One of our teams has been asked to sign off on a set of drawings in four days that, done properly, needed three weeks. The fee had already been agreed. The risk didn’t go away, it just stopped being covered.
That’s the quiet trade happening across our industry right now. Australia’s regulatory framework is becoming more demanding by the year, yet many design consultants are being asked to carry more statutory responsibility and accept greater professional risk for lower fees than ever before. Something has to give. It’s always time. And time is the one thing the rules were meant to protect.
At IA, we operate as a national design consultancy spanning architecture and interior design across seven Australian studios and now one in the US. Our teams take real pride in the work, and a significant part of that work is producing documentation that carries genuine statutory weight. Done well, it protects builders, developers, clients, and the communities we design for. When the fee doesn’t leave enough time, that documentation gets harder to hold together. Not because anyone wants to cut corners. Because there just isn’t time left to do it properly. Coordination gets thin. Checks get skipped. None of that shows up on the fee proposal. It shows up later, when it’s expensive to fix.
The good PMs we work with understand that procurement isn’t about finding the cheapest number, it’s about paying for the outcome you actually need. That’s a collaborative relationship, built on a shared understanding of what risk and rigour actually cost to deliver properly. It’s also, in my experience, increasingly rare.
What’s more common is a race to the bottom. Lowest bid wins, then gets cut again in a best and final round, on the assumption there was still room to give. Sometimes there was. More and more, there isn’t. Every extra cut comes straight out of the hours the project actually needs.
This isn’t a criticism of procurement, it’s a call to change what procurement optimises for. The conversation our industry needs isn’t “how low can we get the fee” but “what does this project need to be done properly, and are we paying for that.” Those are different questions, asked of different people, and they lead to very different outcomes for everyone at the table, including, ultimately, the client.
Here’s the test. Before asking a consultant to do it faster and cheaper, ask yourself honestly whether you’ve actually accounted for the risk you’re handing them.
If you haven’t, you haven’t saved money. You’ve just put off the bill. Someone always ends up paying it.
Andrew Whitelegg
CEO & Managing Director, IA Group
