Musings on Design Standardization

Organizations of all kinds have long been engaged in efforts to standardize their designs. And designers have grown familiar with the usual outputs of those initiatives: documented CAD or BIM standards, template specifications, technical design requirements. This collateral is a common starting point for design consultants. Standards have become common in virtually every sector of the built environment, and they are ostensibly an acknowledgement that consistency drives cost reduction, speed-to-market and quality control.

The digital teams at Arup are increasingly fielding conversations from large organizations about how standardization can be pushed further. How can BIM teams ensure the creation of standard deliverables across multiple consultants? Can these deliverables facilitate reliable data extraction? How can procurement teams enforce the use of standard equipment? Is there automation that can facilitate the development of more granular, prescriptive contract specifications? The proliferation of digital tools opens a wealth of possibility to push the management, dissemination and enforcement of organizational standards.

But there is a cost inherent in this proposition. Standardization, in effect, centralizes and consolidates a set of organizational processes. It is a program that requires a dedicated set of stakeholders to make the decisions that would otherwise be made in a distributed fashion across an array of projects. And while the consolidation of decisions and processes can in some contexts be a good thing, it can also lead to inefficiencies caused by organizational bottlenecks. 

Inefficiency can also manifest in decisions about standards that inadequately consider the nuanced contexts of each project. What’s the point of standardizing if every project becomes an exception to the rule? Over-standardization can have the opposite of the desired effect: imposing bureaucratic processes that reduce project efficiency with no tangible benefit through consistency.

So what parts of the design are the right ones to standardize? In our experience, it depends on the goals of the organization. Start with a business objective, and establish what granular decisions are critical to its success. Additionally, consider what data is required to measure success against that business objective. Standardize incrementally, and constantly assess how your standardization steps have impacted your performance against your business objectives. And don’t be afraid to roll back standardization where it isn’t providing value.

We recently spoke with one of our clients about how standardization could help reduce the full life cycle environmental impact of their facilities. We discussed the decisions made by various organizational stakeholders that impact the success of this business objective. There is a role to play by global procurement teams, whose decisions around equipment and material sourcing impact the environmental footprint of the portfolio. Similarly, site design teams impact environmental performance through the equipment they select.

We found several ways to use standardization to link this business objective with the decisions that need to be made. If the facility portfolio is viewed as a “kit of parts” that contains equipment and building materials, these parts can be cataloged by the organization’s existing centralized procurement team in a way that captures the key characteristics needed to perform a robust environmental life cycle assessment. A standardized life cycle assessment process could then be carried out during each facility design phase to capture the life cycle costs of the site instance. Alternatively, the life cycle assessment could be conducted on the “kit of parts” itself, and environmental performance could be stored directly in the “kit of parts” catalog, in a way that eliminates the need for site teams to perform additional analytical tasks on each site project. However the centralized analysis needs to be very robust, as the results need to apply to a wide range of site configurations, climate zones and other variables. 

That added sophistication might be worth it if the site team considers environmental impact during early-stage facility configuration. Having the analysis results stored with each part in the catalogue allows for an immediate view of how decisions impact performance: a change to the selected equipment causes an instantaneous change to the environmental impact that is registered and validated by the project team.

A visualization of facility power usage efficiency. The "kit of parts" catalog contains all the information needed to visualize, so project teams can see the environmental impact of their decisions in real-time.

If, however, design teams do not have the latitude to broadly change site configurations to tune environmental impact, then the added sophistication of a centralized analysis approach isn’t as valuable. The right approach to standardization depends on the business objective, and where and how the related decisions are being made across the organization.

A sound approach for an organization in this scenario is to approach standardization incrementally. Begin with standardization of the procurement catalog, which helps provide broad value to an organization against a range of business objectives. Build the catalog in a scalable way, one that allows for lots of data to be easily stored and managed for all parts in the catalog. Ensure the right characteristics are stored to enable project teams to perform life cycle analyses on each project. Once these steps are standardized, the organization can determine if the value realized thus far warrants a study into the value of centralizing the analysis and extending the richness of data available in their “kit of parts” catalog.

Our engagements around standardization have helped illustrate that a good strategy considers people and process as well as technology. Standardization shifts responsibility around in an organization, and the evolution of teams and roles must be carried forward apace with new digital tools and workflows. We assist our clients with the organizational and technological changes needed to push standardization in support of broader business objectives. We call this offering Design Assets, because it centers on the “kit of parts” approach to strategically manage centralized and distributed decision-making and data collection. You can read more about our approach at arup.com.