Leading Indicators for the Prevention of Building Design Defects

Design deliverable quality is essential to the successful construction of buildings because it greatly affects overall project performance and efficiency. Designs with errors and omissions often lead to project cost overruns, schedule delays, change orders, and/or construction rework. Consequently, the industry needs to maintain a greater awareness of design deliverable quality deficiencies and associated leading indicators, in order to anticipate or predict the quality of design deliverables, and thereby to improve project outcomes.

To address these issues, the Construction Industry Institute (CII) created Research Team 320a (RT-320a), Definition and Measurement of Engineering/Design Deliverable Quality for Building Facilities, and the team formulated an essential research question:

“How can design deliverable quality improvement be achieved for building projects with a set of leading indicators that promote proactive mitigation or preventive actions?”

Responding to this essential question, RT-320a sought to identify the more common, high-impact design defects that were associated with the most problematic building design deliverables, and to develop a proactive process to assess design quality and to enable project teams to take timely, appropriate action. During the research process, RT-320a developed or identified several important deliverables:

• Eleven Drivers of Design Quality
• Seven building design deliverables that 51 surveyed professionals identified as being the most problematic for quality
• Forty-seven key design defects from among the problematic deliverables, which the team discovered by conducting phone interviews with 66 professionals, along with the causal factors and types of impacts associated with these defects
• One-hundred-and-sixty leading indicator questions, based on the causal factors the team identified
• A proof-of-concept Excel-based tool (the Design Quality Leading Indicator Tool) that incorporates the 160 leading indicator questions and allows users to identify defects or potential design risks in order to improve the quality of design deliverables in a timely fashion

Collectively, the RT-320a research offers its readers the guidance to improve overall building design quality by focusing on intervention and prevention of design defects in quality-problematic deliverables.