Debuting Jan 16, 2021

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Special Featured Course! Only available at special times and special venues.
See our course schedule for list of dates and locations.

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Blueprints: Reading Between the Lines

Preparing quality design documents and understanding how to use them requires knowledge, experience and skills. This session explains clearly how quality plans, details, specifications should be produced and introduces expanded use of schedules and conformance declarations so that buildings constructed from quality design documents will perform as anticipated and so that minimum provisions for earthquake, energy, and component fabrications are clearly described with minimum requirements for codes and standards being accurately presented.

Quality design documents result in better cost estimating and eventually cost control during construction. They also significantly reduce mistakes and reduce the likelihood of inefficient (or even incorrect) design. The ability to read and understand design documents is also required to take advantage of a good design. This session reviews the basic skills for reading design documents and then builds on these with explanations about how to transpose the design into project management tasks, timelines and budgets. Concepts such as critical and parallel path tasks, and a cost control culture throughout a builders’ company will be explored. Quality assurance techniques will also be presented.

​This session is example based. The presentation will walk through sample designs and project management approaches, and present various scenarios to examine the result of various approaches and to underscore the learning concepts presented throughout this series. 
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Part 1: Basic skills and understanding plans and details
The ability to read and understand design documents is required to take advantage of a good design.  This session reviews the basic skills for reading design documents and then builds on these with explanations about how to convert the design into project management tasks, timelines and budgets.

Part 2: Project management using design documents to optimize construction, ensure compliance and to raise client satisfaction
The objective is to provide the homeowner with quality construction, adherence to schedules and to provide top value from the new home. Currently there is a trend of picking two of these three base attributes. This section of the course is to demonstrate how all three can be delivered to a client.

Part 3: Designing to streamline permitting, inspections and delivery to client
This session is example based. The presentation will walk through sample designs and project management approaches, and explore mock scenarios to examine the potential results of various approaches.