CSI's specifying practice group discussed the concept of outline specs and came to the conclusion that traditional outline specs will be replaced. Most of the group members admitted they seldom produced or used outline specs. When they do write outline specs, most are not using traditional methods. Surprisingly, the overwhelming majority favored replacing outline specs with preliminary project descriptions. So what do you think? Leave a comment by signing in at the end of this posting.
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Here is the presentation that prompted the discussion. The rationale for the poll results follows. Scroll through the presentation using the arrow button below.
It is often difficult to produce outline specifications that are consistent. All design team members do not use outlines based on the same system and engineers prefer to use narratives rather than outlines to describe the building systems. Tom Gilmore of Torti Gallas and Partners, Inc. in Denver, CO, has solved this problem by creating a single spreadsheet with all the standard text for all disciplines. Each paragraph is a separate row. The text is selected for the particular project by using Excel's Auto Filter function and then the text is modified as needed.
Beware that your design contract may require outline specs as a Design Development deliverable. AIA B101 - Owner Architect Agreement §3.3.1 explicitly requires outline specs as one of the phase services. B101 does not define what constitutes an outline spec. So there may be some latitude for architects within the bounds of accepted practice.
The group explored several examples of outline specs. CSI's Project Resource Manual provides guidance on the format for producing the outlines and shows an example illustrating some of the concepts. Masterspec and SPECTEXT, two of the commercial spec systems available do not follow the same format of the PRM example. This has caused confusion about what form an outline spec should take.
Steve Lawrey of Vitetta in Philadelphia, PA reported that outline specs are normally throw-away documents. After they are produced, they are little used and the content must be recreated when the construction specifications are written. Creating information once and sharing the result should be the goal rather than duplicating efforts.
Two alternatives to traditional outline specifications were discussed: Multi-Purposed Specifications and Preliminary Project Descriptions (PPD). Multi-purposed specifications rely on using a single document to produce outline specifications and construction specifications. For outlines, most of the document text is hidden, showing only text that is relevant to the current design stage. As more information is developed, more of the specification text is revealed, until the final construction spec is issued.
Preliminary project descriptions offer an entirely different approach. Using UniFormat, the project description is arranged by system and assembly instead of the MasterFormat divisions and sections used for construction specifications. PPDs offer flexibility to describe multiple options for the same assembly and the ability to document the reason for selecting one of the options as the design solution. PPDs can be used throughout the entire design process to capture the result of the process. Then they can be used as a quality control checklist against the resulting construction documents.
The consensus was clear. The group favored PPDs as the preferred method to document projects during the early design stages. Clifford Marvin of KPB Architects in Anchorage, AK, a member of CSI's PPD Task Team pointed out that a PPD Guideline is in progress and wholeheartedly recommended PPDs in place of outline specs. Download the draft guideline from the CSI website.
Both the preliminary project description and the outline speciification format are useful for several reasons.
- They both can be used to record design intent decisions and assumptions in both the schematic Design and the Design Development stages of a project.
- They both can be used to validate a projects estimated construction cost for correlation with the projec budget.
- They both are easy to modify as the design development process evolves.
The main reason for not using either is cost. It it harder to justify the benefit versus cost in small projects. In a large project, it is not not to justify their use. If you have a doubt, I ask you how you would expect a Contractor preparing preliminary pricing on a project to produce an accurate estimate based solelyon Drawings with only a few notes as a guide. More than likely, without additional information, the Contractor would use his historic square foot cost information for a similar project in the same geogrphic location, updated for cost escalation.
On the other hand, a detailed preliminary project description or detailed outline specification that accurately conveys the deisgn intent can produce estimated const of contruction that mant times is 95% accurate, even at the early design stages.
This insight can give the project manager accurate infornation as to where the project is on target and also where it is not.
Don Smith, AIA CSI CCS LEED AP