Development and project controls of design processes

In international multi-disciplinary engineering design projects, it is possible to plan the development and control of future project generation processes in the pre-design process, by calculating man-hours for each technical discipline of project activities and deliverables, and finding the overall project duration, and identifying the necessary resources. These calculations made in early stages of the projects enable monitoring, control and measuring of the later project design process, as well as being the most important tools for completing the projects on time and on budget, since they successfully provide the project milestones, pre-determined targets of project process at various percentages, using Earned Value Management Method. Thus, changes in the projects can be calculated instantly, the resources can be managed successfully and the necessary resource adjustments can be made easily. On the other hand, in architectural design dominant projects such as buildings and facilities projects, since there are not too many and too detailed measurable tools, and as there are no measurable tools such as design stage milestones, the numbers and the durations of the deliverables/activities cannot be determined exactly in design stages, in which case identification of changes in the projects become tough, monitoring and control of the projects become difficult, project progress and productivity cannot be calculated, and project schedule cannot be implemented as planned. All these issues cause delays in the related construction projects, also become the reasons for cost and time overruns in the projects, give rise to various disputes, disagreements, suspension, even cancellation of projects. In line with these explanations, this PhD thesis suggests a model on monitoring and control of design processes, and measurement of progress in architectural design driven projects. Almost all architectural projects are faced with the problem of completion in longer periods and at higher costs than planned, due to lack of project controls in design process. With a model like this one, measurable tools will be created in line with triple constraint of the project management, man-hours, as well as activities and deliverables will be calculated, and using Earned Value Method, milestones corresponding to different percentages in architectural design process, as well as project productivity will be measured. This model, identifying and re-specifying the project measurable tools in parallel to the requirements of the architectural design projects and the sector, specifically handling creative design process in line with differences of architectural designs for progress and productivity measurements of projects, will enable development and controls of project design processes. As the study achieves this, will examine CTR model used in engineering design driven projects, will compare it with development and controls implementation of architectural design driven projects, and will gather all results in a matrix. Thus, delays in the project schedule and exceeding budgets, as well as contextual deficiency of the architectural drawings, in other words, insufficient or erroneous design of such drawings without referring to the specifications, which are the mutual problems of the employer company and the design office generating the project, the problems that are the reasons for main disputes between the two parties, will be measured in this model with earned value application, architectural design projects will be continuously controllable, and by instantly recording any changes in the architectural projects, the issues that could cause disputes will be resolved at the very beginning. This study, throughout the path of engineering design projects? CTR, enables total project process to be measurable and controllable, forming a model where all design package can be clearly identified, in line with all development and controls processes of architectural design projects, including creativity of architectural designs. While providing this, the thesis uniquely defines all detailed deliverables and activities, identifies difficulty factor criteria, appoints man-hours for various deliverables, calculates the ratio of these man-hours to the resources, and identifies review and progress milestones for different design stages of architectural design projects, for the first time.