There are two demands, one is to find a basis for the designer's salary and the other is to judge the operation of the design project. For the general design company, these two are the most basic management demands.
As long as managers who have worked as quantitative designers in the unit of "square meters" know that there are pits everywhere, which is very difficult. Everyone will say that the principle is very simple, that is, "distribution according to work, more work and more pay"!
Yes, this principle is very simple, but it is difficult to implement it concretely. How to quantify the amount of labor?
When it comes to quantification, we must first find quantifiers, that is, the unit of measurement of labor.
Most design companies use "square meters" as the quantitative unit. There is a simple reason. The unit of measurement for the design company to sign a contract with the owner is "square meters", so it is easy to settle accounts with the same unit.
As long as the managers of design companies who quantify the work of designers in "square meters" know, it can be said that there are pits everywhere, which is very difficult.
The first is the problem of rework, because the design may be repeated many times because of the game between developers and management departments, or because of disagreement within themselves. In order to avoid the influence of contract unit price on work measurement, some design companies adopt the method of internal settlement price. The same type of project, regardless of the contract unit price, is the same price for designers. Even under such conditions, regardless of whether the process is tossed or not, the actual workload of the designer can vary several times. But according to the way of area measurement, the workload of employees looks the same.
There is also the question of scale. No matter how big or small the design project is, all the communication and discussion and the arrangement of application documents must be done, and these workloads also account for a large part of the whole workload, which leads to the non-linear relationship between the design workload and the area. In order to cope with this situation, the design company has added the proportional coefficient or the reuse coefficient to the work measurement. The bigger the scale, the more concessions.
Then there is the location of the project. Compared with local projects, designers will definitely spend more energy on transportation. So the design company introduced the distance coefficient. The farther the project is from the company, the higher the coefficient is given.
The requirements of the project itself are also problematic. For example, the Longhu project has high requirements and may have to give a higher difficulty coefficient. ...
There are still many unsolved problems, such as some designers focusing on the detailed design of the facade. Does this have anything to do with the building area? The larger the building area, the more detailed the facade? Not this linear function, right? Sorting out all kinds of reports and documents seems to have nothing to do with the region, right?
In order to adjust various problems, the design company introduced various coefficients to correct the area measurement. It should be noted that there is a product relationship between these coefficients, and any error will be magnified many times.
Finally, the measurement of design work becomes a muddled account. Since you don't know, just pat your head, as many as the manager can. The thing of "quantification" disappeared unconsciously in this process.
It seems that this road is impassable.
Is there any other way?
Yes Quantization must first find a suitable quantifier, that is, the unit of quantification.
It is much simpler to measure by time than by area.
For example, the problem of rework mentioned earlier is to spend more time, and the workload error caused by repeated work can be eliminated by measuring time. The same is true of scale, and the workload difference caused by scale difference can be accurately reflected in time unit. The problem of distance is even simpler. When designers spend a lot of time on the road, they can also record long-distance projects.
After removing the above correction factors, the design work measurement becomes much simpler. In the end, there is only one coefficient, and the ability of each designer is poor. This can be expressed by the designer's hourly wage difference.
Simply put, the cost of a designer in a project = the working hours spent by the designer in this project * the hourly salary of the designer.
When we use "hours" instead of "square meters", the measurement of design work becomes simple immediately. And this is the measurement method of almost all European and American design companies.
With the increasingly fierce competition in the design market, more post-90s have entered the workplace. In the past, the method of measuring by "square meters" showed more and more problems and caused more contradictions. For example, a large number of outstanding designers leave the design industry, which makes it difficult for many design companies to recruit people.
We have also seen some new forces of domestic design companies trying to replace area measurement with time measurement. We believe that this is an inevitable change for design companies to cope with the new era and new market conditions.