When 100% Means Less

One of the strongest drawing sets in my portfolio is for a project that may never be built. This was one of those capstone projects that had it all. The project was a new church building in North Carolina and included working with the architect for the best acoustical performance and sightlines, high-performance AVL systems, distributed AV and digital signage as well as classroom support. Further, the range of spaces went beyond the auditorium, including broadcast studio booths, lobbies, classrooms, youth and kids rooms, offices and even an outdoor lawn performance space. The full breadth of the associated disciplines I work on was on display.

While I was proud of the documentation, eventually using it as an interview discussion piece for my next role, signs started showing that the project risked becoming little more than those drawings. Budget consciousness was part of the design development process as is typical. Usual means of phasing the project to defer costs and flipping to some lower-performance gear were par for the course.

It wasn’t until nearly the end of the drawings process that the last cuts came. These cuts weren’t an axe heading for the tree–these were Fern Gully levels of deforestation rolling in. I had already completed the CD95 (95% complete Construction Documents) set sent out to the owner. Only a few more details needed to be buttoned up and a handful of coordination items sorted. The advance from CD95 to CD100 stepped backward. Details were removed, devices deleted and systems excised as the client adopted a serious budget reset.

A whole wing of scope was reassigned. Functions removed. The change in the project required a change in the documentation. Months crafting the set would now deliver a fraction of its original potential. Taking pride in my documentation, I knew this project would not yield the benchmark showpiece that I had anticipated.

The bitter pill I had to swallow was that the drawing sets are not the project. They serve to communicate the project and are in aid to those who execute the project, but they are not the project themselves. Ego bruised, I needed to prescribe a healthier approach to documenting the project. Some of the lessons:

1. The needs of the project are the real priority. The goal of the documentation is to record those needs. Details shouldn’t be added simply because they look good on the page. The details should capture and communicate the design and the intended process to achieve it.

2. Length of documentation is not itself a value. Some more complex projects do indeed expand into scores of pages, but when I ended up using this set for an interview the 80-something pages weren’t the impressive part. I didn’t need to point to how many TVs I could draw on walls. I had to show how clearly each TV was shown with the necessary information for the installers to carry out the design.

3. The project changed, but my job didn’t. My role was to build the documentation for the project. Though the project changed scope and some of my documentation was relegated to archives to never be built, the CD100 set still successfully communicated the project’s design, and that was always the goal.

While I can romanticize the project that could have been, I am confident that the documentation still stood as a monument to the real goal. Communicate the project, no matter the scope, in its design and process to those who will execute it.