Design coordination is a broad term describing the integration of designs prepared by different members of the project design team to create a single, unified set of information that can be constructed without clashing components. Effective design coordination can help to reduce costs, delays, and disruptions that can be caused by problems on-site and the need for remedial or abortive works and redesigns.
One of the best practices for effective design coordination is to use predefined design coordination checklists. Those checklists help to ensure that the designers understand what they are responsible for, and in particular who is responsible for the interfaces and junctions between different design packages. In a more specific sense, design coordination checklists can help the design team ensure that the design solutions can be integrated, especially when it relates to mechanical, electrical, and plumbing (MEP) designs, which as they permeate through the entire building are frequently the source of coordination problems.
Using project management information systems (PMIS) like PMWeb, the design team can formalize the design coordination process by creating checklists for each discipline to be coordinated. PMWeb custom form builder allows the creation of design coordination checklists for architecture, structural engineering, fire protection, hydraulics engineering, mechanical services coordination, electrical services coordination, lifts, and escalator coordination, civil engineering coordination, landscaping, and specifications. Each form includes the design coordination reviewer’s name and title as well as the checklist which lists items to be checked, review responses, and remarks.
The attachment tab allows linking the PMWeb drawings list records reviewed in the design coordination checklist as well as all other documents covered in the review process. Those documents get uploaded and stored in the PMWeb document management repository.
The workflow assigned to the design coordination checklist identifies the different roles involved in reviewing and approving the design coordination. It should be noted that the workflow steps and roles could be different depending on the design discipline being reviewed.
The design coordination report summarizes the review results for all disciplines for which it displays how many items of the checklist items were verified, not verified, and those that are not applicable. The report also includes a table that lists the checklist items and their status by discipline. The report includes filters to select the disciplines to be reviewed.
