News from Nevada By Design

One of the most frequently used and probably oldest pieces of advice in the world is: "You Never Know Unless You Try!" Growing-up, this may arguably be one of the wisest pieces of advice that one can receive in their life. Over the years (based upon the basic logic of this advice), there has sprung many paraphrases, one of which might be the most useful pieces of business advice:

"You Don't Know What the Client Wants Unless You Ask!"

One of the biggest mistakes that any professional makes is to assume they know what the client wants. After all, they are the experts; the client is paying for that expertise; and so goes the reasoning that as the expert, they know what the client wants.

However, being creative is not so much a matter of 'Thinking outside your box' as much as it is to be able to put yourself inside your client's box and see things from their perspective.

Never assume!

So many times, we receive a set of plans or description of a project with a note attached asking us to send back a proposal for services. At Nevada By Design, the first thing we ask ourselves is; 'what does the client want to accomplish?'

Unless you ask the right questions, you will never find the right answers!

To most people, it may not seem important that the civil engineer understand the purpose of the project. Dirt is dirt, and utilities are utilities, pavement is pavement and a site is a site...it is what's on top of the ground and in the building that is important to the project.

Although building design and esthetics are very important to customer appeal, there are a lot hidden items that can affect the cost of developing a project. Many of those hidden items can be revealed early on and the costs minimized through detailed preliminary discussions between the architect, engineers and the client. That is called Integrated Design and is something we as a firm have been promoting for some time now.

Think about designing a project in the same way you think about treating a medical problem. You see a General practitioner about an illness and he develops the overall picture of the problem by asking you questions about your diet, exercise, history of diseases in your family. If needed, the General practitioner sends you off to a laboratory that analyses your blood and other vital fluids, a cardiologist to look at your mechanical operations, a urologist to check out your plumbing, and an x-ray technician to do a visual of your structure below the surface. Once all the reports are in a diagnosis is made and treatment is prescribed along with a healthcare plan to build back to your former healthy self.

So it is with a construction project and all of the engineering specialists that work together with the architect in a cooprative effort to design a sustainable project. While the type of structure being built is not very important to a civil engineer, the purpose as well as estimated occupancy levels are necessary elements in properly sizing utilities, parking lot design, ingress and egress, delivery access, fire protection, and finally the amount of as well as type of traffic both vehicular and foot. It the project is to meet LEED criteria for a Certification then it is important that we know as far in advance as possible so that we can incorporate storm flow and other sustainable elements into the grading design and drainage study.

In other words, the more information that is available to the civil engineer and the sooner we are brought into the design process, the more we can help avoid the common pitfalls of site development and save the client money.

When was the last time your civil engineer cared enough to ask the right questions?