My thoughts on BIM

[garethace]

m20roxx said above:

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 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.

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

[garethace]

I compiled the above comment into a blog entry here, for ease of external linking.

http://designcomment.blogspot.com/20...-envelope.html

[RobertB]

... 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'.
...
Brian O' Hanlon

Brian,
I wanted to publicly thank you for posting this thoughtful message. I agree that the message of BIM is often lost in the noise of the tools for BIM. The best BIM authoring software in the world won't help a firm if they choose to do things the way they did with film and technical pens.

[garethace]

Robert,

I have read your articles in the AUGI World magazine for quite a bit now. Or rather I used to look at AUGI World magazine over a coffee break, and think to myself, I would like to have the time to read that article. Keep up the great work here at AUGI. You are providing a wonderful publication and support network for guys like myself who are really out on the coal face. As I said, I wish I had contributed more here in the past number of years.

A very good book, which I forgot to mention above and may help a lot of folk to get their head around 'Lean Construction' ideas, is one which Jim Womack co-authored in the early 1990s. There was a team of experts set up in the US to look at the American car industry and where it was likely headed. The result of that study was the book:

The Machine That Changed the World : The Story of Lean Production
James P. Womack, Daniel T. Jones and Daniel Roos

Take a book like that down to the local coffee shop or public park this summer, and have a read of it. It's about the best BIM manual one could get.

[thomas.stright]

I have not read this complete thread....But another good book to read it The BIM Handbook. It's great for those who are fuzzy as to what is BIM.

[garethace]

Thanks for recommending the book Thomas. It is useful to have those kinds of references.

One little experience, I might share with you people. I worked with a man in Ireland. He was a veteran construction manager of dozens of commercial office building projects. When we moved from residential into commercial property development, we saw it fit to invite people into the organisation who understood that world. One person he hired had worked as national facilities manager for one of the large discount retail stores in Ireland. So he knew a heck of a lot about daily management of commercial retail space. The construction manager who had experience in office buildings mainly, built a multi-storey dense residential project with me. Dense residential stuff was our stock in trade. My boss was known as the 'shoe box king' in Dublin. I wrote something here on that subject.

http://designcomment.blogspot.com/20...-box-king.html

But it was funny, we had a sub-contractor coordination meeting once for the residential development. (Bear in mind, we were designer, owner and build-er, all in one. So we didn't have a 'sub-contract' relationship to these fit out carpenters, plasterers, plumbers and electricians - they were contractors to us, the developer/owner. There was no building 'contractor' at all. Only a builder/owner/designer) Some people called us the shoe box kings, others called us the kings of 'design-build'.

Anyhow, our new construction manager tried to organise it like it was a coordination meeting for an office block! Of course, they are different kinds of beasts. I am listening to alot of Paul Walker's webcasts at the AutoDesk website at the moment about Navisworks manage. Paul Walker noted how Navisworks can add a tolerance for bending of pipework if needs be. Of course, with residential, a whole lot of bending, snaking and general trickery goes on with the various systems. So the sub-contractors who who together had about a century of residential building experience found it very funny looking at drawings with red markers and so forth.

In fairness though, the problem we found in the company was that site construction personnel were best moved around. In case they got into a comfort zone. The scheduling approach for a residential development differs quite a bit from that one would employ for commercial property development. But each acquires skills and knowledge that the other might not have. We had a problem, that our residential guys tried to build offices as if they were residential. And visa versa. That is, they would not program for delivery of trades and materials at the opportune times to ensure best quality and productivity. It was good when you took people out of their comfort zone.

My problem was I came originally from neither residential or commercial property development - I had come from industrial building projects, in the food industry in particular, which are heavily serviced buildings, which need to be managed as an 'asset' by the food production company over a period of decades sometimes. But I had brought my knowledge of the industrial building project management to such a degree of sophistication, that I could respect the same when I encountered it in other building types.

Logistical building stock is a different kettle of pollack again, from food industry stock. And pharmaceutical different again. My mentor and trainer way back, had learned a lot of his skills working in semi-conductor plant building. Where they essentially nail down the constructon documents for their facilities a year in advance of breaking open a site. Such is the nature of the semi-conductor industry, that you know Moore's Law turns over every 18 months and you had better be ready to use the shovel. My mentor was used to lazer point accuracy working in the semi-conductor industry and he found the transition to the food industry buildings very difficult.

One of the last jobs I attempted while working at Dannigner was a small box retail unit. How can that go wrong? We got the construction part of it down to a 'Tee'. A building never came together quicker. Where we fell down however, and our lack of experience showed, was in nailing down the lease for the unit. An international restaurant/bar chain was due to take the lease, and between the jigs and the reels that eventually fell through. So the lesson is, there is 'coordination' and there is 'coordination'. If AutoDesk Navisworks can assist to show people who are used to one kind of building type, the difference in program management approaches used in other building types, I think AutoDesk will really have achieved a significant break through. I am not sure what way AutoDesk are thinking about this at the moment. But above are some of my experiences from wearing my welly boots in the field.

That is to say, we moved our construction managers and site engineers between projects of different type (in real physical space). There is a solid enough argument to suggest we could have done the same in the virtual space. Rather like a trainee aircraft pilot has to clock up sufficient hours on the simulator prior to taking the hot seat. I am tempted to make a wise crack about the 'Matrix' movie now and 'Jujutsu', but I will refrain. My experience was, our highly optimised 'lean construction' approach for residential, turned out to be a disaster with something large. Because you simply cannot bend the pipes to where you want them to go. You have to work it out up front. Here is where the 'DNA' of working in large scale asset management of industrial sites over decades would have been very valuable. Here is what happens when a residential building company tries to organise construction of a shopping centre.

Liam Carroll will not recommence work on the €150m Parkway shopping centre in Limerick until 2011 at the earliest, according to details of the Zoe Group's business plan which were revealed to the High Court last week. Tesco and Penneys are understood to have agreed to open in the centre but the property downturn and the collapse in consumer spending have brought construction to a halt. September 6, 2009

http://www.tribune.ie/archive/articl...hold-till-201/

Brian O' Hanlon