Designing for Building Maintainability - Effective Building Maintenance: Protection of Capital Assets - page 135

be a simple failure to use codes and standards properly, or may be at-
tributable to the shear volume of advice. Another source that many de-
signers (and most contractors) overlook is manufacturer installation in-
structions, resulting in poor performance of the product that is installed
incorrectly (think Tyvek barrier without taped joints).
And, most importantly, without using life cycle costing for design
decision making, buildings will lack thorough documentation to reveal
the real costs during the life of the building...designers focus on the con-
struction cost of a building, but typically do not really take into account
the subsequent owning and operating costs, especially maintenance
costs.
Some effort has been attempted to facilitate improved communi-
cation and management to create a better balance of design and main-
tenance. One approach to this is for a single group made up of the de-
signers, the contractor(s), and the owner's operations and maintenance
staff to coordinate the design effort...what we now call the “integrated
design” approach. Another alternative is to forcefully involve greater
participation by assigning legal responsibilities to designers and devel-
opers.
However, attempts to facilitate effective communication during
the design process are burdened by conflicting objectives, professional
prejudices, and inappropriate management structures. If design and
maintenance issues are to be balanced, it is essential for one group to
coordinate design, construction and maintenance activities and much
work remains to ensure that the integrated design approach becomes
widely used.
For this reason, some countries (Singapore, for example) require
developers to retain at least a 30% share in the building for ten years af-
ter completion, automatically involving them in operations and mainte-
nance issues, while others (such as Taiwan) require developers to hand-
over a maintenance budget to the building management control board
during the building delivery process.
While these compulsory requirements can actively assist in in-
creasing maintenance assessment, they are resisted by developers and
few governments have considered them. Thus,improveddesignandcon-
structiontechniques,ideallydeterminedandincorporatedviatheintegrated
designprocess,remainthebestwaytoachievegoodqualitybuildings .
Over the whole life of a building, the design and construction pe-
riod represents only 1-10% of the life cycle; the rest, including opera-