Learning from the successes and mistakes on your completed projects and sharing the newfound expertise with your colleagues is a vital part of your practice’s intellectual capital. Equally, learning from the practical day-to-day experiences of others can be hugely beneficial for your project runners. Drawing on our experiences of working with client organisations as well as architects, and on our collaborations with the project managers Buro Four, Colander can help you with both.

Post project evaluations
Having run a number of successful post project evaluations for our developer and end user clients, we are now offering this service to our architectural clients as well. We can facilitate project reviews in-house with the architectural team, or with a wider audience – encompassing the full design team and, if appropriate, the clients or end users of your buildings. These sessions tend to focus on the process of delivering a project rather than the end product, the idea being to identify how the next project could be better managed.

Project surgeries
In collaboration with Buro Four, Project Managers, we are delighted to offer project surgeries to practices, which specifically focus on the day-to-day design management and delivery of projects.

Small practices can take advantage of our regular day surgeries, where practices can book one-hour appointments to review their specific issues. For larger practices, surgeries can be run in-house on a regular monthly or six-weekly basis to review progress on a number of different projects and provide a mentoring service for project architects through hands-on review of their project work.

Design Quality Indicators
Colander has played an active role in the development of the DQI tool kit, which is available from the Construction Industry Council. This is a pioneering tool for evaluating the design quality of building designs and helping with the briefing process. It is a generic tool that can be applied to different building types at different stages in a project’s development.

These consultancy services dovetail with the training courses that we also run on this subject:
Architects as project leaders (public course) (in-house course)
Managing client expectations (in-house course)