Introduction

Development team

Your development brief has been prepared and your various professionals must now undertake the detailed work leading to the preparation of contract documents etc. Probably the most severe test of your group's leadership skills comes now.

Architects, quantity surveyors, engineers, lawyers, finance advisers and others are all beavering away at their specific, perhaps compartmentalised, disciplines. As the client, the artists have to hold all this together, keeping an eye on the overall vision and adjusting the scheme to suit your purpose.

At this stage you need to be working and thinking as a team rather than as a set of experienced individuals. Without the coordination and cooperation created by an effective development team the process can go badly off the rails.

It is advisable for your development team to include members of the professional team. Most importantly it should have a clear idea of the overall vision and have the trust and delegated authority of the artists' group.

Preparation

Negotiating and securing the finance, structuring the implementation frameworks, preparing contract documents and then taking the major step of entering into financial and legal obligations is the biggest step you will take.

After this, others will implement what you have committed yourself to do: your role becomes less intense. Monitoring and steering the development team requires being ready to make decisions if variations are required to your contracts as practical problems emerge.

If you got the original documents right, no major adjustments are required. If the documents were rushed or ill-conceived, you will spend the contract period on the back foot, trying to adjust complex agreements through crisis management.

If your preparation and early work was thorough enough, the job will go smoothly.

What can go wrong?

Your options appraisal (The options appraisal deconstructes the Initial Vision and reconstructes it into the beginnings of a practical proposal through an appraisal of alternatives. The reconstruction takes the form of a Planning Brief which sets out the broad spatial / legal / financial / timescale / agency & partnership aims. At this point it is valuable to hold various consultation processes to hear outside views, secure the tentative interest of prospective partners and funders, and hear the preliminary views of statutory and regulatory bodies. This process may revise the Planning Brief.) and feasibility (Feasibility: formulates a Model Scheme based on the Planning Brief to test the overall practicality of the Vision and its sensitivity (vulnerability) to shifts or changes - including an assessment of the chance that such change is probable, likely or uncertain (Risk Analysis). The Model Scheme is then translated into the Development Brief which sets out a series of frameworks, guidelines and 'proscriptive' (not prescriptive) conditions that will govern the final design process.) should have identified vulnerability in various areas and you should already have addressed that. Nevertheless, problems may arise for example:

• Your budget turns out to be too little to achieve your vision
• Your need for partners begins to distort or dilute your control and undermine your vision
• You are given money to achieve an objective for a funder that matches one of your own, but it involves complex and time-consuming reporting mechanisms.

A well-structured and clearly briefed development team should enable you to successfully negotiate such problems as they arise.

Dreams into reality

It is at this stage that your early dreams translate into reality. You begin to get feedback on your initial projections and the picture that emerges may be different from the earlier stages that originally galvanised your group to embark on this journey.

A well structured development team means you can stay in control of this.

Confident client

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Client failure

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