Services / Architecture practices
// architecture
The drawing work is what everyone trained for. The hours go to the correspondence around it. We build the systems that carry that load.
None of this is design work, but all of it has to happen before design can be issued. It is the part that quietly sets how many projects you can carry.
The scope came from a site conversation. The stages come from a template last updated two projects ago. The number comes from digging out what you charged on a similar job eighteen months back. Assembling it takes longer than deciding it.
The lodgement is a defined process. The work is the chasing around it: a survey from the surveyor, a report from the arborist, owner details from a client who is not thinking about your deadline, then a request for further information that restarts the whole thing on a shorter clock.
Structural, civil, building surveyor, sometimes landscape and an energy rater. Each one is waiting on somebody else before they can issue, and you are the switchboard. Most practices run this on memory and a spreadsheet that goes stale in a fortnight.
During construction it becomes RFIs, variations, progress claims and site instructions. All of it is contractually significant, and most of it lives in an inbox rather than a record. Six months later somebody asks when a variation was approved.
Every build starts from your workflows rather than a template, so treat these as the shape of the work rather than a menu.
Your rate card, your stage descriptions, your current exclusions, and a shortlist of genuinely comparable past projects with what they were quoted and what they cost to deliver. You get a populated draft and the context to price it. You still set the fee.
One place that knows which checklist items have arrived, who owes each one, how long they have been outstanding, and what the statutory date is. It sends the reminder in your wording and escalates to you only when a date is genuinely at risk.
Each RFI, variation and claim logged against the project as it happens, with its date, author, status and decision. Progress claims checked against the schedule of values before certification. The record assembles as a by-product of the work.
SQM Architects, a Melbourne practice working with property developers, ran three separate subscriptions that between them covered parts of enquiry management, project tracking and reporting. None of the three talked to the others, so the joins were done by hand, and the joins were where the time went.
The build paid for itself inside twelve months. None of it was clever. It was three tools becoming one system, and a set of handoffs that used to need a person no longer needing one.
$ qdp start --practice architecture
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