Restructure for the global marketplace
Opening offices in London, Beijing and Dubai gave NBBJ additional dots on the map and the right to claim a global footprint,
but as the NBBJ partners soon learned, you can’t just add locations — you have to change the way you do business to succeed
in the global marketplace. The international demand for
American-style hospitals was voracious, but the new projects
were too large for one NBBJ office to handle; they required
teams of architects and planners. But expecting professionals to
suddenly morph into team players was a pipe dream, and when
the firm hit a large growth spurt and struggled, it soon became
clear to Parris that things had to change.
“A team of five partners, including myself, traveled to every
office and asked our associates for their opinions about how the
firm needed to change,” Parris says. “Everything was up for
review. The feedback from the associates was pretty consistent.
We needed a common structure, and we had opportunities for
greater efficiencies in support functions.”
As a result of the feedback, the head office was eliminated, and
now all NBBJ offices are equal in stature, which was the first step
toward breaking down the silos. Next, Parris and the firm’s partners installed a structure based around practice studios. Practice
studios are profit centers that specialize in a building type or client group, and each of the company’s 10 offices has at least one studio. The structure de-emphasizes the role of the individual architect, because all work is completed in teams, and it also focuses
the firm’s designs around specific niches like hospitals and buildings for higher education. As projects arise, multidisciplinary
teams are assembled from many of the firm’s studios. For example, design of a new Veterans Administration hospital in New
Orleans requires 50 firm associates, yet only 30 are based in the
Columbus office.
“As a result of the process, we also went through a substantial
downsizing and consolidated the administrative functions and
marketing into two locations, because we had redundancy in
every office,” Parris says. “Now those two offices support the
entire firm, so the structure helps us work as one big team.”
