An
architectural firm designed a project according to program and budget of an
institutional client. The client, though, had a hard time raising all of the
funds needed for the project and so asked the firm either to redesign the
project to reduce its size or help fundraise for the project to reach the
original budget, all without any extra fee to cover the time involved.
Professionals have a duty
to serve their clients and to help them achieve their goals within the
quantitative, qualitative, and financial constraints of a project. And with
that duty comes another one: letting clients know that they must often chose
between two of those three constraints. Unless a client has the rare gift of
modesty with ample means, most projects have to sacrifice the quantity of some
things, reduce the quality of some features, or increase the amount of money in
the budget. In design, as in life, we can rarely have it all, and the sooner
that conversation takes place in a project, the better it goes.
If it doesn’t occur or if
the client doesn’t listen when it does, situations like the one here can
happen. Architects can design a building according to the quantitative and
qualitative requirements and the financial capacity of the client, but if the
funding for a project doesn’t come in as expected, something must give. Either
the project gets redesigned to reduce costs or the participants in the project must
raise the money needed to complete it as initially conceived.
Of course, at this point,
the fees to do this extra work often don’t exist, given the deficit the client
already faces. So professionals have to make a decision: put the project on
hold until the client can raise more money to build it as designed or help the
client either do that fundraising or reduce the expense of the building to fit
within the money available. That decision demands weighing two types of duty:
to others and to ourselves. Professionals have a duty to their clients, but
they also have a responsibility to their colleagues, co-workers, and ultimately
to their businesses. It does no good for a practitioner to go out of business
donating too much time to help other’s business.
The firm in this example might
decide to keep working on the project without pay if the client seems likely to
raise more money in the future and recompense the office for its extra work, or
if the effort seems likely to lead to future work from that client or others.
Some projects become “loss leaders,” generating new projects that can more than
compensate for the earlier loss. And some clients have connections and
reputations that can make their recommendations to future clients especially
valuable.
The dutiful decision also
may turn on the nature of the client’s business. If a business has plenty of
financial capacity and yet asks a firm to do work for free, the donation of
time can quickly become a form of exploitation by the client, and the
professional must say no. We all have a duty to stop exploitation, whether of
ourselves or of others. But if, as in this case, the client is a non-profit
without the money to move forward, the donation of services and the offering of
help to raise money for the project become ways of giving back to a community
and of paying forward the help others have given us. We all have a duty as
citizens, and donating time and money in such cases always pays personal dividends.
