A design manager at a design-build contractor directs the architects and engineers on the contractor’s behalf, so the design that gets drawn is the design that was priced. The seat exists because design-build moves design risk from the owner to the builder. Hire someone who can read a drawing set as a cost document and say no to a designer.
On a design-build job, the person spending the contractor’s money fastest in the first six months is not on the contractor’s payroll. They are a structural engineer at a subconsultant, three firms removed from the estimate, adding weight to a transfer girder because the analysis said so. Nobody is doing anything wrong. The design is simply growing, as designs do, and unless the contractor has a design manager, the first person to notice will be the estimator pricing the 90 percent set against a number that was guaranteed at 60.
What does a design manager do at a design-build contractor?
The design manager runs the design phase as the contractor’s representative: sets the deliverable schedule, chairs coordination, tracks every design change against the estimate and decides which changes proceed. Designers produce the drawings. The design manager is accountable for what they cost to build.
Day to day the work is unglamorous and specific:
- A design schedule tied to procurement. Long-lead packages such as switchgear and structural steel need released drawings months before the building set is finished.
- A trend log. Each design development that departs from the priced basis gets logged, priced and accepted or sent back, weekly.
- Over-the-shoulder reviews. Estimating and field leaders see the drawings in progress, not at the milestone.
- Owner interface. The owner’s comments are sorted into clarifications inside the price and changes outside it, in writing, at the time.
Without the seat, those tasks scatter. The preconstruction manager covers them until the next pursuit starts, the project manager picks them up between buyout meetings, and the designer of record quietly fills the vacuum. Our note on design-build leadership covers the wider team. The design manager is the part of it that only exists because of how the risk is allocated. On a CM-at-risk job the architect works for the owner instead and watches the contractor’s preconstruction team from the other side of the table.
Why does design-build move design risk onto the contractor?
Because the contractor supplies the design. Under traditional delivery the owner furnishes the plans and impliedly warrants that they work. In design-build the builder hires the designer, so errors, omissions and cost growth in the drawings sit inside the builder’s price.
The traditional rule is over a century old. In Spearin decision, the Supreme Court held in 1918 that a contractor bound to build to the owner’s plans is not responsible for defects in them. Design-bid-build still rests on that allocation, and a change order for a drawing error is its everyday result.
Design-build reverses the direction. Federal agencies buy it through the two-phase selection procedures in FAR Subpart 36.3, and highway agencies under the Federal Highway Administration’s design-build rules. In both, the owner states performance requirements and the design-builder prices and completes the design. Both Texas and Georgia run design-build programs for highway work, and private owners in Dallas, Austin and Atlanta use the method widely for industrial and data center projects where speed matters. The FHWA’s own overview describes the core trade: a single point of responsibility for design and construction.
Single point of responsibility is the selling point to an owner. For the contractor it means a drawing mistake is no longer a change order. It is margin. The size of that exposure is easy to work out.
How does a design manager protect the GMP?
By keeping design growth below the contingency that was priced for it. A guaranteed maximum price set from incomplete drawings assumes the remaining design will land near the estimate. The design manager’s job is making that assumption true, one logged trend at a time.
Take an $80 million design-build project with the GMP fixed at 60 percent design. The estimate carries a design contingency of 2 percent, or $1.6 million, for development between that set and the final one. If the design grows by 3 percent as it is completed, which takes very little on structure and mechanical systems, the added cost is $2.4 million. The gap of $0.8 million comes out of the contractor’s fee, on a job where the fee might be $3 million. It shows up first in the cost-to-complete, the figure a construction controller has to be able to challenge before it reaches the WIP schedule.
A design manager does not stop design from developing. They make each development a decision with a price attached, while there is still time to choose a cheaper way to meet the requirement. A girder that grew can be offset by a column grid adjustment in week ten. In week thirty it is a fact. On regulated work that discipline carries into the field, where a life sciences executive runs every field change through change control because the construction record is part of the product. Production homebuilding counts the same leak house by house, where a purchasing director answers for every variance purchase order by cause.
The mechanism is a commercial one, which raises the question of what kind of person can run it.
Which background makes the best design-build design manager?
Usually a licensed architect or engineer who has since worked inside a contractor. The seat needs enough design credibility to challenge a designer of record and enough cost instinct to know which lines on a drawing move the estimate. Either half alone fails in a predictable way.
| Background | Strength | Typical gap |
|---|---|---|
| Architect or engineer, never worked for a builder | Credible with designers, understands codes and coordination | Treats budget as someone else’s concern |
| Estimator or preconstruction manager | Sees cost in every detail | Cannot judge whether a design solution is technically sound |
| Project manager | Strong on schedule and owner relations | Arrives after the decisions that set cost |
| Designer with contractor-side experience | Holds both conversations | Scarce, and already employed |
The last row is the hire. In an interview, hand the candidate two versions of a structural or mechanical drawing and ask what changed and roughly what it costs. Then ask about a time they sent a design back, and how the designer took it. People who have done the job answer the second question with a name and a meeting.
The preconstruction manager seat is the nearest neighbor, and at smaller contractors one person holds both. The split becomes necessary when the firm is carrying two or more design-build projects in design at once. At a developer-builder the neighbor seat shifts again, because a multifamily preconstruction manager prices to the pro forma rather than the drawings.
Who this hire is not for
- A contractor whose work is hard bid or CM-at-risk with the owner holding the design contract. Design risk stays with the owner. A strong preconstruction manager is enough.
- A design-builder doing one small project a year. Assign design management to the project executive and buy peer review by the hour.
- A firm that wants a drafting coordinator. Model coordination is real work with its own seat, described in our note on the VDC leader. A design manager makes commercial decisions.
The drawing set is the estimate now
Contractors that grew up in design-bid-build tend to treat design as an input that arrives. In design-build it is a cost the contractor is incurring every week, through people it does not employ. The firms that do the method well gave one named person the authority to manage it.
Good design managers are few, they sit in the middle of live pursuits, and a public posting tells competitors which design-build work a contractor is chasing. Reaching them is confidential executive search for mandates that cannot be publicly posted, and our note on confidential search explains how it runs. Selah Talent Partners works with design-build contractors across the United States. If your next GMP will be set before the drawings are done, ask who is managing the months in between. If the answer is nobody, the employers page is the place to tell us.
Sources and further reading
- Spearin decision, 248 U.S. 132 (1918), Library of Congress
- FAR Subpart 36.3, Federal Acquisition Regulation, two-phase design-build selection procedures
- Design-build rules, Federal Highway Administration, 23 CFR Part 636, design-build contracting
- Overview, Federal Highway Administration, design-build defined