What we need, argues Roderic Bunn, is a fresh scope of service that closes the credibility gap between what building designers intend to happen and what happens in practice.

Afraid of flying? Terrified your airliner’s engines will go on the fritz mid-flight? Consider this: the airline industry is one of the safest modes of transport per passenger mile. Heath and safety records show that you’ve more chance of being critically injured by tea cosies or toilet seats than by being strapped into a pressurised alloy tube and flung up to thirty thousand feet by two hissing bombs.

If only recent airport facilities could boast such performance. Just look at the debacle at the £4.3 billion Terminal 5 at Heathrow. Whatever the reason for the building’s problems, it was clearly not ready for use. It needed more proving, testing and training for staff way before any conveyor belt saw a suitcase.

Terminal 5 was a headline-grabber for all the wrong reasons. But many, many more buildings, not in the public eye, are being put into service without full and complete commissioning. They are often partly complete and not even taken out for a test flight before their occupants sit down, strap in and turn on all they’ve got.

So, what to do? Over the years there have been various suggestions for improving the in-use performance of buildings, ranging from the collaborative (getting facilities managers involved in design) to the punitive (contract retentions); but none of them have truly modified the industry’s genetic code.

Ironically, given the trouble at Terminal 5, the proposed service that may achieve the purpose goes by the title 'Soft Landings'. The underlying objective is to obtain more certainty in delivering buildings that achieve a closer match between the expectations of the client and users, and the aspirations of the design team.

Soft Landings not only describes a way of passing a building smoothly from the build phase to the occupation phase, but also a mechanism for ensuring that the operational needs of the building are fully considered and appreciated at the design stage. In essence, Soft Landings ensures a graduated, gentle touchdown for a new building, not a painful belly-flop.

 Introducing Soft Landings

In this new approach, the duties of the whole team are augmented during particular key stages: briefing, pre-handover and professional aftercare. Involvement with users is increased, before and after handover, while a Soft Landings team is resident during the users’ settling-in period.

In the aftercare period, actual building performance is monitored and reviewed for up to three years post-handover, using various post-occupancy evaluation tools. This creates better feedback to improve the product and the building’s management, as well as offering a natural route to post-occupancy evaluation.

The aftercare service is an additional paid duty. Issues for action by the client’s team are also clarified and augmented, along with roles and responsibilities and sign-offs.

Briefing and commissioning have to be re-thought, because the environmental performance targets will be set early on and monitored for up to three years.     

Soft Landings documentation

There is always a temptation to treat design tools as ‘point and go’, as if the act of ticking a box magics away problems. Soft Landings isn’t a tick-box idea. What you get out is proportional to what you put in.

Soft Landings relies on two resources: the people themselves, and a set of documents that define how the people define their roles and responsibilities.

Given that each and every project has a different set of contextual circumstances, the Soft Landings documentation has more blank boxes than filled-in boxes. The whole point is for a project team to populate the blank forms in the very early stages of a project. Advice on how to do this is given in supporting material.

The ‘scope of service’ documents are designed to stand alongside conventional contract terms. The briefing and pre-handover stages focus primarily on the clarification of duties (rather than on adding unnecessary new ones), while the duties in the aftercare stages are specific to those stages and require additional fees.

Briefing stage

Briefing is the most crucial stage of procurement, as the seeds of success or failure are sown at this point. The more that time is made available for constructive dialogue, the greater the chance of success.

The process of briefing is often more important that the product. It’s vital that the emerging expectations and performance targets result in a well-structured, logical and recorded context.

There are three sub-stages to the briefing stage: definition of roles and responsibilities, intermediate evaluation, and the setting of environmental and energy performance targets. Those targets themselves raise issues that need to be resolved:

• The design solution must be within the ability of the users to control it
• There will be a greater dependence on a building management system
• Commonsense must be applied to averaging out the expectations.
• Design for manageability should be a guiding principle.   

Pre-handover stage

Many of the common post-handover problems can be traced back to inadequate demonstration of interfaces and systems, particularly with building management systems and similar complex electronic controls. Soft Landings stresses the need for the design and construct team to spend more time on these systems.

The Soft Landings pre-handover workplan requires the professional team to consider the factors critical to a successful handover, such as a commissioning records check, training programmes for operating and maintenance staff, migration planning, and environmental and energy logging.

Soft Landings requires the professional team to compile a building users guide, covering the operation of heating, lighting and cooling systems, and the energy and water efficiency features of the building. It is vital to explain to users the principles of design and operation – especially where they are not obvious. 

Aftercare

Soft Landings recognises that the first two months of a building’s operation are critical. Minor problems can so easily turn into long-term chronic drawbacks unless they are resolved early. The Soft Landings protocol therefore sets out specific aftercare requirements for the first eight weeks following handover.

The activities include review meetings, the logging and reviewing of energy use to provide the basis for comparison with the energy plan, and the fine-tuning of systems to cater for seasonal changes and to match any emergent patterns of use.

It follows that team members should have good people skills, a hands-on approach and be able to solve problems. The latter will require continuity with the project.

Simple walkabouts are valuable as a way of spotting emerging issues and to observe how the occupants use the building. Informal focus-group user meetings should be held to enable the design and construct team to explain to users why they are there.

There should be a formal launch of a building users guide, along with a helpline and/or an intranet bulletin-board.

Technical guidance on the building should be available on the day of occupation, and this should be updated or amended in the light of issues that emerge over the first eight weeks. The facilities team may be expanding or moving over from an existing facility, and they need to be brought into the fold.

The main focus in the first year should be on settling things down, fine-tuning and logging usage and change. Regular reviews should continue, although the residential presence of design and constructor team members may taper off fairly quickly.

Having completed the traditional defects liability period, activities during years two and three will be similar, but with the emphasis on recording the operation of the building and reviewing performance.  An independent occupant satisfaction survey should occur in year two, and the results used to inform future actions. The survey can be repeated in year three to confirm the success of any remedial measures.

Financial backing and incentives

Soft Landings starts at the briefing stage, which means it needs funding up-front. While it’s not too difficult to argue that operational savings can significantly offset the investment required to resource Soft Landings, the traditional separation of capital expenditure from operating budgets tends to militate against it. Having said that, the costs of professional aftercare can be a very small proportion of the total construction budget.

Depending on the size and complexity of a project, Soft Landings can be funded for as little as one percent of the construction budget – and probably even less. Arguably, additional fees will only be needed for the additional aftercare duties, and this should drop off markedly after the first year. The Soft Landings duties during briefing, design and pre-handover merely augment existing professional duties, and most of the costs can either be covered by existing fees or treated as on-the-job professional development. In any case, an appropriate investment in the Soft Landing process can be agreed by all parties from the outset.

It is not unreasonable to introduce financial incentives for environmental and/or energy targets. But if done, the incentives should be kept simple and free from heavy legal bolstering. Incentives should also reflect the spirit of mutual and open co-operation.

Incentive sums could either be built into the project contract sum or stand outside it as a liability on each side. In any case, the amount need not be very high, say, £30,000 on projects of £15-20 million in value. The sharing ratio could be predetermined, for example 20 percent each for the architect, M&E engineer and M&E contractor, and 40 percent for the building contractor.

Soft Landings will create work elsewhere, such as the need to update operating and maintenance manuals so that they reflect the fine-tuning carried out to systems and equipment. In this case, fine-tuning isn’t the same as snagging and defect resolution. Fine-tuning means improving systems in the light of operational experience. The client needs to be aware that such activities will mean spending a bit more money, but of course there should be a payback in terms of improved operational performance, staff productivity or lower energy bills – maybe all three.

Next steps

BSRIA has been working with the Usable Buildings Trust and an industry task group to develop the Soft Landings idea into an open-source framework that anyone can pick up and apply. The framework is due to be published this year and will be available from BSRIA (www.bsria.co.uk/bookshop). BSRIA and the UBT are already working on a version of Soft Landings tailored for schools, which is in direct response to the billions of taxpayers’ money that is being invested in rebuilding every secondary school in England and Wales. The need for Soft Landings is urgent, particularly as energy consumption in new schools is proving to be up to three times the design estimates.

The construction industry will need initial support in adopting Soft Landings. For this reason, BSRIA will be investing in a set of supporting documents, ranging from advice for project managers, to guidance on programming and costing a Soft Landings activity. Clients and construction firms will also be able to join a BSRIA User Group where experiences can be shared, while the UBT will be developing the Soft Landings procedures.

For more information on Soft Landings and advice on how to obtain the guidance and get involved in the user group, visit www.softlandings.org.uk

Roderic Bunn is a Building Analyst at BSRIA.

www.bsria.co.uk