Departmental/Studio Organization
Hi! is there a youtube video that helps explain departmental/ studio organization. pros and cons of each. Ahpp content is confusing for me and looking for a difference way to understand.
Thanks
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The best way to view departmental vs studio is how a firm decides to delegate tasks/projects.
Departmental breaks up work by project phase: a team or group takes the preliminary design/schematic portion, then passes it off to the team responsible for the DD phase, and so on through the life of the project. Benefits of this is that people's skillsets may be better suited for a certain phase of a project (construction detailing vs conceptual design) and they can group these individuals together to maintain a strong output at each phase where everyone is working to their strengths. Drawbacks would be being "pigeonholed" into one area or phase and not getting overall exposure to the full life cycle of a project, items being lost in translation from team to team handoff between phases, to name a few.
Studio keeps projects to teams or groups that will take the project from concept to completion. The individual studios contain a multitude of people that all have their strengths and weaknesses but collaborate at each phase to bring the project through. Benefits of this being that everyone gets to be exposed to the project at each phase, while cons could be that some people aren't as strong at certain points but maintain similar contributions (design, detailing, etc.), not everyone working towards the same end goal, or being in a studio that doesn't play to one's strengths based on the client or project type.
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From reading up on both of these firm organizational structures, the department versus studio structure appears to me to be the way that the horizontal/vertical/matrix structure is expressed in the real world. The horizontal structure is similar to the studio organization, and the vertical structure is similar to the department organization. The matrix structure, which is a hybrid of horizontal and vertical, would be a firm that tries to put everyone in separate studios to service different project types or specific clients, but ends up "borrowing" staff to work on other studios' projects, because they have a specialization or expertise that the other studios lack, essentially drawing on a department of professionals, even if not so organized. I have always been assigned to a "studio", but get staffed on projects based on needs, not studios.
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Departmental vs. Studio Organization
This is describing two distinct models of organizing an architecture firm:
1. Departmental Organization (also called Functional):
- Structure:
- Staff is divided by discipline or task
- e.g., architectural, structural, MEP, etc.
- Pros:
- Specialization leads to efficiency and consistency in tasks.
- Easier training and quality control within each department.
- Cons:
- Can cause communication silos between departments.
- Less continuity for a project (a project might “pass through” many hands).
- Example: A designer starts a project, then hands it off to production staff, then it goes to the CA team.
2. Studio Organization:
- Structure:
- Staff is divided into small, multidisciplinary teams (studios) that each work on entire projects from start to finish.
- Pros:
- Better continuity and team cohesion throughout the project.
- Stronger client relationships since the same team stays involved.
- Cons:
- Less specialization
- staff need to be more versatile.
- May duplicate resources across studios (less efficiency).
- Example: One studio handles everything
- Designs, CDs, and CA for their assigned projects.
Rajan K.
Founder, arniko.academy
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