Guides

A field guide to running design on a fit-out

Design management on a fit-out is a simple job described badly. You have a contract that promises information by certain dates, a supply chain that produces that information, and a client who wants to know it is happening. Everything else is scaffolding. This is the rhythm that works, learned across twenty years of London fit-out, from One Hyde Park to 21 Moorfields.

Start with the scope, not the programme

The first document worth building is not the programme. It is the scope of work: who designs what, to what level, by when, against which employer's requirements. Every dispute you will ever have on the job traces back to a line that should have been in this document. Read the contract and the EIR before you open a single drawing. Write the scope as a table, not prose, because tables get checked and prose gets skimmed.

The register is the job

Build the document register before the first drawing arrives, and build it with the fields you will need in month six, not week one: originator, volume, level, type, discipline, revision, CDE state, suitability code, planned and actual dates. A register missing the planned date column is a list, not a register. The TIDP, the deliverables programme and the drawing issue sheet should all be views of this one dataset. The moment you keep two copies, one of them is wrong, and you will not know which.

Name things once, properly

Agree the ISO 19650 naming convention in week one and generate numbers from it rather than typing them. A typed document number is a typo waiting for a dispute. The convention is not bureaucracy: it is what lets you find the right revision at 7pm the night before a design team meeting without phoning anyone.

Run the meetings off the register

A design team meeting without a deliverables look-ahead is a conversation. Bring the two-week look-ahead, the overdue list and the open RFI schedule, all filtered straight from the register. Actions get an owner, a date and a row. If it is not on a register by the end of the meeting, it did not happen.

Protect Friday afternoon

The weekly report is where design managers go to die. The fix is structural: if the register is live and the comments columns are kept honest during the week, the report is a summary of data that already exists, not an act of memory. Quantify everything. "14 of 18 packages approved, MEP two weeks behind baseline" survives scrutiny; "good progress on approvals" does not.

Capture changes when they happen

The variation agreed on a phone call and written down nowhere is the most expensive sentence in construction. Raise it against the deliverables it touches the same day, with scope and cost impact, even as a one-line placeholder. A thin record today beats a reconstructed one in adjudication.

None of this is clever. It is discipline, applied early, and it is exactly the discipline that consumes the first three weeks of every project when built by hand. That is the part dpow.app generates from your contract documents on day one, so the discipline is there before the job starts moving.