• Soft Landings FAQs
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Soft Landings - frequently asked questions

• What is Soft Landings?
• Who should take part?
• Can I modify the Framework to suit my project?
• Who runs Soft Landings?
• Who leads Soft Landings?
• How much does the Soft Landings Framework cost?
• How much will Soft Landings cost to implement?
• How can clients budget for Soft Landings?
• How do M&E contractors quote for a Soft Landings service?
• How can designers and contractors benefit from Soft Landings?
• What role do penalties and retentions have in Soft Landings?
• Can there be incentives and rewards?
• How does Soft Landings fit with defects warranty requirements?
• Where can I go to get more advice and support?

What is Soft Landings?

Soft Landings is a process for designers and constructors to improve the operational performance of buildings and provide valuable feedback to project teams. 

Soft Landings also requires designers and constructors to remain involved with buildings beyond practical completion, to assist the client during the first months of operation and beyond, to help fine-tune and de-bug the systems, and ensure the occupiers understand how to control and best use their buildings.

Soft Landings provides a unified vehicle for engaging with outcomes throughout the process of briefing, design and delivery. It dovetails with energy performance certification, building logbooks, green leases, and corporate social responsibility.

In essence, Soft Landings involves:

• Achieving greater clarity at the inception and briefing stages about client needs and required outcomes
• Placing greater emphasis on building readiness, by designer and constructor having greater involvement during the pre-handover and commissioning stages
• A resident Soft Landings team located on site during the users' initial settling-in period
• Remaining involved after occupation, during and beyond the defects liability period to resolve outstanding issues.

Soft Landings requires designers and constructors to spend more time on constructive dialogue with the client, and in setting expectations and performance targets on energy and end-user satisfaction. Soft Landings provides a unifying vehicle for feedback methods such as energy and occupant surveys and assessments such as Design Quality Indicators and BREEAM.

Budget needs to be set aside for the pre-handover and aftercare steps (see "How much does Soft Landings cost to implement?". As buildings often evolve during design, the Soft Landings team can anticipate this and consider how to respond to the client's calls for adaptations.

The continuing involvement by the client, design and building team during a three-year aftercare period will help the operators get the best out of the building. Everybody involved will benefit from the lessons learned from occupant satisfaction surveys and energy monitoring. The worksteps in Soft Landings enable operators and users to spend more time on understanding interfaces and systems before they occupy the building. The designers and key contractors are tuned to understand and support the end-users in the critical early period of occupation.

Who should take part?

Everyone in a project team, and the client and the client's representatives. Soft Landings maps out roles and responsibilities for all key members of the project team.

It is important to include specialist sub-contractors, especially where they have a design responsibility and when their systems link to other parts of the building.

Controls sub-contractors are vital members of Soft Landings team, as their systems are responsible for making sure that the building and its engineering services operate in accordance with the design specification, and are manageable by the client's facilities team after handover.

Designers of the controls systems should also stay engaged as part of the Soft Landings aftercare team, rather than pass their responsibilities wholly over to a snagging team who may not appreciate the finer points of the design intention.

Can I modify the Framework to suit my project?

Yes, in fact the Framework and its example worksheets are not designed to be applied without some tailoring to the local context, whether driven by a particular form of contract or by the type of building. While Soft Landings is a generic framework, a swimming pool will have a different set of Soft Landings requirements compared with those of a school, for example. The project team should identify these differences and requirements quite easily as they work through the worksheets.

The worksteps for all stages of the Soft Landings process need to be worked through in a workshop. Not all Soft Landings requirements will be able to be sorted at the outset, some will need to wait until other professionals are hired, some will need revisiting and revising as more information becomes available (particularly during detailed design). At the very least the project team should be able to identify additional duties required of key sub-contractors, and these requirements should be included in tender documents. However, the requirements should be carefully worded so that they do not appear onerous or too specific, which would go against the spirit of collaborative working and shared responsibility.

Who runs Soft Landings?

A project team runs its Soft Landings process, not any external body. It is not a tick-box assessment process, it is not a licensed process, and it is not a fixed product. The Soft Landings worksteps can (and should) be tailored to suit a project's particular circumstances. Soft Landings works as a team endeavour.

BSRIA and the Usable Buildings Trust will work together to support the construction industry and its clients to apply Soft Landings, and develop the process and procedures in the light of operational experience. Some form of training and competency accreditation may be worthwhile in future, but this will surface over time.

Who leads Soft Landings?

Soft Landings needs strong client championing, as without that it is unlikely that Soft Landings will be a natural process for a project team. Soft Landings will work best when it is an explicit client requirement, and where the Framework has been adopted at a project's very inception.

Soft Landings will need a champion who stays with the project throughout. This will be vital for procurement processes where key members of the team may come and go at key stages (such as in design and build), and where key contractors may only join the project team much later and when much of the design may have been finalised. The champion will need to consider how Soft Landings duties need to be worded in a particular contractor's terms of appointment.

The role of the Project Manager is key. Project managers are primarily hired for their abilities to manage time and cost. A client wishing to adopt Soft Landings needs to give very careful thought as to the type of person they appoint to lead their project, and ensure the project manager's terms of reference are written with Soft Landings as the guiding principle.

Facilities management expertise needs to be involved in the early stages. It may require good skills in facilitation to get the best out of the facilities team during the briefing stages, as designers and premises managers can approach issues from very different perspectives. Engaging facilities managers also helps with the management of expectations, and will help the professional team to identify the degree of FM training and familiarisation that will be needed post-handover.

How much does the Soft Landings Framework cost?

Soft Landings is an open-source Framework, freely available to all who wish to adopt it. Hard copies of the Framework can be purchased from BSRIA via www.bsria.co.uk/bookshop, but versions in PDF can be freely downloaded from both the BSRIA website and other institutions and bodies representing construction industry professionals.

How much will Soft Landings cost to implement?

Soft Landings only requires small extra funding. It is designed to run alongside any procurement process without creating duplication.

The costs for the early stages - from project inception to pre-handover - should involve little extra cost, well within the margin of competitive bids. There is some extra work during the three-year aftercare period, but the costs are modest in relation to the value added to the client's building, in relation to the cost of potential re-work, and the potential cost of high fuel bills from poorly finished-off and poorly controlled building services.

Some elements of Soft Landings, such as group facilitation in the briefing stages, reality checking of design decisions, and the energy and occupant surveys are best carried out by an independent organisation using industry-standard methodologies. The costs of this external input will be modest.

The amount of time spent on aftercare will tail off as the results of the surveys help the building's facilities team deliver a sustained high level of environmental and business performance.

How can clients budget for Soft Landings?

Clients may need to set some kind of budget for Soft Landings before they have a project team together to run through the detailed costs. A nominal budget could reasonably be 0.1% of the total contract budget. This should not be fixed - on smaller contracts the percentage might be slightly higher, on very large projects, slightly lower.

Clients should not ask construction firms to price their Soft Landings input individually during the tendering stage. Soft Landings doesn't work like that. It has to be a project team exercise once the architect, engineers and main contractor are appointed. In the early stages of procurement clients should merely be looking for commitment from tenderers, plus some statement of capability (based on the Framework's requirements) and willingness to work collaboratively and share information. The next stage, once the project team has been appointed, is to bring everyone together, decide roles and responsibilities, and put hours and expenses to the agreed activities. That has to be done in the round, and is best facilitated by someone with the right skills, and external to the project team.

If enough effort is put into the inception, briefing and design development phases, the actual costs of interventions during a three-year aftercare period may be significantly lower than budgeted. The client can opt to claw back the remaining budget, invest in capital items that improve the building further, or use the underspend to reward the project team for getting the building to match the design intention, however this is expressed. (Energy targets would be one measure, occupant satisfaction another.)

Note that many costs assumed necessary for the initial stages might be zero, as they involve actions that require minimal extra work by the project team. Even in the post-handover stages of Soft Landings, which does involve additional paid duties, the costs may be lower if the professional team do not charge-out their time at full labour rate. They will be benefitting from the exercise as well, after all.

The only fixed additional costs are energy and occupant surveys, carried out at the start (to influence the briefing process and design) and during the aftercare stages as part of post-occupancy evaluation.

How do M&E contractors quote for a Soft Landings service?

The short answer is that they don't. At the bidding stage, clients should merely ask tendering M&E contractors to demonstrate their willingness to adopt the Soft Landings process, to show evidence that they understand it and what their responsibilities should be, and also to be able to show some degree of capability. This capability statement should typically include experience in energy monitoring and targeting, experience in aftercare services including the use of post-occupancy feedback techniques (for example, energy and occupant satisfaction), and an appreciation of design reviews and reality-checking, with specific respect to client expectations and required operational outcomes.

The problem with this approach, of course, is that the apportionment of Soft Landings roles and responsibilities (and apportionment of costs) cannot wait until the M&E contractor is appointed. It has to be factored in at the briefing and early design stage. The sooner in the procurement process that the client can nominate an M&E contractor the better (integrated teams do deliver better results), but if this is not possible then the client's design professional team will have to apportion nominal Soft Landings roles and responsibilities for the M&E contractor (and key specialist contractors). The M&E contractor's roles and responsibilities will subsequently need to be re-visited, checked and refined once the M&E contractor is finally appointed.

This process will work if the client has created a nominal budget for Soft Landings that can accommodate the M&E contractor's specific input later on in the procurement process.  

How can designers and contractors benefit from Soft Landings?

Without feedback, there is no learning. Soft Landings closes the loop between design expectation and reality, creating virtuous circles for all. Soft Landings is a vehicle for occupant satisfaction surveys, energy monitoring and reporting, and benchmarking, all of which contribute to creating a lessons-learned culture among all members of a project team.

Soft Landings should also lead to less costly re-work for design teams and contractors, who often employ specialists specifically to clear up poorly completed work. This is a drain on finances and resources and is best avoided.
How can designers and contractors benefit from Soft Landings?

Without feedback, there is no learning. Soft Landings closes the loop between design expectation and reality, creating virtuous circles for all. Soft Landings is a vehicle for occupant satisfaction surveys, energy monitoring and reporting, and benchmarking, all of which contribute to creating a lessons-learned culture among all members of a project team.

What role do penalties and retentions have in Soft Landings?

None at all. BSRIA's view on retentions is that they pollute what should be a spirit of collaboration that is the heart of the Soft Landings process.

Soft Landings is not a magic wand that can make all problems disappear from the construction process, but it does provide a process for the identifying potential shortfalls in performance, the management of expectations, and a way of resolving problems during the initial period of occupation.

Can there be incentives and rewards?

Yes, but these should be modest and preferably free from heavy legal bolstering to prevent members of a Soft Landings team becoming confused by means and ends. The aim of Soft Landings should be a building that is energy efficient, comfortable, controllable and productive, not a means of making extra income for the construction team. Any savings over and above target could be shared equally, and this could be expressed in contract terms in simple and straightforward language.

How does Soft Landings fit with defects warranty requirements?

Soft Landings is not about fixing things that do not meet the output specification. Soft Landings is about identifying things that cannot be classified as defects and which may, in any case, lurk just below the radar of defects and snagging teams.

In the post-handover stages, Soft Landings is about identifying shortfalls in performance, in controllability, in manageability and in dealing with unintended consequences of system operation. Automatic lighting systems may be turning on and off lights unnecessarily, or motorised windows may be operating illogically from the occupier's perspective. The solution may be to either adjust setpoints, and/or to educate the user as to the operational purpose of the system in question. Quite often, all that's needed are clear explanations and better user guidance rather than system re-commissioning.

Where can I go to get more advice and support?

BSRIA is running a Soft Landings User Group Membership of the Soft Landings User Group is open to all organisations working in design, construction and occupation. It will also be valuable to those who understand and apply the principles of whole-life costing and who incorporate sustainability in their corporate social responsibility plan.

The aim of the BSRIA Soft Landings User Group is to help and support building project teams and their clients in adopting Soft Landings procedures on live projects. Outside of quarterly meetings, members of the user group will also work within a web community where information and experience can be shared.

Members of the Soft Landings User Group will be able to attend regular workshops and meetings, network with other companies using Soft Landings, and learn about energy analysis, occupant surveys and facilitation skills. Soft Landings tools and procedures will be made available as they are modified in the light of user feedback. Members will also provide input to the development and application of updated Soft Landings guidance that can then be shared with others.