Project Cell: Cellular Organization of the Building Design Process

Abstract

The construction sector plays an important role in most economies; therefore, any waste reduction in a building's life cycle will result in a significant benefit to the economy. It is at the building design phase that most costs and wastes are defined for the entire building life cycle. Moreover, many forms of waste are also accumulated during the design phase itself. The objective of this article is to present a new approach for organizing and managing the building design phase in a more effective and efficient way. This approach, called Project Cell, promotes concurrent engineering and lean management principles to achieve better performance during the design of a building. The Project Cell approach was implemented in the design process of a generic kindergarten project for the Brazilian Ministry of Education. This case study determined that approximately 2.5% of the total project effort was due to rework and 7.5% was due to discarded drawings based on team decisions. Furthermore, after the construction of 16 buildings in several locations across Brazil, no requests for time extensions or additional work expenses were reported based on design errors or execution difficulties. In this case study the implementation of project cell resulted in better productivity in the building design process as well as more effective building designs when compared to the traditional departmentalized approaches. With such evidence in mind, the authors believe that introducing Project Cell may be valuable contribution to CEM Body of Knowledge.