Design management in the building process - A review of current literature

The architecture, engineering and construction (AEC) industry has experienced the declining productivity and some of this is due to deficiencies in building design. The focus on energy efficiency and sustainability makes it even more important to reduce such deficiencies. The managing of building design phases might be one of the most challenging forms of management in the AEC industry, i.e. it involves managing both outputs as drawings and creativity as minds. There must be enough room for creativity so that a building project can evolve to serve clients' needs. There are pooled, sequential, reciprocal and intensive interdependencies in building design that need to be handled or coordinated differently. A particular building design phase most likely consists of all the four types, yet dominance shifts between them through sub-phases. The logic of creative processes is difficult to understand and, therefore, to manage properly. In this paper, these four interdependencies and their coordination are described based on the literature review. The key findings indicate that the reliance on the same management approach to handle both reflective and sequential dependencies might be contra productive. (C) 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.