Has the time come to look for the loose change?

We have a little, fake treasure-chest sitting on our kitchen bench where we put our coins in.

I occasionally empty my wallet into it; husband clears out pockets there when doing the laundry.

When the month drags out a bit too long for our liking and all the cards have run dry, we dip into the box and use up the coins.

Despite of some serious cycles of ‘booms and busts’ I’ve had the privilege to observe within my working time of over 2 decades and hundreds of companies forming and failing on mass through these, AEC as an industry never was forced to go on a genuine search for ‘the hidden coins’.

In good times, everyone had a piece of the pie even if not in proportion with their abilities/performance.

In bad times small companies disappeared, larger merged into bigger ones and the reduced pie got shared to those closest to it. Everyone felt the pinch and was supposedly tightening the belt, still at the industry level, no real attempts have been made to improve efficiency.

The fortunes of participants of AEC-projects were driven by a combination of factors not easily identifiable, nor separately analysed, murkiness was (and by-and-large still is) the name of the game.

A couple of coins here-or-there could make no difference to most.

Not even when combined into a coin-tower.

I am a big fan of clever stop-motion movies; see one relevant to the topic:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YsOaTEouwpA&feature=relmfu

Add a couple of new letters to your name (PBIM)

The easiest way to lose friends that work within my (AEC) industry is to tell them to become more ‘hands-on’.

Apart from a few that are architects and document their own buildings*, all my other industry-based mates fall into ‘that’ category.

A generation of engineering/design and construction managers that like to take their information nicely packaged-up and if possible, served on a silver plate.

This ailment seems to be non-discriminatory to nationality, age or gender. As if all universities around the world simultaneously set out to train construction and design managers that once they pass the intern-job-level and are put in control of ‘a’ human resource go into a totally ‘intellectual mode’. They will instruct, order, redpen and mark up, but ‘god-forbid’ to ask them to generate, manipulate, order or output the information.

Actually, the fact that BIM is not yet a ‘press the button, fix it all’ solution nor can work unaided, on its own should be good news to my friends...giving them the opportunity to ‘shape up’ as opposed to ‘ship out’.

I’ve been suggesting establishing the role of a ParaBIM-mer, someone that is highly skilled in manipulating, navigating, investigating the model but not necessarily a model originator.

Doesn’t even have to be a stand-alone position but a qualification that will enhance one’s ability to work as a manager in a model-driven project-environment.

* and some of them are staunch graphic-artists with their own take-on of the famous ‘section line’

Breaking down the doors to construction modelling...

I stated before, how I believed there were no decent construction modelling software–applications available for the AEC market.

I still stand by this claim and to support it, let me turn to the ‘humble’ door.

When I look at the two modelling programs that claim to be ‘out-of box ready’ for construction and I’m familiar with, what they ‘do’ with doors is not what I’d call a construction focused approach.

Someone early in the development of these tools decided that doors (and windows) should be ‘hosted’ elements, a type of digital parasites, not able to stand on their own.

Fair enough, you might say if you are a designer, this makes sense. Not only will the practice prevent modellers plonking doors down randomly where no walls are there to support them, it is mostly the host’s duty to set the way the joinery item should behave, the way the cladding must wrap around and into it.

For a true BIM-application to function properly, both the door and its host need to be able to stand on their own. A block wall is built well before the doors are hung; the openings are still needed to be provided for.

There are numerous ways construction-modellers can get around these shortcomings, they can and they do.

A little interest and help from the developers would do too.

The fancy role of the terminator...

...is the one I’ll establish one day when I have it my way. I’ll be on a main construction contractor’s team and we’ll be still producing drawings. I guess, that condition indicates I wouldn’t quite have it all my way, but let’s assume I’d be happy with the set-up.

The job of the terminator will be to constantly scan the central model and all its associated drawings and remove redundant data. S/he will be identifying dimensions and notes related to elements that have been built, verified and as such become ‘existing’ within the process. This data will be then made invisible for the new issues of the drawings, and the elements will become easily identifiable. (by colour, labels)

S/he would include a register of data removed too, a bit like we do in revision clouding, just the other-way-around.

You may say, there is nothing revolutionary to this concept, the traditional process of documenting buildings via IFC and shop drawings does exactly this.

Well, does it? In practice?

Do you know of companies that have people charged with the task of ruthlessly going through data and moving them onto invisible layers for progressive issues of IFC drawings? Oversee the creation of shop drawings to prevent them carry unnecessary, “existing” information?

Most companies I know still believe the busier-looking the drawing the better the results will be!

I’ve been aggressively campaigning against BIM outsourcing-companies lately...

Or that’s what people at my work perceive me doing.

In fact, I’ve got nothing against sound providers offering BIM related services.

Not just that some of my best friends are working the described field as I write this post, I’ve spent many years being one of them.

So, accuse me of anti BIM-outsourcing and I’ll take offence.

Or will not, instead I might just happily go along as being labelled a ‘hypocrite’, but branding me as such, apart from it being a lively topic for the occasion, will not help BIM the slightest.

I see company after company rolling up and rolling out BIM related services while missing out on the fact that their targets (for outsourcing, like the one I’m in now) are becoming more knowledgeable, god ‘forbid ‘BIM-sophisticated’ then what they used to be and our demands are rising.

Most of these service providers offer us modelling, the part of the ‘machinery’ that is the easiest to re-create within our own environments.

Furthermore, there is very little incentive in us in sourcing something that will put our own-people out of work in times where projects are in short supply.

If these companies want to be taken seriously, they need to offer us something that we either do not have (but want) or is cheaper/easier to get from them then us developing it.

It DOES matter what modeller you use!!!

I may have said otherwise previously, so be it.

I’m putting the record straight: I’ve had it up to my ears with the PC BIM talk!

I should add, that I’m tired of the ‘my one is bigger, better, faster, lighter, cooler, whateverer than yours is’ discussions too. So this message may be a bit confusing.

I can also say it now, that I will not take one more car/driving analogy in relation to software packages, unless it is original and comes from me.

I do not ‘just’ want to get from A to B. I want to enjoy my drive, take pleasure in it.

I like my tools to be cool and clever, fast and discrete, individual yet robust.

I consider myself to be a discerning customer, highly demanding, yet fiercely loyal.

I have been ‘tossed around’ a bit over the years so I also learned to ‘make do’.

But, there is a difference between opting for something inferior due to budget constraints or other circumstances and swallowing a load or empty talk, how it is ‘not what you use’ but ‘how you use it’.

Sure and I WAS born yesterday.

I do feel a bit responsible for all of those – yet to jump into the AEC modelling modellers that are looking at their options as I write this.

Responsible and a bit sorry.

All for one and one for all!

Not referring to Dumas’ three Musketeers, but to a practice my modelling contemporaries seem to be very fond of.

It is to do with outputs: even when comprehensive models are created from masses of drawings (say, at construction stage) – and all info sits in one database, some urge exists in the model-outputters to squeeze as-much-info as possible on single to-be-printed drawings.

So, shop drawings coming out at the ‘other’ end of the model become just as hard to read and congested with information as their counterparts going in.

Add to that the silly-practice of the ‘reduced A1, i.e. A3’ size and we are almost back to square one.

Change management in action:

I am well on my way to kick my addiction to printed (hardcopy) drawings.

Never mind the little ‘green house’ plonked by senders at the end of emails with the nagging note to resist printing the host-message in order to save paper and help the environment.

My eyes did it for me on the end. My failing eyesight and the tiny desk I’m working at nowadays, squeezed in like in a ticket-booth have forced me to use digital-drawings more.

2 laptops fit side by side - one slightly overhangs the edge. I could place an A3 set in front of them, but then the coffee-cup would need to go.

The coffee-cup is staying.

The writing is on the road...

My husband believes, I write sentences that are far too long and use punctuation the Hungarian way, not well for clarifying meaning.

Thankfully no longer the sensitive type I accept his criticism gracefully, promising to try harder, while I secretly collect samples of English road-signs where a comma would make a hell-of a difference;

If commas were used on road-signs.

Two great examples from my collection are “slow children playing” and “reduce speed bumps”.

Writing on the road to instruct or warn is another interesting form of communicating with the users of the infrastructural-piece in question.

While living and driving in NZ, I was often amused when multi-worded instructions (like: slow down school) were written out in such sequence that the driver was supposed to read them from the bottom-up while for me a much more obvious way would have been the ‘normal’ way.

“Way give stop” stuck with me forever. Maybe I was doing my ‘big-picture’ thing and not paying attention to detail, at least not in the order they’d predicted I would.

(or envisaged that I should)

My interest in ‘verbose traffic-signs’ has also been related to my work, the way words have been added sometimes haphazardly I believe has lessened their use, similarly to the way technical documentation in the AEC has been moving away from graphics over the last 2 decades.

For years we had a kitchen with no hot water.

My mother and us-two-daughters carried the hot water from the bathroom to the kitchen over numerous rooms for dishwashing, many times a day for over 30 years, before my father got around to install a little instantaneous water heater above the sink.

My father was extremely good with his hands, built our house and assisted many.

He could fix almost everything, from cars to bikes to broken-earrings.

He was a busy-type too, often working a full shift at home after coming from work.

He just never did the dishes.

Had he had the pleasure to grab the large metal bowl from the pantry (1 door) get to the bathroom (3 doors), fit the bowl under a tight-tap, fill it up with boiling water and manoeuvre through the same 3 doors (open-and-shut, we only heat certain spaces) ...back to the kitchen even once...

We would have got the hot water in the kitchen in no time...

I thought of my dad when I saw the clever-little political sign, I attach here.

I also think of my dad as I look at the future of BIM.

Not going to happen, unless you get those in the middle to do what the ones at the bottom are doing now, then those from the middle will get things moving (tools, systems, processes etc)...

It is simple, like washing dishes.

“A stretched out policeman”...

...is what a ‘speed bump’ was called in the place I grew up in, and no, this was not to mock the force-in-blue (google: lezeci policajac) – the term is still officially used by traffic planners, product suppliers, people on the street, maybe even the force.

I keep returning to traffic analogies as I try to work out some real-life BIM strategies. This could be due to me spending a significant time on the roads driving to and from work, but also because there are so many obvious similarities between issues that the traffic/road-planners have resolved reasonably well while we, making AEC projects a reality, seem to be continuously struggling with.

Here are the 5 areas of management where BIM could (should) be learning from traffic and road designers, operators and specialists:

POINT ONE:

Dealing with the clever users and the ones that think they’re are clever but are not. (the highly educated and the illiterate; the knowledgeable and the smart-alec; the clowns and the overcautious;)

POINT TWO:

Dealing with the regular users as well as the out-of-townies (the ones that speak the official language and the ones that do not)

POINT THREE:

Dealing with the quite young and the pretty old as well the technologically advanced and the low techs.

POINT FOUR:

Dealing with routines and emergencies.

POINT FIVE:

Keeping people more or less safe.