How many projects can one architect actually run at once?
The honest answer is not a number. It is a mix — and a practice can carry twelve projects comfortably or drown in four, depending entirely on which stages they are in.
Every principal has been asked this by a client, a partner, or themselves at two in the morning. The answer people want is a number. The answer that is true is a mix.
Load is a property of the stage, not the project
A project in detailed design is a full-time occupation. The same project waiting on an authority approval is a fortnightly email. Counting both as "one project" is why capacity planning by project count fails.
| Stage | Attention it demands | Predictability |
|---|---|---|
| Concept | High and bursty — thinking time, not production | Low: iterations are hard to bound |
| Design development | High and sustained | Moderate |
| Authority submission | Low, punctuated by urgent bursts | Very low: timing is not yours |
| Detailed design / tender docs | Highest, and unforgiving of interruption | High if scope is frozen |
| Tender & award | Low | Moderate |
| Construction administration | Moderate, relentless, unschedulable | Low: the site sets the pace |
The practical rule
One architect can carry roughly one project in a high-attention stage, plus three or four in low-attention stages, and stay sane. Two high-attention projects at once is possible for a few weeks and corrosive over months — it is where errors, missed issues and late nights concentrate.
Which means the real capacity question is not "how many projects do we have". It is "how many of them are in detailed design at the same time, and did anyone plan that".
The signs you are over-committed, before deadlines slip
- Drawings are being issued without an internal check because there is no time
- Transmittals are going out late or not at all
- Nobody has invoiced a stage that closed three weeks ago
- The same person is the only one who knows what is happening on two live projects
- Client emails are being answered in the evening rather than in the day
Notice that four of the five are administrative rather than design failures. That is the pattern: the design work gets done, because it is what people came to do. It is the record-keeping that is dropped, and the record-keeping is what protects the fee.
What to do about it
Stage-load the pipeline deliberately. When taking on a new project, ask what stage it will be in three months from now and what else will be in that stage at the same time. It is a two-minute question that prevents the most common cause of a bad quarter.
And make the current stage of every project visible to everyone, on one screen. Most practices cannot answer "which projects are in detailed design right now" without asking three people — which is why the collision is only discovered after it has happened.
Ofivio shows every project and the stage it is in on one board, so a stage collision is visible before it is a crisis.
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