Summary: This newly published podcast features Ray Kogan, AIA, president of Kogan and Company in McLean, Va., who specializes in strategic planning and consulting for design firms. For Kogan, the value of a strategic plan is that it allows architects to succeed in a fragmented and competitive marketplace and helps managers move towards a defined plan and vision. Ironically, the elements of strategic planning that architects will need to be in control of their future are services they often do for their clients but don’t do enough for themselves.

Among the broad trends that architects need to integrate into their strategic plans: demographic changes, like an aging population’s design needs, and the continued urbanization of the country around large, state-spanning, mega-regions. Kogan expects new technologies like BIM to flourish in projects that embrace non-traditional design methods like IPD, but expects more claims and lawsuits in BIM projects where this new technology is attached to more rigid, traditional design-bid-build projects. The next development in the mainstreaming of sustainable design, he says, will be a holistic integration along the lines of what ADA design guidelines have become—second nature to all practicing architects. Most fundamentally, the traditional design work that architects do on projects will have to extend itself and occupy a longer spectrum of the project lifecycle, beyond schematic design to construction administration. A new model would have architects working on financial feasibility studies, all the way to finished building operations and maintenance, says Kogan. “What we’ve all come to think of as the traditional deliverable will become just a middle service in a much more extended continuum of services that architects are going to have to provide,” he says.