Concurrent design

Designing all the domains at once — what is to be built together with how it will be built, paid for, run and cared for.

Sequential design settles what first and hands it to whoever must work out how, by which time the expensive decisions are already made. Concurrent design keeps the levels open together: the thing, the way it is produced, and the process that will operate it are worked on at the same time by the people responsible for each. So the design of what is to be built reflects real consideration of how it will be built and lived with, and the constraints that would have surfaced late arrive while they are still cheap.

It is load-bearing because the means are already the end. Quality and success at the finish are inherent in the method used to get there: a design that ignores its own production produces waste that no later effort recovers, and a plan that ignores its own operation produces something that works once. Holding the levels together is what makes budget a design criterion — cost flexing through invention rather than through lowering the target.

Set-based practice belongs with it: carry several viable options further than feels comfortable and narrow late, rather than committing early to one and defending it. In a small body this is simply not deciding the shape of the thing before the one who will maintain it has spoken. The discipline is the same at every scale; only the number of voices changes.

Also called: designing all domains at once Stands on: Cross-Functional Integration · Integrated Project Delivery · Design To The Goal Opens onto: Quality · Pull planning · Plans and Specifications In play: table · beyond Sources: The LIØNSBERG Pattern Language — Synthesized (Element 9, where concurrent design is named) · The Economic Case For IPD (wiki root page, unmarked, which carries the programme–project–process reading) — lionsberg.wiki page name: Integrated Delivery Open: Named without a page of its own; the fullest description is a paragraph inside the IPD case.