m20roxx said above:
The thing is life is short, and we all have to take our own path in life. The trouble with becoming a successful architect, is just that, becoming a successful architect. It puts you on a set of rails that lead you to specific stop-off points in your life. We all know the shiny glass buildings which house the headquarters of the leading firms - many of which are global enterprises at this stage and earn dividends for shareholders. Successful architects, given their experiences in life (one of my colleagues in an energy conservation class is a past graduate of Foster and associates, he was a director in many of their regional offices, and is a much more talented guy than I ever will be), tend to talk about things such as 'contracts, contractors, consultants and clients' a lot.Architects using Revit for collaboration need to have an understanding of how to build the model for initial collaboration with a consultant but more importantly a greater understanding on how to ongoing process and updating of the model will work. This is where the real issue lies.
The path my life took was a strange one to say the least. I was one of the least successful architects in my class, I never completed my exams - and it didn't help I had a sweet tooth for computer technology of all kinds, and working for building contractors - which to be honest, only served to distract me from my proper path in life, which should have been to follow my colleague from Fosters and associates, and talk about 'contracts, contractors, consultants and clients'.
I had a very strange experience I remember, not so long ago. I worked for a company during the construction boom years in Ireland, that was driven by ideas of 'Lean Construction', imported from the United States. The company I worked for had roughly a 30 year lifespan, before it collapsed along with many banking institutions in Ireland in 2009. I wrote an article in one of the Irish newspapers here:
http://www.tribune.ie/article/2009/a...cigarette-box/
The odd thing about the 'group' of companies I worked for, was we weren't in the position of an architectural practice trying to imagine what it is like 'out in the field'. We weren't like a contruction company trying to imagine what it was like in the design firm. We weren't even like a client wondering who to hire as a designer, or who to hire as a build-er. We were all of those things in the one company. We had a form of 'integrated construction' developed to execute and realise our projects, which we actively managed afterwards as owners, as landlords. When they talk about 'getting the benefit of knowledge from sub-contractors' in the BIM process - I realise now, in my old company, we had that going on, everyday inside our company. You didn't have to introduce it, you didn't have to look for it, you simply could not avoid it.
We didn't have 'contracts'. We didn't have 'consultants'. We didn't have 'clients'. We didn't have a 'building contractor' either. We were all of those things in the one organisation. What we did have though, was an endless stream of AutoDesk resellers arriving in regularly, to give us presentations on why we should move to Revit. We were a fully AutoCAD based organisation on the architectural, structural and MEP sides. We could tell the AutoDesk resellers thanks, but no thanks. We are already doing integrated design and lean construction, with accelerated scheduling. Anyone who is interested can e-mail me and I'll send you a copy of our old AutoCAD manual, which was provided to all architectural and engineering employees when they entered the company. It is no one's intellectual property anymore, since the company is gone belly up. But I know both of the guys who compiled the manual - on the architectural and engineering sides.
A strange thing happened to me in the later days. The boss had employed a small team for doing his designs. They were working in the full three dimensional world of ArchiCAD software, sketchup and some licenses of AutoCAD for doing some two dimensional work. I had advised the boss, by way of my director colleague in architectural - that we should buy up a small little practice outside of our organisation - which had different work practices than our own. We should keep it external to our own office, and in time it would serve as an incubator unit, which could explore different directions to that in our headquarters. The boss took me up on the advice, and I had the odd experience of working for this small off-shoot from the headquarters in Dublin, Ireland. I recall the no. 10 bus service was ideal for going back and forth. I had to complete a range of two dimensional sets of documents for the smaller off-shoot office, because they had not the expertise in their small staff in advanced two dimensional documentation procedures.
It was funny I recall though - they had the latest and greatest BIM tool in the form of ArchiCAD - but they were sharing their 'model' with nobody. Their culture was un-like the culture at headquarters. The culture at head quarters was driven by the sheer fact, that whenever I moved a line in my architectural DWG 2D file, one of the structural draftsmen would spot it in his structural slab drawings, which externally referenced all of my stuff. I had to layer my 2D information and organise my XREF's in such a way as to accomodate full communication with the engineer - and he had to do likewise. The fact was, the little office who used ArchiCAD used it as a tool for visualisation and quick conceptual design. They hadn't the first clue how to think in terms of a BIM process. Their mentality did not extend to where they could work on the same server as a structural engineering or MEP department. Many of the guys using ArchiCAD wanted to stay in their little office playing around with ArchiCAD and never had even walked the construction sites we were breaking open.
My boss in that company was a strange character though. He had been a mechanical engineer at a branch office of Jacobs Engineering company in Dublin, Ireland in the 1970s. I remember the estimation, scheduling and cost control department in the company were often shocked - as our boss would ask them, if they had looked at the tower cranes and how they should be accomodated on site - to enable an accelerated program. Bear in mind, my old boss had built his company up from scratch in the recession years of the 1980s in Ireland. Bought his own cranes, hired his own staff and worked with his own site workers. He even sold and leased the end product to tenants himself. He might often witness something at the leasing end of the process, in a project, that would inform him to change his methods in the next design process he would initiate. A strange man indeed, his name was Liam Carroll.
I was reminded a lot of Mr. Carroll and his companies when I watched the webcast by Paul Walker, who developed a software called Navisworks for AutoDesk.It can be found at link below in the archived webcasts tab.
http://resources.autodesk.com/constr...eling/Webcasts
Construction in 4D: Construction Execution with Building Information Modeling.
Wednesday, November 11, 2009.
Or this one, featuring a BIM user at DPR construction company in the US.
Cut Construction Costs and Shave Schedules with BIM Coordination. Thursday, January 14, 2010
A blog enty of mine, I do encourage you all to read is this one:
http://designcomment.blogspot.com/20...s-capital.html
It will appeal to many of you, who are used to program management techniques. My old company had been involved in a joint venture with Dublin Airport Authority in the later years. I was hopefully that some of their DNA and program management skills would have rubbed off one ourselves. That was the purpose of writing my blog, to try and assimilate some of the concepts into my own brain. It is all about learning to understand the culture of those you hope to participate with, in a process. I am quite certain we could have undertaken a very sophisticated, lean and integrated process with the Dublin Airport program managers - if our company's finances hadn't run out of run-way, with the collapse of the property boom in Ireland. Such is life.
Mark Graban's Lean Blog podcast website, which features a lot of great interviews with some of the pioneers in the lean manufacturing area - guys such as Norman Bodek, who published many of the translations from the original Japanese Toyota books. Or Jim Womack who co-authored a book on car manufacture called 'The Machine that Changed the World'. You simply click on the podcast menu at this link to listen.
http://www.leanblog.org/
When I worked for Liam Carroll's company I used to read a lot of literature on lean manufacturing - this compilation book in particular, is a worth while reference. It contains a couple of key Jim Womack HBR articles.
Harvard Business Review on Manufacturing Excellence at Toyota (Harvard Business Review Paperback Series), Harvard Business School Press (January 5, 2009)
ISBN-10: 142217977X
ISBN-13: 978-1422179772
As I said, feel free to e-mail me and I can send you a copy of our old cross-disciplinary AutoCAD manual by reply.
Regards from Ireland,
Brian O' Hanlon