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The architecture sector, together with everyone else, has been thrown into crisis mode since Covid-19 hit. With the furlough scheme extended to at least April, tough and uncertain times look set to continue into this year – especially if we consider the added hardships of facing one of the deepest recessions on record and as firms navigate Brexit too.

No-one wants to come across as glib in the face of these events and the undeniable hardship that many will endure and there are no easy answers. But there are already lessons to be learned and there is an opportunity for practices to drive innovation, and transition disaster recovery measures into a longer-term, strategic vision that can help drive competitiveness in 2021 and beyond. It’s important to evolve now.

 The appetite and ability to anticipate change, to adapt quickly to unexpected events as they arise is critical. If practices can demonstrate this, then they can provide far more assurance of continued reliability than if they are forever on the back foot or desperately trying to maintain a particular way of working. And alongside this focus on agility, organisational strategies also need to prioritise maintaining or even improving the quality of work; increasing productivity whilst protecting the health and wellbeing of staff, and reducing unnecessary overheads across project teams.

Driving change through digital transformation efforts has have been accelerated by the pandemic. As McKinsey outlines, to stay competitive in our new environment requires new strategies and practices, with technology viewed as a strategic enabler rather than a tactical source for cost efficiency. It calls out leading organisations as viewing digital and corporate strategies as one and the same.

That’s a lot to juggle. And a lot of practices out there are looking for guidance, as they shift from an unprecedented level of crisis response to a strategic vision fit for a less an unpredictable future than ever before.

So, what needs to be top of the agenda? Here are three key steps to consider:

 

1. Bolster resilience: The start of lockdown and the shift to mass remote working was a prime opportunity for cyber criminals to exploit the use of more personal devices, unmanaged home networks, dispersed data across multiple locations and disparate services. Indeed, Zaha Hadid Architects was hit by ransomware in April and warned other practices about falling foul to hackers.

 

With the Government advising to work from home if we can and the Institute of Directors finding that 74% of company directors plan to keep increased at home working after coronavirus, remote working is here to stay. Companies must therefore ensure that strategic planning addresses concerns around security, as well as redundancy and ease of management, to ensure greater resilience is built into systems, infrastructures and processes. Centralise operations, ensure closely managed access control and multi-factor security for everything.

 

2. Align tech with team demands: Remote working forced firms to embrace cloud collaboration tools and services like never before, from virtual desktop platforms to Microsoft Teams. Now, having witnessed the benefits, employees are set to demand greater flexibility going forward.

 

Yet, compared to many remote workers, architects and building design professionals face particular challenges when working from home, given traditionally they need to rely on powerful workstations and fast network speeds for their projects – not necessarily available in homeworking scenarios. However, technologies are now available that are calibrated to provide the optimum experience for a range of industry specific software, reducing lag and prioritising input, to enable at-home workers to work as effectively as if they were in the office, even on cheaper hardware operating in low-bandwidth environments of personal WiFi. In fact, they can continue to work to a high-level performance from anywhere with an internet connection. This doesn’t mean that everyone should be working from home all of the time. There are benefits of face to face collaboration that simply can’t be replicated, but remote working does now need to be an important factor in any working strategy.

With the right technology in place, smarter ways of working can be realised. According to David Lawrence, Director of Flanagan Lawrence Architects, the practice plans to migrate its team entirely to a virtual infrastructure over the next 12 months after realising the benefits of working this way during lockdown. This includes having greater flexibility to adapt their traditional office space, support the adoption of satellite offices, and enable employees to work from anywhere via a centralised and secure system.

 

3. Take a phased approach to a long-term goal: Now is the time for practices to be seriously considering and implementing appropriate solutions to help cement certainty in the future, secure the edge over their competitors and generate a significant return on investment. Understandably no one wants to spend money right now, but sensible and informed investment will be critical for the medium to long term and cost savings absolutely can be realised.

 

But this is not just a technological conversation, it’s a commercial one. Technology needs to support operational and strategic goals: it can never be an end in itself. There needs to be buy-in from senior leadership to ensure that digital technologies are incorporated in line with the priorities of the broader business.

This calls for a strategic, phased evolution, that is continually reviewed and refined in line with constantly-changing macro factors and one that interrogates robustly all those old ‘certainties’, ensuring that investment is made in a progressive and intelligent manner. That could be, for example, flexing between moving to an on-premise server, through to transferring your entire infrastructure to the cloud, replacing physical attributes of the office – including workstations and server rooms – wholesale.

Given the unpredictability we’re facing, architecture leaders need to have the flexibility to rapidly pivot and change direction to meet the demands of today, while anticipating the challenges of tomorrow.

This can’t be a knee-jerk reaction; it must be underpinned by strategic vision that has the overall goals and objectives of the business at its heart. With Covid-19 accelerating the innovation and adoption of digital solutions across industries, architectural practices should be exploring how technology can fit into their long-term strategic plans and help pave the way for greater resilience and agility, as well as future success.