Application Of Interface Management In Owners’ Design Management

With the accelerated development of the economy and urbanization, there are moreand more construction projects in recent years. Design is the first step during theconstruction period, and it has an important influence on project’s target of safety,quality, schedule and investment. As the initiator, organizer and decision-makers of theproject, owners play an important role in the design management throughout the wholeprocess of the project. But the owner’s capability of design management is weaknessnow in China.During the design management process, owners have to face a lot of interfaceissues derived from the exchange of resources technology and information by a numberof project participants. Interface management theory can be used as a new attempt tomake the design management more efficient and orderly, it also complies with the trendof multidisciplinary complementary.After decades of development, interface management theory has received a lot ofresearch achievements. But most of the research focused on the industry of R&D andbusiness marketing, the research of interface management in the construction industryhas just begun in recent years. In this paper, interface management is applied to thewhole process of owners’ design management. After summarizing the definition and thetype of interface management, this paper describes the interface contradiction causesand general principles of interface management. And last, in accordance with theimplementation of the order of the construction project, owners’ design management isdivided into the preparation stage, design stage, construction stage and the stage ofcompletion of the project in four stages, this paper is executed by this four stages.At the preparatory stage, this article describes the owners’ interface managementtasks in the preparation stage from two aspects of build the project interface system andconstruct the project interface management system.At the design stage, make the communication interface between the owners anddesign firms as the research object, this paper discusses the importance ofcommunication and collaboration between the owners and design firms. Method basedon co-ordination center is proposed to manage the interface between the owners anddesign firms at the end of the chapter.At the construction stage, make the design change management as the research object, this paper discussed the interface during the department of project manager, costmanagement and design Management. And then based on the interface during internaldepartments, raise the method of process reengineering.At the stage of completion of the project, method of Gray clustering analysis isapplied to evaluate the interface management level of the owner.A theoretical and practical attempt is taken through applying interface managementtheory to the owner’s design management, so that it can play a role on the exaltation ofthe owners’ management capacity.