How to Staff an Architecture Project Through Every Phase
A staffing plan that treats a project as one undifferentiated block of hours will be wrong in every phase at once — overstaffed early, understaffed at deadlines, and blindsided by construction administration. Architecture projects change shape as they move from pre-design to construction, and the staffing plan has to change shape with them.
This guide walks through each phase: what the work actually is, how effort typically distributes, the staffing mistake each phase invites, and how to keep the plan honest from kickoff to closeout.
First, the shape of the whole
Fee structures vary by firm, project type, and contract, but the distribution used in standard AIA agreements is a widely used baseline for how design-fee effort splits across the basic-services phases:
| Phase | Standard share of fee | Typical range |
|---|---|---|
| Schematic Design (SD) | 15% | 10–25% |
| Design Development (DD) | 20% | 10–25% |
| Construction Documents (CD) | 40% | 35–50% |
| Bidding / Negotiation | 5% | 2–8% |
| Construction Administration (CA) | 20% | 20–30% |
(Pre-design services — programming, site analysis, feasibility — typically sit outside the basic-services fee as additional services under AIA contract structures, which is exactly why they're easy to under-plan; more on that below.)
Treat the ranges as a sanity check, not gospel — a renovation skews toward CA, a speculative developer project may compress DD. The point is that your staffing plan should roughly mirror your fee distribution. If CD is 40% of your fee but your staffing plan has the same three people at the same hours all year, one of the two documents is lying.
Pre-Design: small team, senior hours
The work: programming, site analysis, zoning and code review, feasibility, contract scoping.
The right shape: small and senior — typically a principal and a project manager, with specialists pulled in for spot tasks. The decisions made here (program, budget, fee, schedule) constrain everything downstream, which is why this is senior time and not intern time.
The classic mistake: assigning whoever happens to be free. Pre-design looks low-stakes on a staffing grid because the hours are few — and because it often sits outside the basic-services fee entirely — but a junior-led programming effort produces vague requirements that get re-litigated in SD, where the rework costs multiples of what doing it right would have.
Plan it: a few senior hours per week, protected. Don't let a deadline on another project consume the principal's pre-design time; the budget you blow won't be this phase's, it will be every later phase's.
Schematic Design: the team forms
The work: design concepts, massing, preliminary plans, early consultant coordination, client presentations.
The right shape: the design lead at heavy allocation, a designer or two at moderate hours, the PM coordinating part-time. SD runs on iteration, so it benefits from a small team with high overlap rather than many people at low hours.
The classic mistake: scope churn absorbed silently. Clients revise programs most aggressively in SD, and design teams absorb revisions instinctively. Each absorbed revision is unplanned hours. Decide deliberately — additional service or documented absorption — while the revision is happening, not at the quarterly review. (We've written a case study on what silent absorption does to margins.)
Plan it: moderate total hours with a deliberate spike before each client presentation. Watch the iteration count: if you planned three concept rounds and you're on round five, the staffing plan is already fiction and needs to be re-projected.
Design Development: the quiet budget killer
The work: developing the chosen scheme into coordinated systems — structure, MEP, envelope, interiors. Materials and details get real; consultant coordination becomes constant.
The right shape: the team grows. Technical staff join, the design lead stays engaged, and coordination time (meetings, redlines, consultant back-and-forth) becomes a real budget line of its own.
The classic mistake: DD is where projects most often go quietly over budget. It lacks SD's visible milestones and CD's hard deadline, so it sprawls: "we're still developing the design" can describe week two or week fourteen. Staffing creeps up — an extra designer here, more coordination there — and without a phase budget in view, nothing flags the creep.
Plan it: define DD's internal milestones (systems selected, envelope resolved, coordinated 50% set) and project staffing against each. Reconcile hours against the DD fee weekly — this is the phase where the burn line matters most.
Construction Documents: peak headcount, peak risk
The work: the full drawing set and specifications — the most labor-intensive phase of nearly every project.
The right shape: maximum headcount, more junior-weighted than earlier phases, under a technical lead running QC. This is where production staff carry the project, with senior review at defined checkpoints.
The classic mistakes, and CD invites two opposite ones:
- Understaffing early CD because the deadline feels distant, then sprinting with overtime in the final month — which means the set gets drawn by exhausted people, QC happens at 11 PM or not at all, and errors ship to the contractor.
- Throwing bodies at it late. Five people added in the final three weeks don't know the project; they cost coordination time the team no longer has.
Plan it: staff CD as a level plateau, not a ramp to a cliff. Backload QC time explicitly (it's the first thing cut in a crunch and the most expensive thing to skip). If the plateau doesn't fit between now and the deadline at sane weekly hours, the conversation about scope, fee, or schedule needs to happen now — capacity math doesn't improve under deadline pressure.
Construction Administration: the long tail
The work: submittal review, RFIs, site visits, punch lists — stretched over construction's 12–24+ months.
The right shape: thin but sustained — a CA architect and partial PM time, with the original technical lead reachable for the genuinely hard questions.
The classic mistake: planning CA as an afterthought. The drawing set finishes, the team scatters to new projects, and CA is handled "as it comes up" — by people whose calendars are already full. RFI responses slow down, the contractor escalates, and someone senior firefights at the worst possible billing rate. Worse, CA hours never appear in the staffing plan at all, so the firm's capacity picture overstates availability for the entire duration of construction.
Plan it: allocate CA explicitly for the full construction duration — even at four hours a week, it must occupy a line in the plan. Expect a spike at submittal waves early in construction and another at closeout.
Keeping the plan honest
Phase-aware staffing only works if the plan stays connected to reality. Three habits make the difference:
- Project weekly, by phase, by person. Not "Sara is on the library project" but "Sara: 24 hours/week on the library through end of DD, 8 thereafter." Vague allocations can't be reconciled against anything.
- Reconcile hours against phase budgets every week. The distribution table above is a plan; timesheets are reality; the gap between them is your earliest warning. Catch it at 60% burn and you have options.
- Put PTO and the next project in the same view. Phase transitions are exactly when teams reshuffle — which is when vacation collisions and double-bookings happen. A staffing plan that can't see time off will confidently schedule people who aren't there.
Doing this in a spreadsheet is possible at small scale and breaks down predictably as the firm grows. This phase-by-phase shape is what Resource is designed around: project projections lay out budget burn by phase on a weekly timeline, staffing projections show each person's allocation against capacity with PTO in view, and the two reconcile continuously — so the plan you run the Monday meeting from is the plan that's actually true.
However you tool it, the principle holds: staff the phase, not the project. Each phase is a different job with a different team shape, and the firms that plan that way are the ones that hit CD deadlines without overtime and finish CA still profitable.