Establish an effective project team

Having the right structure, skills and mix of experience on the team responsible for developing your design code will help you to manage resources for successful delivery and adoption. Similarly, this team must have agreed an efficient way of working for effective partnership. Your initial resourcing plan will have identified what work you can do in-house – including with colleagues from other directorates – and what work is better procured externally. While planning teams have plenty of relevant skills and contextual knowledge, you may need to consult colleagues from other departments or procure people with skills in, for example, urban design, heritage, landscape or highways.

Procuring consultants is not always quick or straightforward. The survey of Pathfinders found that the process took on average 2.3 months, regardless of whether the Pathfinder had existing relationships or service agreements in place.

It makes sense, therefore, to have analysed your capacity to carry out the work inhouse at the outset, and to only procure external consultants if doing so is justified on grounds of cost-effectiveness, time and quality.

Trafford’s development management team determined that it made sense for them to lead on preparing the content of their design code. They were responsible for public consultation, testing and deployment too. While they used their framework consultants selectively to help develop the digital platform, graphic content, website hosting and maintenance, the core work and underlying evidence and analysis was all conducted in-house.

Initially the East Riding of Yorkshire Council Pathfinder team intended to develop their code in-house in order to “build skills internally”. Time constraints led to them appointing a consultancy to work with. The briefing and process of reviewing documents took longer than anticipated, making the project less efficient than the Pathfinder team hoped. They concluded that in future they would be likely to use consultancies for smaller sections of work, such as consultation or graphics, rather than to work alongside them on the main project.

Medway Council developed their design code with a multi-disciplinary team led by BPTW, with whom they had an established relationship.

BPTW and the wider consultant team brought varied expertise to the table, including urban design, community engagement, landscape and public realm design, transport and highways.

This collaboration helped fill gaps in the Medway team’s skillset, provided focused production capabilities with an emphasis on specific disciplines when needed, and offered the vital ability to synthesise ideas, resulting in a richer and more “operationalised” design code. BPTW’s approach was enthusiastic and collaborative, two virtues identified by the Medway team as important ingredients in the overall success of their project. To find out more, watch ‘Introducing Design Coding’.

Define and clearly communicate a scope of work

Even when a budget is agreed and the funding secured, there is still the risk that costs will creep up in unanticipated ways as your project unfolds. To counter this risk, you must manage your plan vigilantly and make the most of the resources at your disposal.

Most Pathfinders highlighted that, as well as having a clear vision, it was important to have a defined scope of work right from the start, something that is emphasised in ‘Design Coding in Practice’. Many of the Pathfinders were surprised at how long this process took, so make sure that you afford it plenty of time.

A key ingredient in refining the scope is to first consult with your development management team. Thereafter, you must clearly explain the scope of work to other stakeholders as you start to engage with them. This will help them to focus only on what is necessary, encouraging more efficient and effective use of available resources.

A narrowly scoped code will make implementation easier because the project team can concentrate their time on the most important tasks, policy areas and key design components and make better use of resources. It will also support adoption of the code at a later stage, as described in ‘Laying the groundwork’.

For example, the City of Bradford Metropolitan District Council Pathfinder team found that defining their scope of work clearly and early helped to limit subsequent changes, which run the risk of delay and increased costs.

To emphasise their focus on new, high quality, viable and affordable urban housing, the Bradford team’s draft design code has been developed “primarily to support the policy for Urban Housing (HO3) within the Local Plan, which promotes intensifying housing density within appropriate ‘urban’ areas”.

Set a detailed project plan

Knowing what you want to do is half the battle. The other half is knowing how you can do it. In other words, you need a wellstructured and deliverable project plan. It must set out the main stages for developing the design code and identify risks and dependencies, which should be done in collaboration with other stakeholders.

For example, the Lake District National Park Authority Pathfinder team consulted their development management colleagues not just in defining their scope of work (which focused clearly on four development types) but also to set a robust project plan. It included testing phases that used a set of planning application case studies to be assessed using drafts of the design code. This allowed the Lake District team to assess the usefulness of their design code in advance of adoption, saving them from undesirable delays, additional work and unanticipated cost.