Integrating design planning, schedule and control with Deplan

The planning and management of building design has historically been focused upon traditional methods of planning such as Critical Path Method (CPM). Little effort is made to understand the complexities of the design process; instead design managers focus on allocating work packages where the planned output is a set of deliverables. All too often there is no attempt to understand and control the flow of information that gives rise to these deliverables. This paper proposes the combined use of the Analytical Design Planning Technique (ADePT) and Last Planner methodology as a tool called DesPlan to improve the planning, scheduling and control of design. ADePT is applied during the early planning stages to provide the design team with an improved design programme that takes into account the complex relationships that exist between designers, and the information flows that flows between them. Then the Last Planner methodology is employed, through a program called ProPlan, to schedule and control the design environment.