Theme three: stakeholder relationship regarding design quality

Sub-Themes for Theme Three

Importance of appropriate stakeholder interactions & engagement Challenges exist for stakeholder interactions:

• Difficult, time consuming

• Conflict of interest among stakeholders

• Messy communications

• Language barrier

Need for Competent and skilful architects Use of facilitating tools:

• Post Occupancy Evaluation (POE)

• Design Quality Indicator (DQI)

Table 4-5: Sub-themes under the Theme Three

With the complexity of design quality and its relationship with several stakeholder groups, an appropriate strategy for stakeholder management during the project process becomes paramount. In this regard, the participants highlighted the role of interactions and engagement.

‘The more dialogue and interaction we have with the end-users, the more confident we become that the quality of design is appropriate.’ [P1-4]

Participants referred to a series of formal communications, workshops and meetings as well as informal conversations as various channels of they have with other groups. This point was recurrent in the responses.

‘It is lot more about communications, and workshops and meetings and discussions; we get to speak to same format, less formalised way, more personal interactions.’ [P1-6]

There was a lot of emphasis on engagement of stakeholders especially that of the user group in the process in order to achieve design quality.

‘It is important to get the stakeholders involved at the outset and throughout the process… If you do not do it, you will end up with a design that fails.’ [P1-1]

‘It has to be all considered so all users have their sort of input into the final design then that creates a strong design’ [P1-9]

However, the participants found the interaction process not challenge-free. They described the engagement process as ‘difficult and formidable’ [P1-1] and the communications ‘quite messy’ [P1-6]. They also referred to ‘conflict of interests’ between different groups [P1-4] and the presence of a ‘language barrier’ [P1-2].

Evidence in the dataset on conflict of interest was evident. For example, clinicians sometimes consider their own wants more than that of the patients, as mentioned by P1-1 and P1-8. Contractors sometimes show low interest in design quality but just in the cost factors, according to P1-8 and P1-11. P1-3 even said the facility managers could wrongly influence aesthetics elements, which can be considered as irrelevant to their needs.

‘Some people are concerned with the money, some people concerned with cleaning and maintaining, some with how you carry out the clinical procedures, and others who looking for more difficult-to-define aspirations, the aesthetics or the design philosophy’ [P1-6].

Appropriate interaction and relationship among stakeholders is seen as highly important considering that they usually have varying power to influence decisions, as demonstrated in the previous section. To deal with this, P1-1 believed that stakeholder groups should be met individually in order to understand their influence as well as needs but also to ‘equally make them understand that there are several other groups with different perspectives and

needs’. P1-9, interestingly, was of the opinion that the best way is to gather all stakeholders together so that they can talk and communicate with each other and the decisions can be made quicker, as a result.

With respect to the language barrier, P1-1 urged the importance of asking the appropriate questions. Similarly, P1-6 warned not to ‘lose people through technical summaries’. P1-2 also pointed out that sometimes architects fail to explain their work in a jargon-free, understandable manner for ordinary people and gave an example of such happening in a project where this caused considerable project delay.

Managing stakeholders and their interactions demand skilful architects and managers. Macmillan (2006), by referring to the complexity of stakeholder relationships, urged the need for a skilled facilitation process. Evidence was also present in the responses. P1-4 believed properly discovering stakeholders’ needs is ‘an art or skill that you gain through experience’. P1-10 thought it is a technique to ‘draw out information’ and that the questions ‘have to be worded quite cleverly’. P1-1’s comment was also noteworthy:

‘You need to be a politician, a headmaster, a psychologist, you need to have all those attributes to bring these different people into one room and have a meaningful and useful conversation’.

To facilitate effective interactions and communications, a range of tools are also used from drawings, mock-ups, and 3D visualisation to evaluation and appraisal methods. The role of Post-Occupancy Evaluations (POEs) and the Design Quality Indicator (DQI) was a major point of reference during the interviews. All participants asserted the value of POEs for design quality evaluation.

‘I think it is absolutely fundamental and of paramount importance to evaluate projects by post occupancy evaluation’. [P1-1]

‘I think it is extremely useful, it might dust a few myths in terms of what we believe we are doing it right’. [P1-7]

P1-4 and P1-6 talked about the role of POE in providing learnings and informing future projects. According to P1-1, conducting POE can reveal where stakeholders’ needs were not understood appropriately. He gave an example:

‘A portable heating system shows lack of understanding or engagement in the design process’

Despite the importance, most believed POEs were not implemented adequately or flawlessly. P1-9 and P1-11 mentioned they do POEs only sometimes. P1-7 and P1-1 echoed by saying:

‘The evaluation happens so seldom… in my experience, you design a building and you will start a new one and do not look back.’ [P1-7]

‘People can't be bothered to, we just do not do it, or it gets evaluated in an unstructured way’. [P1-1]

The reasons for not conducting POEs were said by the participants to be mostly time constraints and not seeing the value of it. Hadjri and Crozier (2009) reported similar barriers and some others such as cost, skills and lack of agreed and reliable indicators.

The discussion on tools delved into the use and usefulness of DQI tool. Six of the participants mentioned they had used DQI tool (or its healthcare version then, AEDET2_{) in}

their projects. They had a positive opinion on the DQI conceptual framework with P1-6 referring to it as the ‘best and universal summary’ of design quality evaluation criteria.

Operationally though, there were altered opinions. P1-2 found it ‘operationally too complicated’ and believed a smaller number of questions are more suitable. P1-1 lamented that ‘a meeting of 30 minutes is insufficient for a £30 million project’. P1-2, who himself was a contributor to DQI development, believed the usefulness is somewhere else.

‘First to facilitate a conversation within an organisation that never normally happened before. Second to show them what design is. Most people think the architecture is only about pretty pictures’ [P1-2]

He also added that although people score the statements, what is valuable is the conversation happening between participants on the design quality attributes. As discussed in section 2.2.4.1, Gann et al. (2003) suggested the same and called the DQI as ‘a tool for thinking’. Most participants were of the opinion that the tool’s outcomes are not often integrated into the decisions with P1-11 saying in the majority of cases, it is just to ‘tick a box’. P1-7 restated by saying ‘there is no transition between the results coming out of the DQI and how the decisions are made’. P1-2 believed this integration is ‘quite difficult’.