Architecture practice glossary

The operational vocabulary of an architecture practice, defined the way practices use it rather than the way a contract does. One page rather than thirty, because a definition you have to navigate to is a definition nobody reads.

Architecture practice management

The business of running an architecture practice as distinct from designing buildings: winning work, planning it, resourcing it, delivering it, invoicing it and learning from it. It is the part of the profession that receives almost no attention in education and consumes a large proportion of a director's week.

Fee stage

The unit an architectural fee is divided into, corresponding to a stage of work: concept, design development, documentation, approval, construction. The stage matters commercially because it is the event that entitles the practice to invoice. A fee expressed only as a total cannot be claimed against progress, which is why practices that quote that way end up negotiating every invoice.

Fee proposal

The document and the commercial instrument by which a practice offers to do work. A useful one states the stages, what is included and excluded at each, the fee against each stage, what triggers an invoice, and what happens when the scope changes. The last of those is the one most often omitted and most often needed.

Variation

A change to the agreed scope, and therefore to what the practice is owed. Variations are the most commonly lost revenue in small practices: they are agreed verbally, on site, in the middle of doing something else, and never make it onto an invoice. A variation that is not recorded as a commercial fact when it is agreed is usually a variation that is never paid.

RFI, or Request for Information

A formal question raised during construction, usually by the builder, requiring a documented answer by a date. RFIs matter beyond their content: an unanswered RFI is a programme risk, and a pattern of them is often the origin of a variation or a dispute. Practices keep an RFI register because the timing of the answer is as significant as the answer.

Project programme

The timeline of a project expressed as stages with dependencies and dates. In architecture it is distinctive because several of its dependencies are outside the practice's control: authority approvals, consultant inputs, client decisions, so it is less a plan than a live model of what is waiting on what.

Project resourcing

The allocation of people to projects over time, and the answer to whether the practice has capacity to take on more. Distinct from timesheets, which record what actually happened. The gap between the two is where most unprofitable work is discovered, usually late.

Retainer

An ongoing fee arrangement, typically monthly, for continuing availability or work of unpredictable extent, rather than for a defined deliverable. Common in long construction phases and in advisory relationships. Retainers need watching precisely because they lack a stage to be claimed against.

Consultant cost recovery

The recovery of consultant fees that a practice has paid or coordinated on a client's behalf. It requires knowing what was engaged, what was invoiced by the consultant, what is recoverable and what has been passed on. Practices lose money here quietly, because the amounts are individually small and the tracking is tedious.

Drawing register

The controlled list of drawings for a project: numbers, titles, revisions and issue dates. Its purpose is to answer, without ambiguity, which version of which drawing was issued to whom and when. On a long project the register and the model drift apart unless something keeps them in step, and that drift is expensive.

Drawing review

The internal quality process applied to a drawing set before it is issued. Its value is cumulative rather than per-issue: what one reviewer catches should become what the practice checks for. That only happens if findings are recorded somewhere durable rather than in red pen on a printed set.

Project portal

A private, project-scoped view for someone outside the practice: a client, a consultant or a builder. The three audiences want different things and should see different things, which is why a single portal with roles usually satisfies none of them well.

Architecture CRM

A record of enquiries, leads and the relationships they came from. Distinct from a sales CRM in that architectural work rarely arrives through a funnel: it arrives through referral, reputation and past clients. What a practice needs is reliable memory of every conversation, not lead scoring.

BIM integration

A connection between a practice's management system and its Building Information Model. Its practical value is keeping the drawing register, project information and budget figures in step with the model, so that the commercial record and the design record describe the same job.