A critique of the RIBA plan of work
The RIBA plan of work is considered “the definitive design and process management tool for the UK construction industry” model. ‘The RIBA Plan of Work was initiated in 1963 to provide a framework for architects to use on projects with their clients, bringing greater clarity to the different stages of a project.” In line with management trends at the time of its creation, it is a ‘waterfall model’; or a stage-by-stage system, with a clear start and clear end date. Being comprehensively eight stages and clear stage outcome. Stand the ultimate user only tests the product at the end of the project.
The RIBA plan of work is considered to be a sort of quasi-divine process for architects and the true path to creating anything in architecture. If you don’t follow it effectively within the U.K, you may be disqualified as an architect.
Flaws of the plan of work.
In more contemporary management science, waterfall models have been exposed as ineffective for most complex projects. In software management, for example, tasks that follow it tend to deliver products that aren’t satisfactory to the end-users compared to methodologies that are based on feedback loops, and iterative delivery. In the majority of studies of waterfall models, they are more expensive than initially anticipated; the product isn’t delivered at all or requires an unnecessary level of overwork because of complex and ultimately unused features. The CHAOS manifesto outlines that 29% of projects with the waterfall model in software engineering failed, and 57% were challenged.
Questioning the history of the plan of work
“The study, which surveyed client organisations, project owners, contractors and project management consultants, found that 66% of projects delivered in the past period failed to deliver “all or most” time, cost and quality objectives.”
Within this framework, Architects are frequently criticised for their inability to deliver projects effectively. Architecture and engineering are both high-risk professions. This criticism they receive is something familiar to all management theorists, it is a characteristic of critiques of waterfall methods. People using the waterfall method categorically fail to deliver projects on time, they run over budget, they aren’t satisfactory for the end-users, and they are overworked and underpaid because of the unused work-to-value ratio.
The popularity of feedback. Time to update the RIBA plan of work?
Poor requirements and scope definition make up 65% of all construction project failures. The word feedback was introduced in the English language.
The plan of work emerged from the 1960s petrochemical era, which promoted centralized institutions, centralised command and control, service producer and service user dynamics and infrastructural level capital, and largely ignored systems of feedback.
But in a dynamic information economy, it doesn't integrate an understanding of human needs or culture beyond the single client and does not facilitate meaningful engagement by architects beyond any handover date. It is no longer robust enough for the world we are in.
Having this system as the core model of all professional practice restricts industrial growth and change. It limits the ability of modern practitioners to effectively charge for their work. Contemporary design issues today stretch multiple scales of thinking, are social, physical and mental, and are complex and non-linear, to the point they require very different project management systems and systems analysis. Having a singular plan of work confines the economic output of the professional practice of architecture to a trickle of its potential. Perhaps it’s time to realise that problems with the profession are related to the way it is managed and the structures promoted which are seen as important.
Inflexibility towards flexibility; social architecture:
In the context of contemporary challenges like these, the RIBA plan of work’s restrictive nature is concerning. It has an unbroken position that seems unchangeable, but when scrutinized its relevance is increasingly fraught. Despite this, it has embedded itself as the single and only process architects must follow. In other industries — ideas like project management are just one of many possible and available options — but the plan of work is heralded as a stamp of honour for being an architect, and as such it reduces is the ability to adapt to a changing world. This becomes a self-defeating position for the professionals within it as they try to expand their businesses and organizations concerning the world today.
The plan of work is ultimately unable to compete within a multi-scalar world — its format is not just damaging economically for the future of the profession, it is also constricting culturally. It doesn’t represent the entire palette of possibilities, and processes in the field of architecture, by virtue — it also limits our possibilities in culture and life in the city itself. A monocultural system means the city is developed in a monocultural way.
The danger the plan of work poses
We are now at a point where the profession's business models are endangered by the RIBA plan of works inflexibility and as a result the social and economic relevance, indeed the competitiveness of architecture as a field is seeing a total decline. Not only is the business proposition of architects losing ground. The only feasible business option is in the commodification of education, which in turn is increasingly about selling the status of the architect. is in a large part because of this the plan of work also plays a part in the foundation for the education system — which depends on the plan to give it structure.
But this also means the educational processes are restricted, and the culture that leads to the production of verifiable knowledge is undermined. A process designed for industrial management in the 1960s underpins the framework for our knowledge. Knowledge practitioners can’t engage with the fast pace of growth and innovation, and new frontiers in thinking are restricted.
Who are those people that authenticate knowledge? If they are not working within the plan of work are they invalid? Far from being a framework to protect the profession — the plan of work may be the very thing that makes not only the industry obsolete but architecture’s total knowledge base obsolete.
But the plan of work haunts us like a spectre It is something that has been around for so long that the field of architecture seems unable to question it.
Social Architecture is an emergent model of operating in architecture that can effectively overcome the strategic difficulties that conventional architecture faces — and rise to the challenges of the real problems we face today. It’s the framework that I prefer.
