James Brodie

James Brodie is seven weeks into running Red Pen, a one-man design management consultancy, after a career that ran architecture → project management → design management. The episode is the back catalogue's most sustained argument about design coordination, what the word actually means, why he thinks it is no longer owned by anyone, and what filling that gap looks like as a business. His starting point is that the old settlement, in which the architect was lead consultant in charge of coordination, was once treated as near-scriptural ("it was written on the stone tablets") and is now in transition, with the coordination happening between consultants rather than above them. His answer is to sit in that space shoulder-to-shoulder, carrying his own PI insurance so he has skin in the game rather than watching from behind a risk-and-liability line. The episode's most valuable stretch is a genuine, unresolved disagreement with Andy about whether the future of coordination is a marked-up paper drawing or a 3D model, Andy sets out the full iBOQ thesis in response, and neither concedes.

Key Topics Discussed

• Where the red pen comes from. His grounding under Pete Bosley and James Downey at Bosley Architects, where markups were the discipline: highlight as you work through, cross off, keep the markup in the set with the new copy on top. Downey was an ex-builder who came into architecture through registration and taught constructability, do not specify NASA-grade stainless in the Bay of Islands when you can buy from Carters round the corner; do not draw a detail with a million complex site welds.
• Constructability is the trick most designers miss. Andy's example: a downtown job where the scaffold had to be rearranged six times to get services up, and nobody could say who paid for it.
• Why he left architecture. On the Plant & Food job as project architect he was "a bit bruised by the commercial contractor using my documentation to basically rape and pillage the client," spending his time running interference. He asked Mike Ward, the PM, for a job and moved to project management, then spent years delivering master planning works at the Auckland Museum, back at the same table as the same people, but outside the drawings, "grinning from ear to ear."
• He is selective about clients. No casinos, military, gambling or tobacco. "It's important to me to be able to feel good about what the client is doing."
• What a project manager actually is. He never resolved it: a civil engineer becomes a PM, an architect becomes a PM, so what does a real one look like from day one? Mike Ward's answer was that everyone understands building works, so it just about works. By default James became a design manager, semi-informally, as the first-tier PM houses started marketing design management as a subset of project management.
• The tension he worked inside for years. A colleague would walk past his desk on the museum job and say "put that pen down", defined scopes, risk, liability, we are not designers. His reply was always "I'm not designing, I'm coordinating; there's a difference." When he is effective as a design manager, "it kind of feels like I am working a little bit like a project architect."
• Why he left to start Red Pen. He did not vibe with the project director role, "I wanted to be in the detail," and as a PD he was spread thin across P&L and administration best left to people with that skill base. He is candid that a lot of core PM tasks, minutes, registers, engagements, "almost feel like the equivalent of breathing," and that he automated his own with AI a couple of years ago.
• The founder's account, unvarnished. Paying off the mortgage was the enabler; he had never worked for himself. The fear was the salary, "the money shows up in the bank account on the 20th of the month and your tax gets paid by somebody else." Then everyone high-fives you, the noise dies down, and "you wake up in the morning and go, oh my god, what have you just done, can I retract that letter of resignation?" He also names a loss he had not anticipated: the office as a buffer you could play off against, "that's not me, that's the corporate policy", gone. A friend editing his website copy told him: "you can't have your cake and eat it too. It is you."
• Seven weeks of business development. Day one was "your job is BD, go", phone every person on the list, coffees, meetings. The best moments are a recommendation to someone he does not know, which produces another recommendation, which produces a potential six-month contract. "When you haven't really worked, when you've worked for other people your whole life, it is actually quite daunting. And then when you unlock it and you see that it works, it's a good thing."
• The conflict of interest he will not accept. Architects acting as the project management consultant on their own projects. "How can you be the architect and answer your own RFIs and say the RFI is not my fault?" Andy raises Arrow International's builder-and-PM model as the same species of problem: "I'm going to send myself an EOT."
• What coordination actually is. "Extremely unglamorous." The spatial and dimensional overlay and cross-reference of every discipline, structural, architectural, services, fire. Done badly it produces clashes, beams into ducts, "a multitude of big to little issues," and on site that is RFIs and a paper war. On a commercial site "you're raising one RFI a day."
• Coordination starts before the meetings. It begins when the consultant scopes are written, and at concept when plant room locations and plant sizes are decided. Who writes those scopes? Usually project managers, and in his estimate "99% of project managers in New Zealand don't have the skill to do that." The failure mode is the save-as: reusing last month's scope for a fit-out on top of an already-engaged base-build team, "and every time it just brings with it the scope gaps and the assumptions, 100% of the time." His first-principles counter: take the CIC guidelines, but ask what the actual project is, what the objectives are, and tailor, then squirrel out the time to actually reread it. On the newer version of the same failure: "this is just copy-paste and AI slop."
• How he runs a coordination session. He wrote "lead consultant in charge of coordination" into the architect's scope in bold on a recent hangar project to re-establish it. Participants prepare and bring their discipline's concerns. Then the room cross-references moments between disciplines on paper and marks up. Explicitly: "we would try not to get too bogged down in being fooled by the model or by a clash detection report", those highlight problems, they do not solve them, and solving is the humans' job. He defends the tactile: "as soon as you've got that level of collaboration and engagement with something physical, it has an effect on people."
• The disagreement, unresolved. Andy: "I am of the strong belief that the centroid of construction will revolve around a 3D model within the next five years," and pushes hard, why can the steel subcontractor not take shop drawings straight off the model into manufacturing? "The most underutilised piece of technology on any construction site to date is a 3D model. People say they're using it for clash detection. I call bullshit on that." James does not disagree in principle, but holds that the convention still terminates in a 2D set, the kitchen installer "is not set up to receive it any other way", and that the hand - mind connection with a pen is real. He recalls carrying nearly 50kg of drawings in a shopping trolley to Stanley Street for Plant & Food, and the long-promised 3D-only building consent that never arrived.
• Andy's iBOQ thesis, in full. He separates physical from digital construction and says he is focused on the latter, the office workflow by which information passes hand to hand until someone acts on site. The chain: LLMs reclassify every modelled asset into Uniclass regardless of what the designer named it, because "we don't really trust the designers to put metadata into the model, that's not their job"; every object is then measured for length, breadth, depth, area and volume; object-level classified data becomes an estimate under NZ, Australian, ICMS or POMI methods of measurement in about two hours against roughly six weeks by hand; and the estimate becomes a P6 or MPP file. His insight after fifteen years planning: the only difference between an estimate and a programme is a verb, the estimate holds the nouns and quantities, you add "pour concrete," "install precast," plus a location breakdown of site, sub-site and work area, and that is a programme.
• On BIM's missing letter. James: "we always used to say that BIM was the I, and BIM for information was often missing. It was a building model." Andy agrees the designer's job is a compliant design, not data entry.
• Where the design world goes next. He thinks procurement in New Zealand is largely broken, competitive tendering "just sets everybody up to have a scrap," and nobody wins. He is open to design-and-build and to the question of whether design consultants are really the best placed to produce construction drawings, pointing at documentation specialists as an alternative model. "How many architectural construction sets have been drawn by a whole lot of grads who know three-fifths of not much? It's not their fault, but that's the way the market has been set up."
• What he will and will not promise. "I could say you're never going to have a variation on site, that's never going to happen. Or we'll keep your contingency spend at 4.5%, never going to happen." What he will say is that the collaborative way of working "has a positive effect on the bottom line when it's on site. Every time."
• Why Andy runs the podcast, said plainly. Asked directly, Andy gives both reasons: to surface the problems nobody talks about because there is no forum ("they started the construction accords, that went nowhere… it's a talk fest"), and the business reason, 96 professionals have now sat across from him, and if any of them hits a time-management or project-controls problem, they know who to call.

Notable Quotes

• "I'm not designing, I'm coordinating, there's a difference.", James Brodie
• "On those stone tablets it was written that the architect is the lead consultant in charge of coordination.", James Brodie
• "How can you be the architect and answer your own RFIs and say the RFI is not my fault?", James Brodie
• "You can't have your cake and eat it too, it is you.", a friend to James Brodie, on the Red Pen website copy
• "The most underutilised piece of technology on any construction site to date is a 3D model.", Andy Alagappan
• "The only thing that is actually different between an estimate and a programme is a verb.", Andy Alagappan
• "You don't go to work each day to feel diminished.", James Brodie

Guest Background

James Brodie is from Dunedin, "Scotland to the south", and was at the first Hyde Street party before it became a ticketed event. He moved to Auckland in 2000 doing graphics and web work, then studied architecture at Unitec carrying a chip on his shoulder about not having been at university. In his second year Pete Bosley offered him a job, and his architectural grounding came from Bosley and James Downey, markups, constructability, and buildings built well by builders who knew their trade. He spent a period at Jasmax wanting to see big work, then returned to Bosley bringing Plant & Food Research as a client, a client he felt good about "because they make food." He moved into project management at Zoyo (later TSA Riley) under Mike Ward, delivering Auckland Museum master planning works, and progressed to senior project manager and project director before concluding that the director role took him out of the detail where he is most effective. He founded Red Pen, a single-person design management consultancy, "it says we on the website; it's me", seven weeks before recording. He has children, took them skiing in the South Island, and describes the resulting holiday, with nothing waiting for him on return, as the best he has ever had.