Plan work in phases

Architecture and engineering practices plan and bill by phase: the brief, the concept, the coordinated design, the technical design, construction. The phases up to the technical design end with the client approving them, and that approval is the moment the phase’s fee becomes invoiceable and its scope stops changing for free; construction is billed against its completion instead. Onplana models a phase as an epic, each sign-off or completion point as a milestone, and each fee share as a milestone line on the quote linked to one of those milestones, so the programme, the fee schedule and the hours are one record.

Start from a phase template

Two system templates lay a building project out this way. Both are available on every plan.

Template	Phases	What it carries
RIBA Plan of Work (Architecture)	Stages 0 to 7 of the 2020 Plan of Work	22 tasks with hours, a client sign-off task and milestone closing each of Stages 1 to 4, three risks
AIA Design Phases (Architecture, US)	Schematic design, design development, construction documents, bidding, construction administration	17 tasks with hours, an owner approval closing each of the three design phases, the customary 15/20/40/5/20 fee split named in the copy

1. Open Projects and choose New project, then Start from a template.
2. Pick the RIBA or the AIA template and name the project.
3. The project opens with one epic per stage, the tasks inside them, and the sign-off milestones on the Gantt chart as diamonds.

The durations and hours are a starting shape for a mid-sized project. Resize them once the appointment is agreed; the structure is what the template is for.

Tip

Every task in both templates carries an estimate on purpose. Phase progress is measured as the share of the phase’s estimate that has been approved on timesheets, so a task without hours is a phase without a denominator.

What a phase is in Onplana

A phase is an epic: a named, coloured group that tasks belong to, in order. Renaming a stage is renaming the epic; adding a stage is adding an epic and moving tasks into it. The Gantt, the task list and the timesheet all know which epic a task belongs to, which is what makes hours per phase readable.

Each sign-off is a milestone, and so are the points the later stages close on: practical completion and handover in RIBA (Stages 0 and 7 carry none), contract award and substantial and final completion in AIA. A milestone has a date, it shows on the Gantt, and it can be linked to a milestone line on the quote, which is how a fee share is recognised.

Quote the fee per stage

On the deal, price the engagement as milestone lines, one per fee share, each against one of the template’s milestones: in RIBA the Stage 1 to 4 sign-offs, then practical completion and handover; in AIA the three owner approvals, then contract award and the two completions. Send the quote for the client to accept. When the deal is won, the lines become the project’s milestone schedule, and each amount is recognised as revenue when its linked milestone completes. The margin report then shows the stage’s revenue against the hours that earned it.

The RIBA appointment leaves the split to the practice; Stages 2 to 5 usually carry most of it. The AIA tradition has a customary split of 15% schematic design, 20% design development, 40% construction documents, 5% bidding and 20% construction administration. Both are starting points, not rules. See Choose a billing model for how milestone amounts are recognised and Quote and win for the quote itself.

See the hours each phase consumes

Hours land on tasks, and tasks belong to epics, so the hours a phase has used are the approved hours on the tasks inside it. Filter the task list or the Gantt by epic to see a phase’s tasks and their logged time, and compare the total with the phase’s estimate.

Caution

The margin report groups by client, project and person. It does not yet cut revenue and cost by phase, so per-phase profitability is a comparison you make from the hours and the fee share today, not a row the report gives you. A phase cut is planned once one firm has run a project on these templates.

Migrated schedules

A schedule imported from Microsoft Project arrives with its stages as summary tasks rather than epics, with dependencies and costs intact. Use the templates for new appointments; an imported plan keeps its own structure, and the phase cut, when it lands, will read summary tasks as phases on projects that have no epics.

Change after a sign-off

A client change after a stage sign-off is the most common source of unbilled design hours. File the ask against the client, decide whether it is in scope, and if it is not, add a line to the quote and send it again. The client’s requests view shows which asks became work without being re-priced. See Run your pipeline.