Once a building is physically complete, designers and builders move on to the next project. Few of them stay around to learn from what they have done and pass on their insights to the occupants. 'Soft Landings' aims to extend the scope of service so that feedback and follow-through can become natural parts of the delivery of a project. It increases designer and constructor involvement before and after handover, and points the 'supply side' to more involvement with users and a careful assessment of building performance in use. The objective is more certainty in delivering buildings that achieve a close match between the expectations of clients and users and the predictions of the design team. A Soft Landings team (designer and builder) is resident on site during the move-in period in order to deal with emerging issues more effectively. It then monitors building use and energy performance for the first three years of occupation: identifying opportunities both for fine-tuning the building and for future projects. This process also creates a coordinated route to postoccupancy evaluation. The cost of the extra work is relatively small and can be balanced against gains from the learning process, less rework and better client references. Soft Landings does not require wide-scale revision of industry-standard documentation: a licensed Scope of Service document set can stand alongside most existing procurement processes.Keywords: building performance, client satisfaction, design quality, feedback, innovation, involvement, learning, predictability, process improvement, professional services, project delivery, quality control
IntroductionClients and users are united in expecting better performance from the buildings they procure and occupy. Tighter environmental regulation adds pressure for greater predictability of the end product. In practice, however, most clients and users become 'crash test dummies': they are abandoned by the project team after handover just when they are likely to need the most help.Publications on building performance evaluation, most recently Preiser and Vischer (2005), show how feedback can be integrated into every phase of delivery throughout a building's life cycle. In practice, however, most designers and contractors have traditionally shown little interest in learning from how their buildings actually perform in use; and most clients have certainly not wanted to pay them to do so. It has therefore been necessary to consider how feedback and feed-through can begin to be added onto conventional procurement processes.The post-handover period is the most neglected stage of construction, often looked upon as a nuisance and a distraction. Ironically, this is precisely when much can be fed forward into the completed project, for the benefit of the client and the occupants; and much can be learnt, recorded and fed back for reuse on future projects, to the benefit of all the stakeholders. Instead, during this crucial phase, client goodwill and profit margins often tend to be eroded, the hard-won exper...