Design Management in Collaborative Environment

Abstract

The contemporary trends demand the involvement of managers / contractors in the control of design. Design is an iterative, generative, and multidisciplinary information based process by its nature. The involvement of various stakeholders makes it difficult to process, plan, and integrate. The most of subsequent activities including cost of construction projects related to design. It is also a fact that the changes in design particularly during design process and also during the construction phase are inevitable. The simple project management techniques are insufficient, not only to fulfill the requirement of integrated design, but also the design construction-integration. In this discourse, the importance of design management is emphasized. The research has developed to propose design parameters' information based model for design management. Model integrates two things: information about produced- required key design parameters and information of design changes during the design process. The information about produced-required parameters implements the use of design structure matrix for optimal sequence and crucial iterations. The optimal sequence and crucial iterations make possible to propagate the design changes information to affected design subsystem, immediately in collaborative environment. In this way, mangers can work proactively by knowing the crucial iteration obtained, after reducing non-generative loops and getting optimal sequence. The proposed model saves all information in database and can also execute the subsequent changes during construction phase for design construction integration. A prototype for the model has been developed using Microsoft Access-Visual Basic alongwith the design structure matrix user interface available for incorporating the results about optimal sequence and crucial iterations. The essence of this research is to make construction managers familiar with design management in order to fulfill the emerging needs of design & build and public private partnership based construction projects.