OFFICE ADMINISTRATION

Office administration is a set of day to day activities that are related to

1. Determine goals
2. Business operation
3. Administrative and organizational task (like management of human resources, budgets & records, supervising
support workers,)
4. Financial planning( check cash flow and maintaining accounts),
5. Compile factual and numerical data
6. Office procedures,
7. Deal with clients(in architectural office)
8. Strategic Project planning ( in architectural office),
9. Record keeping,
10. Maintaining discipline and tidiness in office,

Determine Goals.
Goals are different for different types of offices.
What are the goals for an Architect office?
1. To grow an office that will survive you.
2. Advance the mission, vision, and values by providing excellent, timely, and cost-effective customer/client service
3. To create and maintain a highly qualified, professional, diverse, and responsive workforce to support the
department's mission, vision and values.
4. To promote a safe and healthy work environment for employees to experience job satisfaction in their
achievements and contributions to the agency's mission and vision.
5. Employee satisfaction through autonomy, sense of purpose in life and learning opportunities. Emphasize
efficiency, reliability, and leadership to attract and retain the great employees.
6. To provide services of high standard to the best of ability and based on standards, best practices, and fiscal
sustainability.
7. Act with fairness and impartiality in architectural business.
8. To be able to work under pressure when given a task that is of vital importance to the organization.
9. To maintain high standard of integrity.
10. To Build and maintain relationships.

Business Operation
The outcome of business operations is the harvesting of value from assets owned by a business. Assets can be
either physical or intangible. An example of value derived from a physical asset, like a building, is rent. An
example of value derived from an intangible asset, like an idea, is a royalty. The effort involved in "harvesting"
this value is what constitutes business operations cycles.
Business operations encompass three fundamental management imperatives that collectively aim to maximize
value harvested from business assets (this has often been referred to as "sweating the assets"):
1. Generate recurring income
2. Increase the value of the business assets
3. Secure the income and value of the business
The three imperatives are interdependent. The following basic tenets illustrate this interdependency:
i. The more recurring income an asset generates, the more valuable it becomes. For example, the products
that sell at the highest volumes and prices are usually considered to be the most valuable products in a
business's product portfolio.
ii. The more valuable a product becomes the more recurring income it generates. For example, a luxury car
can be leased out at a higher rate than a normal car.
iii. The intrinsic value and income-generating potential of an asset cannot be realized without a way to secure
it. For example, petroleum deposits are worthless unless processes and equipment are developed and
employed to extract, refine, and distribute it profitably.
The business model of a business describes the means by which the three management imperatives are achieved.
In this sense, business operations is the execution of the business model.
Human resources.
Human Resource Management (HRM) is the term used to describe formal systems devised for the management
of people within an organization. It is a function in organizations designed to maximize employee performance
in service of an employer's strategic objectives. HR is primarily concerned with the management of people within
organizations, focusing on policies and on systems. HR departments and units in organizations typically undertake
a number of activities, including employee benefits design, employee recruitment, "training and development",
performance appraisal, and rewarding (e.g., managing pay and benefit systems). HR also concerns itself with
organizational change and industrial relations, that is, the balancing of organizational practices with requirements
arising from collective bargaining and from governmental laws. HRM covers the following core areas:
1. Job defining, designing and analysis,
2. Workforce and staffing planning,
3. Recruitment and selection,
4. Training and development,
5. Performance management,
6. Remuneration compensation (remuneration) and benefits.
7. Legal issues.
Budgets
A budget is a quantitative expression of a plan for a defined period of time. It may include planned sales volumes
and revenues, resource quantities, costs and expenses, assets, liabilities and cash flows. It expresses strategic plans
of business units, organizations, activities or events in measurable terms. A budget is the sum of money allocated
for a particular purpose and the summary of intended expenditures along with proposals for how to meet them.
Budget helps to aid the planning of actual operations by forcing managers to consider how the conditions might
change and what steps should be taken now and by encouraging managers to consider problems before they arise.
It also helps co-ordinate the activities of the organization by compelling managers to examine relationships
between their own operation and those of other departments. Other essentials of budget include:-
1. To control resources
2. To communicate plans to various responsibility center managers.
3. To motivate managers to strive to achieve budget goals.
4. To evaluate the performance of managers
5. To provide visibility into the company's performance
6. For accountability
In summary, the purpose of budgeting tools:
Tools provide a forecast of revenues and expenditures, that is, construct a model of how a business might perform
financially if certain strategies, events and plans are carried out.
Tools enable the actual financial operation of the business to be measured against the forecast.
Lastly, tools establish the cost constraint for a project, program, or operation.

Financial planning
Financial planning is the task of determining how a business will afford to achieve its strategic goals and
objectives. Usually, a company creates a Financial Plan immediately after the vision and objectives have been
set. The Financial Plan describes each of the activities, resources, equipment and materials that are needed to
achieve these objectives, as well as the timeframes involved.
The Financial Planning activity involves the following tasks;----
1. Assess the business environment
2. Confirm the business vision and objectives
3. Identify the types of resources needed to achieve these objectives
4. Quantify the amount of resource (labor, equipment, materials)
5. Calculate the total cost of each type of resource
6. Summarize the costs to create a budget
7. Identify any risks and issues with the budget set
8. Performing Financial Planning is critical to the success of any organization. It provides the Business Plan
with rigor, by confirming that the objectives set are achievable from a financial point of view. It also helps
the CEO to set financial targets for the organization, and reward staff for meeting objectives within the budget
set.
9. Determination of amount of finance needed by an enterprise to carry out its operations smoothly.
10. Determination of sources of funds,
11. Determination of suitable policies for proper utilization and administration of funds.
The role of financial planning includes three categories:
i. Strategic role of financial management
ii. Objectives of financial management
iii. The planning cycle
iv. When drafting a financial plan, the company should establish the planning horizon, which is the time
period of the plan, whether it be on a short-term (usually 12 months) or long-term (2–5 years) basis. Also,
 the individual projects and investment proposals of each operational unit within the company should be
totaled and treated as one large project. This process is called aggregation.

Financial planning of an organization

Objectives of Financial Planning:

# To ensure availability of funds whenever these are required:
# To see that firm does not raise resources unnecessarily:

Importance of Financial Planning:

# It Facilitates Collection of Optimum Funds:
# It Helps in Fixing the Most Appropriate Capital Structure:
# Helps in Investing Finance in Right Projects:
# Helps in Operational Activities:
# Base for Financial Control:
# Helps in Proper Utilizations of Finance:
# Helps in Avoiding Business Shocks and Surprises:
# Link between Investment and Financing Decisions:
# Helps in Coordination:
# It Links Present with Future:

Strategic project planning

1. Strategic project management bridges the gap between the lofty ambitions of strategists and staff that do the
work. Strategy without projects is just another document collecting dust. Projects without strategic
importance quickly lose their appeal.
2. Strategy requires making explicit choices – to do some things and not others – and building a business around
those choices. In short, strategy is choice. More specifically, strategy is an integrated series of choices that
uniquely positions the firm in its industry so as to create sustainable advantage and superior value relative to
the competition.
3. Strategy directly shapes decisions about products, pricing and other matters. In fact, that’s an excellent way
to assess your strategy – does it give you a framework to make decisions and achieve results? If not, the
strategy needs further development. A strategy that you cannot apply to work has no value.
4. Once you make strategic choices, you can move forward. If organization is struggling to achieve its current
strategy or pursuing new goals, projects are the answer. Even if your organization is focused on the status
quo, the world is constantly changing. You need projects simply to maintain your position relative to
competitors.
 Strategic Project Management Clarifies Priorities
Whether you are managing a single project or a set of projects, the need to manage priorities is ever present. As
an example, let’s say your organization has made a strategic choice to obtain college educated customers aged
30-40 in large cities. This customer strategy will impact every aspect of your work and how you approach projects

 Simplify Decision Making.

 Start the Day with Priorities (Not Email)
 Prioritize Your Energy.
 Link Project Budgets to Strategy.
 Prepare Yourself To Contribute To Strategy.
 Focus on Organizational Ambition Over Personal Glory
 Revisit Strategic Progress Often.
Strategic planning is essential for organizational success. Strategic project planning generally involves the
following steps:
Strategic planning process
1. Identification of a project’s purpose, vision and mission: Project Goals
2. Determining external and internal priority issues: Opportunities, Threats, Strengths and Weaknesses
3. Outlining the required results: Mission and Objective Statements
4. Assessing how to achieve the required goals: Strategic Alternatives
5. Implementation: Action plans and delegated tasks
6. Benchmarking: Measure and review your performance
Construction project planning often reduces cost and aligns your vision with the final project outcome. To learn
more about our strategic project planning services,

Deal with clients

Clients are the life-blood of architecture firms. If new clients aren’t coming in the door, the bills won’t get paid.Dealing
with every client is an enriching experience in itself for an architect. And if they come from varying backgrounds, it
makes for all the more a fascinating journey. Clients of an Architect may be politicians, corporate class or technocrats or
industrialists or common people. In case of clients other than common people either they themselves dealt with the
Architect personally (most of the times) or the highest level official dealt with the Architect. They might have “false &
fancy ideas” or they are quite realistic in their expectation and know exactly what they want and explicitly convey it to
the Architect or they do not know exactly what they wanted - they are confused seeing so many on the web, in ads, inputs
through their friends & relatives, they may not even realize how large their building would be or they do not expect any
fancy or very stunning looking building / house and they come to Architect to get a building which would be value for
money spent.

To deal with such varieties of clients the Architect has to be a good mind reader, should have formidable attitude to listen
and understand the client’s goals and objectives. The client to be made an active participant in the design process by
engaging the client in incremental decision making by giving that client options so the client is actively involved in
making choices about the end product that relates back to the goals and objectives. Giving the client a choice makes for
better communication, better solutions, and a better relationship with clients. Architect should assist clients in obtaining
construction bids, selecting contractors, and negotiating construction contracts

Record keeping
In the course of practice, architects generate a lot of paper and countless computer files. Every office grapples with what
to do with this mass of information both during the delivery of project services and after those services are complete.
Deciding what to keep and what to throw away is best done with a systematic approach rather than leaving such decisions
to periodic bouts of office-cleaning frenzy. Even an office with records retention guidelines in place should carefully
review them on a periodic basis—particularly in view of the proliferation of electronically generated information and
digital storage media and the resulting changes in the role of paper-based documentation

It is tempting to manage records retention solely from a legal perspective, in other words, in terms of how long after a
project is complete the firm remains vulnerable to potential lawsuits. There may be statute of repose that limits the time
in which an action may be brought to a period that begins with a specific documented event, such as substantial completion
of a project. These times may range from four to fifteen years. Although familiarity with these laws is necessary, they
should not be the only consideration in deciding which records to retain. Therefore take the opportunity to determine
which records are important to preserve and to write a records retention policy.

Answering the following questions will provide a starting point:

 Decide What Records to Keep
• What method of record keeping is used for current projects?
• Once a project is complete, what procedure is used for project archiving?
• Is there a way to retrieve archived information that could be useful for ongoing projects?
• Does the office have historical or legacy reasons for wanting to keep complete project records indefinitely?

Obvious archival items include drawings, specifications, and other design material, but other records should be retained
as well. It is helpful to think of file records in three main archival categories: owner-architect records, team (consultant)
records, and architect-contractor records.

Issues of history and legacy, and even of business referral, are factors involved in the decision to keep records indefinitely.
For example, if a firm develops a policy of keeping full project records for only ten years beyond substantial completion,
it might wish to have a secondary review process at the end of the ten-year period to consider the following:
1. Does the project have long-term master planning considerations or potential future modifications and additions?
2. Does the project have any long-term use as a model for future projects in the office?
3. Does the project itself have long-term significance as a historic site?
4. Is the project significant from the historical point of view of the firm?
5. Does the owner have ongoing facilities management needs for the project?

If any of these or any similar question is answered in the affirmative, the firm needs a follow-up procedure to determine
which documents are to be retained for a longer term. If the firm decides to keep only as-built drawings, project
specifications, and final CAD files beyond ten years, it can quickly dispose of other project records.

Office Procedures
Ever wonder what kinds of things people do in an office? Need to know how to run an office smoothly? Every office has
a set of rules, guidelines and procedures that have to be done every day. Organization and repetition is a major part of it.
You have to do certain tasks daily, weekly, monthly or even yearly in order to make sure that everything is updated and
good to go for fellow employees and customers alike. Communication is the key in every successful office.

It is always good to keep an office organized and tidy so that when you are looking for specific things, you don't have to
do much to find what you need. Some of the general office procedures are:-
1. The practice of using a bulletin board. A bulletin board can not only help employees but can also be beneficial to
customers; you can place information and share it through bulletin boards.
2. Keeping calendar somewhere in the vicinity. It is extremely helpful when you want to schedule meetings and
even company picnics and things like that. This can also be helpful when it comes to your employees and your
customers.
3. To make sure that your desk doesn't have sensitive information on it that other employees or non-employees can
see when you are away from your desk. Security is the most important part of a company's successful operation.
4. Computers play a major role in an office. Depending on the company using them, they can be the most important
equipment for employees. They may contain sensitive material and information such as customer information,
product information, employee information, and company information. That is why it is important to have security
on them--such as antivirus, encryption, data loss prevention, intrusion prevention systems, firewall, and email
security software--to make sure that information that is potent is secured where no unauthorized person will be
able to access it. Internet and email usage should also be restricted to work purposes only. Procedures may be put
in place for daily clean-up and shut-down at the end of the work day. There may also be procedures set in place
for monthly check-ups from the IT department. The use of a disk defragmenting program or disk cleanup software
on a regular basis will aid in maintaining the health of the system. Keeping backup records of everything is only
going to benefit you in the end. Keeping backup files can be handy just in case something ends up happening to
the original files. Being able to put the files back up is a great way to maintain an organized.
5. To have regulations for use of petty cash.
6. To have a filling system
7. Maintain the records of office furniture, equipment etc.