NCARB Competency Standard 10 Evaluate the progress of construction

NCARB Competency Standard 10 Evaluate the progress of construction for conformance with contract documents and design intent.

At the point of initial licensure, architects with this competency can …

• Complete site visits and participate in meetings at appropriate intervals to observe construction progress and assist in interpreting the construction documents.

• Evaluate the work performed in relation to the construction schedule; if they are not in alignment, coordinate with the client and contractor in the development of a solution.

• Review, evaluate, and take appropriate action on shop drawings, submittals, testing and inspection reports, and samples.

• Advise and assist the client with project closeout procedures (e.g., substantial and final completion, review and preparation of close-out materials, etc.).

• Evaluate the performance of a project after completion compared to the design intent.

The five bullet points relate also back to competency standard number 9, Prepare and Administer Documentation Of The Construction Phase. So there's an interrelationship here.

The most important thing that you can do early in your career is get on construction sites.

What can you do right now?

Go on a construction site, but go there with intent. Plan out your site visit. Depending on what stage the construction is, plan ahead of time what you're actually going to be looking for, so when you're there, you can actually go look for it. Now, a lot of these will be guided by what are the open questions, RFIs, or what are the things that are being submitted, and you want to look at the substrate or the conditions where that material is going to be installed.

When you evaluate the work performed in relationship to the construction schedule, if they're not in alignment, coordinate with the client and contractor to develop a solution. The contractor will provide a schedule, often what they call a "three week look ahead." It's a short term schedule. What are they doing right now and in the next few weeks? And if that starts to slip, you really start to see it. And so you want to look for the things that are causing that to slip. What are the delays? What are the things that are actually prompting the contractor to miss the schedule?

To review, evaluate and take appropriate action on shop drawings, submittals, testing and inspection reports and samples, this relates back to competency nine, where you're actually creating a system of record keeping for tracking those and you're creating appropriate responses.

So now what you're doing is evaluating and taking action on these items, sending them to the engineers for their review, or actually reviewing them yourself to check them against the construction documents to make sure that they're in conformance.

In Competency Standard 9, you perform close out activities and deliver final documents. This competency is advising and assisting the client with those closeout activities.

Finally, evaluating the performance of a project after the completion compared to the design intent is Post-Occupancy Evaluation. There's a formal way of doing that, and then there's the informal way, where you look at everything that's done and compare it to what did you really want? What were the goals? Now you have to be asking yourself that all the way through the project. You can't just ask yourself that at the end and compare it to what got the result. Because if there is a little bit of divergence somewhere along the way, you can make corrections to get it back on track with the design intent.