EPISODE: 002 - STAGE 0 - STRATEGIC DEFINITION
- Piotr Bytnar BEng (Hons) MSc CEng MIStructE
- Nov 5, 2024
- 21 min read
Updated: Jun 4
BYTNAR - TALKS
EPISODE: 002 - STAGE 0 - STRATEGIC DEFINITION
This episode is for people who want to know more about the process of project design and delivery.
If you ask yourself questions:
Where should I start?
What aspects are critical to my project?
What would be the most feasible and viable way of delivering my project?
Am I sure the budget is enough?
This episode should give you a broad idea of where you are at the start of your Architecture Engineering or Construction project. It may transpire that your project is not the best way to spend or invest your money but if it is it will give you a strategy on how to make the most of it.
This is Bytnar Talks, the engineer takes on construction, episode two.
Hi, I’m Piotr Bytnar. Each day I help my clients plan and design building projects through Bytnar Limited, a consulting Chartered Structural Engineers practice. My biggest passion, and the cornerstone on which I’ve built my business, is finding clever solutions for construction projects.
I am a chartered structural engineer and a buddying software developer, so you can rest assured that I will strive to talk about the best practices and the use of new technologies in the industry, and, if you’re embarking on a construction project or are involved in planning, designing, and building the world around us, you’ll find this podcast useful.
This episode is about the first stage in the RIBA Plan of Work 2020: Stage 0 – the Strategic Definition.
Welcome back to all the listeners of the first episode, released last week, where I talked about the process of building-project development, a.k.a. the Plan of Work. Thank you for listening to the premiere of this podcast, and I’m glad you found my rambling useful—at least useful enough to come back for more. Also, welcome to all the new listeners. If you have not yet had a chance to listen to the first episode, I would love to invite you to it. It starts the conversation on the process of building-project development by giving you a broad-brush overview and is an introduction to the next episodes, in which I’ll talk about each particular stage in more detail.
I must admit that preparing this episode was so much easier after going through it all a week ago for the first time. It has become a little hidden joy for me, going through the process and sitting down with you on a Sunday evening —you, in the form of a microphone each week— to talk about the topics close to my everyday life, that is: architecture, engineering, and construction.
I strive to deliver each and every next episode with an improvement in the quality of the delivery, so you can enjoy ever more engaging material. I’d love to say now that the podcast is a smashing hit, topping the podcast charts and surpassing The Joe Rogan Experience and Steven Bartlett’s The Diary of a CEO, but it is not. I’m proud, though, that it is being listened to—hopefully not only by my relatives and friends (by the way, thank you for all the support you give me)—but by the wider public and professionals in the AEC fields.
If I were to talk statistics, the podcast received an infinite-percentage growth in the audience—easy to accomplish if it only takes listeners to change from zero to one—but since then, the increase has been in the thousands of percent.
I was told by industry experts that perhaps going on for over an hour is a little bit too long, so I’ll try to make it more concise for this one and perhaps break the topics further down if I cannot. Most of the material is free talking, so it may go on for a bit longer than necessary, but I would not otherwise be able to deliver this to you, as it is not for profit and I do it in my spare time.
Scripted material sounds great and sharp, but I want you to experience me as I am—and as you would if you ever picked up the phone to talk with me.
Why do I do it? The industry is superbly fragmented, with not many experts capable of joining all the aspects together, so I hope this podcast will become the glue—or at least the information pack, if you will—for other professionals and clients who embark on the perilous path of building-project delivery.
I like to keep repeating that many construction teams are assembled for the first and the last time on any given project, and that most investors embark on construction projects for the first and only time in their lives. If listening to my podcast will make any of these groups better informed—or at least lead to reflection—I’m happy to carry on doing it.
So, without further ado, let me talk about the start of the process: Stage 0, Strategic Definition. [Music]
All right, here we go—let’s get on with it, shall we?
Okay, well, last week I gave you the broad-brush overview of the Plan of Work. The Plan of Work generally consists of seven stages, from 0 to 7, going through Strategic Definition—Stage 0—Preparation of Brief—Stage 1; those two stages are pre-design. Then there are three design-related stages: Stage 2, Concept Design; Stage 3, Spatial Coordination; and Stage 4, Technical Design. After that we go into construction—Stage 5, Manufacturing and Construction—and Stage 6, Handover; finally, it ends up in Use, and very often demolition or reuse of the structure.
I like to say that the process isn’t really seven stages but eight, which starts at zero and ends at zero, because if we do not take all of the lessons learned throughout the seven stages and implement them again in this Stage 0, we are wasting our time—we’re wasting our breaths on this planet. We need to learn from our mistakes, we need to capitalise on our successes, and take them with us for the next projects.
Today we’ll talk about Stage 0. Stage 0, in a nutshell, defines the project objectives, including your—as a client-employer—needs. What’s the business case? What will be the strategic brief for it? What are the initial feasibility studies for the project? We need to establish what you want to achieve, what the constraints are, and the aspirations of your project or of your business more broadly—or your need, if you’re just a person who needs to build a house for your family or extend a house for your family.
It is important to direct you to the vast plethora of material freely available online on the Royal Institute of British Architects’ websites, which deals with the RIBA Plan of Work. You can download a free page showing the whole map of the process, with core tasks clearly shown as the platform, and the scope of such guidance is very generic and can be applied to a myriad of different projects. There are so many different projects out there that you can be involved in that it is genuinely impossible to put them all in one guidance—in one manual for construction.
Every single office works out its own way of doing things and approaching the tasks. Every single office will never be exposed to all different types of projects, but that’s okay—they don’t have to be. When you have a framework of work—if you have the Plan of Work—you know what the steps are, and you can apply them to all different projects.
As a consulting-engineer business—as the owner of a consulting-engineers business that deals with architectural building projects—we very often come across projects we’ve never done before, and that’s fine, because we have the principles, the knowledge, and a great big library of technical documentation that can assist us in defining all the needs, expectations, and risks of any given project. This way we can build on our expertise, our experience, making our practice better, and we never shy away from the challenge. There are many challenges even on projects that seem simple—something that we do day in and day out.
There are so many different aspects in any given project, including the people involved, that can make the whole process more difficult or challenging. The RIBA Plan of Work sees Stage 0 as a rudimentary question: if the project is to be a building, what type of building should it be? It says that it should take into consideration the whole-life cost, maintenance, everyday operation, and even demolition.
The full-life carbon involved in that project, post-occupancy evaluation for the business case, and the client requirements are also very important. It asks you, as I said before, to review the feedback from Stage 7 of similar projects—so, as I like to say, the stages are 0 to 0, not 0 to 7—because Stage 7 should and will, in many good offices, give input to Stage 0, the one we’re talking about now.
Stage 0 should identify project risks and opportunities that come from the investment. It should inform on sustainability, including social value, and its commercial value for the speculative investor, as it may not be readily apparent that such can bring better returns. Generally, in speculative investments the return on investment is the most important marker for the stakeholders, but bringing buildings that are better for the planet and better for the people around them makes them more successful and often commands better value and better return at the end of it.
It’s very important at this stage also to think about procurement strategy—how we are going to approach it, how we are going to deliver the project. If we don’t think about it now, we may be doubling the efforts, or not doing enough to satisfy the further steps. The RIBA Plan of Work templates show several typical approaches to building projects, which are: traditional tenders, one- or two-stage design and build, or management- or contractor-led. Whichever you choose, it’s good to settle that matter at the get-go, at Stage 0, as otherwise every next stage will be misinformed and misaligned with the way you approach procurement.
I would like to direct you to the Plan for Use Guide 2021 or the 2020 RIBA Plan of Work Overview—both documents available on RIBA websites. The RIBA Plan of Work 2020 has been enhanced by the Institution of Structural Engineers with their Plan of Work. It shows the process in similar fashion, albeit dividing Stage 4 into two stages: 4, Technical Design, and 4.5, Production Information. You’ll get to know why once we get to this stage, and it comes from the business cases of typical engineering firms and the risks they like to avoid or delegate to someone else.
At Stage 0, the IStructE Plan of Work states that an engineer, if involved at this definition stage, should inform the sustainability requirements of the project. The engineer should understand the client’s requirements and try to steer the solution into the most sustainable fashion, into the most sustainable way of execution. Sometimes buildings don’t have to be demolished; sometimes they can be refurbished and the layouts can be changed. Sometimes, if there is not enough space, the building can be extended, and storeys can be added above or below ground. There are plenty of different forms of construction that can be used for the new build, and they should be assessed for suitability—and that’s where the engineer can help, at the strategic definition.
But it’s all good and dandy, right? How does it really work in life? Well, I’ve got several examples for you here, ranging from smaller clients to larger clients. We start with the typical homeowner. [Music]
So, whoever you are—whether you are a homeowner, landlord, manufacturer, foreign property investor, or public-good organisation, charity, or local council—it’s almost certain that you will go through the typical stages of the buying process, which starts with the recognition of the needs or the wants. Then you go from there to find information about it. Many of you will end up on Facebook groups, maybe LinkedIn, and associate yourselves with professionals who talk about the subjects that you’re interested in, and try to educate yourselves a little bit more. You’ll educate yourself about the ways of construction and the way to go with your needs and problems.
For better or worse, it may not be as good an advice as you could get if you employed someone. This part of your process is basically Stage 0, which you can, or may not, require help with or seek help with. If you feel confident, and if you think that Google’s got all the answers and you found these answers and you can think more broadly and see all the aspects of the projects you have on hand, then it’s probably fine, but if it’s not your best place—and I must say, in my professional career, in my experience many, many well-versed and experienced professionals do not have this approach, do not have the idea of having approached the projects from all different avenues that they could—so they won’t have all the answers.
And same with the strategic definition at Stage 0: there may not be one consultant that you’ll need; you may have one lead consultant that will help you define many aspects of it, but then you may like to involve many other more specialised consultants that’s good in high-level definition, give you advice and steer the projects into the right way. So you see, Google, as good as it may be that we have access to the ample Google wealth of knowledge—now ChatGPT can answer most of our burning questions—there’s still a lot that may not be freely available online, and experiences and the lessons learned from previous projects, these are very rarely existent in offices per se, and offices which guard this knowledge, as this knowledge makes them experts in their fields. So you’re not going to find it online, but you will find it with consultants.
Once you go through that stage, which is information search—it’s the educational stage of your buying process—you then can go out and start searching for alternatives. Again, this stage in the buying process can be helped with by the employment of consultants, and then before you move on to the actual buying decision—and in this case it may mean building a building, but it may well not—as if you go through all of the other stages and use appropriate people, they may steer you into a completely different direction and show you the capabilities of your existing facilities, your existing buildings, that can actually accommodate your problems and needs. And from this stage in your buying process you can move on to the further definition and then start into finding people that will actually design and build it. But that’s all about the pre-design stage—that, and that’s all about Stage 0.
Stage 0 is a little bit mumbo-jumbo now when I talk about two processes at the same time—process of the project definition and the buying process—but that’s what it is. You know, you wake up one day with a need and then you need to go through the three stages—at least three stages—in the buying process, which are information search, evaluation of alternatives, and the purchase, the decision whether you want to go for one solution or the other. And these three stages of the buying process, they are involved within Stage 0, the Strategic Definition, as understood by the Plan of Work 2020.
I hope that makes sense, in a way, like looking at a homeowner who needs to extend his property, right? Well, you’ve got a growing family, and now is a burning question: we need that extra room—what are we going to do? What, and what can be achievable with your existing house? Do you need to change anything? Do you need to invest in a building project? Do you need to invest in that attic expansion or a side extension, back extension—whatever that may be—is that required? And if it is, are the heights of the floors enough to accommodate your needs or regulations? If it is an extension, is it going to be considered within the permitted-development rights, or do you need to go through the planning process and planning application to gain the permission?
There are so many different aspects of it that may influence whether you should build or not, and if all of the planning issues are not a problem, then you may find yourself with construction issues, maybe, and it may be more expensive to actually build an extension or an addition than to move somewhere else. It is very often people’s preference to stay where they are, as they get accustomed to the way they live, to their neighbourhoods, to their neighbours, but that may not be the best solution if there are better ways forward. And if, for example, you are building an extension and it transpires that your existing house has been built on engineered fill and it is based on the raft foundation that’s floating on piles, and you’ll need the same for your extension, which will inevitably cost in excess of tens of thousands of pounds to do—is this something that’s reasonable to do, or is it actually better to move and find a better place to live and relocate?
These sorts of questions can be very easily identified at the very, very beginning and give you—and this way it can give you—a very good start. For typical clients, homeowners in Bytnar, we curated a standard service that you can book online, which is called the Initial Advice, and it cares for all of these little aspects that you may not think about or struggle to find information about, or struggle to find the information that is actually applicable to your house and your circumstance.
You see, with this service—and I don’t really like to treat this platform as a sales pitch, but that’s what we do—we found that very many homeowners, as smart as they are and as savvy, they are going to Facebooks and Google, Bings of this world—they still lack that information, and the information isn’t all in one place, and there’s plenty of misinformation. So we prepared a service that can answer many of these questions, and it can be easily accessed from us, from Bytnar.
You see, when you’re a landlord, moving on from there, and you think of maybe changing your house into flats and capitalise, to convert your house into flats, but then very often is the case that, one, there are no other flats on the street, or maybe the house isn’t big enough to accommodate minimum-sized flats and you simply won’t be able to do so, and perhaps going into HMO would be a much better solution for you, especially if it is under the permitted-development rights and you don’t need a licence for it.
When you’re a manufacturer trying to accommodate your growing business—whether that be trying to find more space for storage for made goods or materials, maybe you need some more production space, or maybe office space—whatever that space may be, you need to consider whether a controlled environment needs to be heated and insulated, whether the materials that you need to store are light-sensitive and temperature-sensitive, whether you need ventilation—maybe refrigeration, maybe a bakery factory and you need to store a lot of cheese bakes and pasties—or it is an office space that you require, a little bit more of the workspace.
Whatever it may be, it may not be straight away a simple answer of, okay, let’s acquire more land, or let’s build to the side of our factory—maybe extend it with a few more bays to one side or the other, or maybe make it wider. It may be the case that a mezzanine would work quite well for your solution, either accommodating some more office space, workspace, or a walk-in refrigerator. You see, just so many different ways of approaching these topics, and if you don’t look into that in detail, well, you may make the wrong decision.
You may think that mezzanine is the right way forward, and you construct it, and then it transpires that under one of the columns, which was heavily loaded, you have drainage, and it caves in because you didn’t take that into consideration—you thought that the slab is actually going to hold it, and it didn’t. And there is a problem there, and it’s very easy to think this way when you have a space that can accommodate a certain amount of load; you may think that a similar amount of load would be fine without thinking that actually distributed load is different than point load, and if you have a point load on the edge of the slab, well, that’s not the greatest place to be, or if you have a point load over a sewer or over drainage that isn’t that deep and doesn’t have a lot of cover over it, that’s another whammy right there.
You may have other problems when it comes to manufacturing endeavours: you may acquire land, but that land may not be suitable for the use and occupation; you may need to invest in a lot of ground engineering to make that ground much better, or invest in piling to make that slab viable for a plethora of usages. In such circumstances, you know that the actual return on investment would be less, or it would be more expensive to do the construction, and it may not be the right choice for you; it depends where in the world you are and whether that actually can pay off and return on investment.
Similarly, if you have foreign-property investment funds—you see, I’m having clients who sometimes approach me with the ideas of getting into the market with the standardised solution—the great standardised solutions that they already invented in other countries—and they see that, you know, there’s a market growth over there, and they’d like to come to Britain and do the same here with the, you know, beautiful pods, A-frame housing, or Dutch barns, you know, glamping pods, whatever that is, whatever that may be. They fail to recognise that the planning system here is very often different than in their countries, and their one-off products—the products that are standardised—may not suit well into any given scenario, into any given plot or a master plan. After all, we don’t want, you know, brutalist, all-looking-the-same neighbourhoods, do we? We need to play with the understanding of local area, local materials, local housing, and adapt to it rather than trying to impose solutions that are unnatural to the circumstance.
And those ideas are very clever, very often, and well suited for where they began, but very often not so well suited to the British market. And if you try to go all-in with it, without having all the right information about the whole process and how to deliver projects in England or Great Britain, it may be difficult for you to actually make money, and it’s more likely that you’ll actually lose money.
Panattoni invests hundreds of millions of pounds—£100 million in Kent this year—building sheds left, right, and centre. It is a great investment for them, and they’re the biggest shed builders in Europe, if not in the world. The investments are great all over the place, and they make a great return on their investments, but they get prepared for the local market, and they build sheds that can be accommodated in a plethora of different businesses.
You see, when you go out there and you want to build one of these sheds, you need to think about layout and how adaptable it needs to be so you can make a good yield on your investment and appeal to the broader range of businesses. Depending on whether you’re a short-term or long-term investor, whether all you want to do is flip housing stock or invest in it in the long run—perhaps into the rental sector—it will change how you want to approach the market.
It is a long game to go through planning, acquiring land, planning. Having land and then going for the planning is not always the best case; sometimes better to go for planning and then acquire land to make the whole endeavour less risky, but it depends how risk-averse you are—you may choose one way or the other. There’s all things about nutrient neutrality and biodiversity net gain, the Green Belt, and all different local areas of scientific importance, or heritage importance, or Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty. These factors will influence what you can do and what sort of developments you can push for and how risky it will be and how long you’ll have to wait until you get anywhere; sometimes it may take years before you manage to get planning on the site. Is that the time you can wait for? Is it not? These sorts of questions you need to answer yourself before you move into the British market.
So whether you want to realise the profits quickly or over a long period of time, there’ll be different strategies for you to approach the construction projects. Is your project a speculative investment, or diversification of funds, or just to keep securing the property? Then the approach will be different again. Are you going to invest in the local office who can deliver progress from concept to the last bolt—like the office that I run—or would you rather deal with property-development firms with proven record? What are the pros and cons of both approaches?
You see, when you have your own office, or the office that can be your managers, or can plan and build the housing stock, you may command better returns on your investments, whereas when you go to the property-development firm, well, they will like to have their cut, which will be bigger than the management office, and you’ll have less control over what’s happening.
Recently I’ve been approached—well, last week, really—by a public-good organisation that was concerned with a footbridge: apparently it’s deteriorating; it’s the old steel-slash-timber bridge, so it’s rotten and rusting, and they decided that it is the right time to change it now, and they found the idea of changing it into a glass-reinforced-plastic solution, and somehow they thought that foundations need to be changed as well, and they approached me to design their foundations for them.
When I looked at all they had, how they approached finding engineers to design the foundation, I looked at the whole thing, and nowhere in their descriptions could I find that there’s anything wrong with current foundations. So I picked up the phone and called the lovely engineer lady on the other side and asked her why she would like to change the foundations. “Well, because—because we do.” “Why?” “Well, because there’s nothing wrong with it, is there?” “So if there’s nothing wrong with it, what’s the point of changing it?” “Right … um … yeah.”
So, yeah, that was it. I then went on to discuss with her what are the pros and cons of it, and why it isn’t sustainable to change things that work correctly, and if they want to spend money there are better ways to spend money than just throwing it into the ground. It’s better for the environment and for everyone’s pockets to keep things that are working in place. That said, that was rather uncomfortable for the lovely lady, and we are yet to see whether they come back to me for further advice.
But it seems like the whole office has a certain naivety within the approach to the project delivery, to the project definition. It seems like most of these places—and I dealt with charities and local councils—they’ve got this naive approach to it: they have money, they need to spend, they find a way to spend it, and then they approach designers or engineers or whoever—surveyors—with a question: “Do we need to change it? We’d like to change it, actually.” So even if we don’t really need to change it, maybe it would be better if we change it because we have money to spend, and if we do, how? And as long as it seems right to them, it has to be right. Wrong.
If you want to have people on your side before you start making these decisions—people that see no profit in going into the further steps, people that want to judge on the circumstance you are in now rather than trying to sell you their expertise, their consulting services in the next stages of the process—then you should have these people on your side to either inform your decision at the word go or to check whether the people who are approaching you are actually providing you advice that resonates soundly with what’s in place and whether the directions that they give you are the directions you should follow.
You see, if you are not a well-versed client, a suggestion that something may need doing can resonate as something that needs doing immediately, but may need doing means that it may take another 10, or 15, or 20 years for it to actually be required, but not right now. So don’t be shy and reach out to those advisers out there, to those consultants—like the office that I run—or just give me a call. You see, it’s important to have someone with great knowledge, great experience, and maybe more than all of those two things, someone with an open mind who will not push for the work that does not need doing and will see the alternatives that could actually deliver better projects for you. [Music]
This type of clients, when they come into contact with me, I love to disappoint them—the clients that come to me with the expectation of delivery—and I tell them, “Sorry, I don’t want your business. Your project is ill-defined; your project will cost the planet and you too much for me to get involved with. We can either start from scratch and define it better, or you can go somewhere else and spend your money unwisely there.” At the end of the day, everyone who ever stuck to going back and redefining it from scratch usually saved a lot of money, but it takes guts and humility to do, and when you’re all the way out there splashing money left, right, and centre, it may not seem the most sensible thing to do—which unfortunately very often it is. [Music]
So, as you can see, or your ears hear, there is quite a few reasons to involve professionals at this stage of the process. I can think of at least ten reasons why it is worth getting a consultant at this stage. I’d say:
The decision at this stage is critical to the outcome. It may be the case that your initial need can be accommodated without the necessity to build
You may not have enough experience to judge what is the most realistic way to fulfil your expectations
You may not know exactly what needs to be taken into consideration to satisfy your needs and expectations.
You may not know the ways how your needs can be fulfilled.
Your site may not be suitable for development
Your budget may not be realistic.
Your knowledge of the best practices may be non-existent.
Your knowledge and expectations about the requirements and the process of project development may be insufficient to judge if going into the investment is right for you.
You may not know how to identify and put your needs and their requirements together.
You may not appreciate the risks involved in your investment project.
Well, some of them sound very similar, but, in the gist, that’s what it is— Stage 0, Strategic Definition. [Music]
All right, great—you’ve made it to the end. I hope you found something useful in the material, and if you have your own reflections on these matters or otherwise, I would love to know. Comment under the podcast, email me, or direct message me on LinkedIn. I would love to hear from you. Let us talk and make construction better for everyone in it. The next episode will be about Stage One of the Plan of Work, which deals with what it says on the tin: Preparation of the Brief. If you have suggestions or topics that you would like to hear me talking about, I would like to know. Let’s have the conversation that you care about. If you are an industry professional and would like to share your take on the industry or the expertise you’re involved in, I will gladly have a coffee with you and record our conversation for the listeners to benefit from. For now, this is it—toodloo!
Piotr Bytnar BEng (Hons) MSc CEng MIStructE
Chartered Structural Engineer who deals with the Architecture of buildings. His Master's Studies led him to an in-depth understanding of risk and contract arrangements in construction as well as specialist knowledge in soil mechanics.
He and his team help homeowners and property developers to design and deliver construction projects reducing waste in time and the cost. He believes that the construction project is an iterative process that can be well managed and it is best managed if all the aspects of the project definition and management are dealt with in-house or coordinated by one organisation. His team works to all stages of RIBA and ISTRUCTE stages of work and enables contractors to deliver projects on-site providing risk evaluations, methodologies for execution of works and temporary works designs.
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