7.1 The Project Work Plan & Phase Fee Allocation
Key Takeaways
- Traditional architectural phase fee allocation is roughly 15% Schematic Design, 20% Design Development, 40% Construction Documents, 5% Bidding, and 20% Construction Administration.
- Alternative delivery shifts allocations: CM at Risk and design-build move effort earlier, and fast-tracked work front-loads documentation.
- The work plan is re-forecast at every phase boundary and whenever scope, schedule, consultant structure, or actual hours change.
- The work plan is the evidence that makes an additional-services claim credible, because it fixes the original deliverable list and hour budget.
- A work plan without named deliverables per phase cannot distinguish an in-scope refinement from an out-of-scope request.
The Project Work Plan (PWP)
In professional architectural practice, an assignment cannot be successfully managed without an active, documented roadmap. The Project Work Plan (PWP) is the primary operational tool used by an architectural Project Manager to define project objectives, assign resources, sequence production tasks, and control fee expenditures. According to The Architect's Handbook of Professional Practice (AHPP), a PWP should be established immediately upon project initiation (or during proposal development) and continuously updated as design parameters evolve.
Five Core Components of a Project Work Plan
A comprehensive Project Work Plan integrates five structural elements:
- Scope Statement: Explicitly outlines what is included in the project scope—and equally important, what is excluded. It defines building square footage, site boundaries, targeted sustainability certifications (e.g., LEED or WELL), programmatic requirements, and contractual service boundaries under the AIA B101 agreement.
- Deliverables List: A comprehensive inventory of concrete instruments of service required at each milestone. This includes specific drawing sheets (site plans, floor plans, building sections, exterior wall details), 3D digital coordination models, CSI MasterFormat specifications, code compliance summaries, and structural/energy calculation reports.
- Master Task Schedule: Defines the project timeline from pre-design through post-occupancy facility evaluation. It incorporates contractual owner review periods, public entitlement and zoning board approvals, building department plan check timelines, bidding/negotiation intervals, and construction duration.
- Phase Budget Breakdown: Allocates the total contract fee across individual design phases, engineering disciplines, and profit reserves.
- Staffing & Resource Allocation Plan: Maps individual team members (principals, project architects, BIM technicians) to specific work packages, establishing authorized hours per week and tracking planned billable hours against phase fee targets.
Traditional Architectural Phase Fee Allocations
In standard design-bid-build project delivery governed by the AIA Document B101 Owner-Architect Agreement, architectural fees for Basic Services are traditionally distributed across five fundamental project phases:
| Design Phase | Traditional Fee % Allocation | Primary Objectives & Milestone Deliverables |
|---|---|---|
| Schematic Design (SD) | 15% | Conceptual massing, preliminary space planning, site zoning verification, structural grid concepts, schematic outline specifications, preliminary cost of work estimate. |
| Design Development (DD) | 20% | Finalizing spatial layouts, fixing architectural dimensions, establishing structural member sizes, routing primary MEP distribution loops, selecting exterior envelope materials. |
| Construction Documents (CD) | 40% | Comprehensive, coordinated drawings and technical specifications (Project Manual) required for building permits, contractor bidding, and construction execution. Largest labor expenditure. |
| Bidding & Negotiation (BN) | 5% | Issuing bid packages, organizing pre-bid conferences, answering contractor pre-bid questions, issuing addenda, evaluating bids, assisting owner with contractor selection. |
| Construction Administration (CA) | 20% | Reviewing submittals and shop drawings, responding to RFIs, conducting periodic on-site field visits, certifying payment applications (G702), preparing change orders (G701), substantial completion inspections. |
| Total Basic Services Fee | 100% | Complete professional delivery pipeline under AIA B101 Article 3. |
Adapting Allocations to Alternative Delivery Models
While the 15% / 20% / 40% / 5% / 20% distribution represents the traditional industry benchmark, project managers must adjust these percentages based on project delivery methods and unique project constraints:
- Integrated Project Delivery (IPD) & Design-Build: Front-loads design effort into Schematic Design and Design Development (e.g., SD = 20%–25%, DD = 25%–30%) to resolve detailing and trade coordination early with the trade contractors, reducing Construction Documents to 25%–30%.
- Complex Renovations / Historic Preservation: Requires expanded Schematic Design and field investigation allowances (SD = 20%) to address existing conditions.
- Protracted Permitting or Contested Entitlements: May require allocating a dedicated contingency percentage before proceeding to construction documentation.
Converting Phase Fees to Labor Hours
Project managers translate net fee allocations into executable labor budgets using the planned blended hourly billing rate:
If a firm maintains a blended billing rate of $125.00/hour and has a net architectural fee of $100,000 for the Design Development phase, the team has exactly 800 billable hours available ($100,000 / $125.00 = 800\text{ hours}$).
Keeping the Work Plan Alive
A work plan that is written once and filed is a marketing document, not a management tool. The plan is re-forecast at every phase boundary and whenever any of four things changes:
| Trigger | What must be re-forecast |
|---|---|
| Scope change, authorized or not | Fee, hours, deliverable list, schedule |
| Schedule change imposed by the owner | Staffing curve, overtime exposure, consultant deadlines |
| Consultant added, removed, or moved to the owner's agreement | Fee, coordination responsibility, deliverable list |
| Actual hours diverging from budgeted hours | Remaining-hours forecast and the corrective action |
The work plan is also the instrument that makes an additional services claim credible. When the architect can show the client the original deliverable list, the original hour budget, and the specific request that changed them, the conversation is factual. Without it, the conversation is an argument about memory.
An architectural firm is developing a Project Work Plan (PWP) for a $1,200,000 net architectural design fee. Using standard AIA traditional phase fee distribution guidelines, what dollar amount of professional fee should the project manager allocate to the Construction Documents (CD) phase and the Schematic Design (SD) phase respectively?