Design Management in Building Construction: From Theory to Practice 11

with setting design guidelines for a demonstration project for a housing fair. Ten
experts of different backgrounds assembled to form the “house of quality” matrices
and to judge how well the client’s image of the future building meets the original
design criteria and, conversely, to judge how well the ideas for technical solutions
meet the client’s requirements. In the second experiment, innovative and feasible
design solutions were sought for retrofitting an office. The main feedback from these
sessions, and the method used, are recapitulated in Table 3.

Table 3. Evaluation of QFD design sessions (Nieminen et al., 1999).

Evaluation of Design Sessions Assessment of the QFD Method

The project goals became clear to all Clients were forced to react on requirements
participants. and to express their view of the project goals.

The session results did not restrict planning Choice of the working group is critical.
and design.

In the beginning, there was still a large QFD provided a method to structure and run
misunderstanding of the original goals and the the meeting.
terminology was not clear.

New objectives and innovations were The decision making process was transparent
introduced. and traceable.

Appropriate innovative design solutions were No documentation process was needed

found. afterwards.

Clients’ needs were documented in the form of Some members in the design team were not
performance requirements. sufficiently committed and remained passive.

6.5. EcoProP Performance-based requirements management tool

EcoProP is a computerized tool that provides a framework (Fig. 1) to set perfor-
mance based requirements for building construction projects. EcoProP is based on
a generic building property classification, VTT ProP , which takes into consider-
ation Finnish and international standards, norms and classifications. By means of
EcoProP, selected requirements and targets can be documented. Furthermore, the
program provides a procedure to create a brief as an end result of the sequence of
requirement-setting sessions. EcoProP also makes it possible to take a quick glance
at the target performance level of the building in question and to make comparisons
with other buildings.
Based on piloting experiences, EcoProP has proven to increase discussion, com-
mitment and teamwork (Leinonen et al., 2000). The original needs of the stake-
holders get documented. This is especially useful in the not uncommon case of a
cost-efficiency analysis of the design being carried out with a view to cost cutting.