into Ongoing,
Completed and Future Tasks. This makes it easy to track the team members who work remotely
and without much supervision.
Project schedules are created depending on the reports received from the team members.
The future tasks and time spent by the resources is tracked and mapped. It helps the project
manager to understand and estimate the budget of the project. If any unanticipated problem is
encountered, we have set number of man-hours for resolving them. Sometimes, it is more
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complex, and the overall project plan needs to be modified. The project monitoring phase often
has separate set of requirements, but in most cases happen simultaneously with the Execution
Phase.
To sum it up, we make sure that the project gets constructed, supervised and completed as
per the original intent and the client is satisfied with the final deliverables.
References
Pinto, J.K. (2019). Project Management: Achieving Competitive Advantage (5th ed). Boston:
Pearson
