BIMBO - the right thinking

Right Thinking – it takes me back to my history and classics teacher who once wrote on the blackboard (a big black tablet where tutors wrote with a chalk stick) the following and we all aimlessly script it into our books with crisp blue Quink flowing and precisely dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s.

“Most ancient civilizations - Egyptians, Greeks, Phonecians, Aztecs, Chinese, Sumerians, Babylonians etc. did not slowly rise from the dust, or blossomed suddenly, as if they'd been gifted a legacy of civilization, and technology from some mysterious point in pre-history.  In time, as wars, strife, time, disasters had their effects, these civilizations declined, as they never entirely had the entire support structure to maintain advances they had only inherited, but not developed.”

The history lesson continues, Ford said, “the Russians are coming – let’s get organised”, asking, what was the “thinking” behind Ford’s commentary.

As an adolescent, thinking at the time – what the hell does this mean? – am I ever going to refer to this again? and continued being a happy juvenile.

Here we are, several decades later and the history lesson comes to the forefront.  I was having a discussion just this week to see how to engage the SMEs into BIM.

Does our thinking need to change in order to do BIM well? focuses the response. What resonated for me from the history lesson was “never entirely had the entire support structure to maintain advances”.

Of course, thinking has to change in deploying BIM for the SMEs.  It is most certainly a change and where things are done differently.  With BIM we are building virtual buildings first, solving the problems as we go and then building the real stuff.  We now have reasonable tools to do this.  We are continuing to evolve these tools to better refine the way we build, document, retain information and this update information.

In the context of BIM, the key to all of this is that we also need to build a “support infrastructure” around this method of working.  This requires the right type of mentality and thinking.  There are groups of people working in silos all over the world and developing tools and processes.  Only when these get unified eventually will and the evolution of BIM be complete.  As an analogy of “valve to transistor to VLSI” now allow us to seamless communicate with this technology taken as granted.  But when it started, it was equally fragmented and it was the relentless engineers who changed their generations thinking to get away from valves to VSLI chips and more.

The “support infrastructure” is the planning, communication, management, technology, resource, education that are all seamlessly integrated together.  The right thinking is the thinking around these aspects.

How drôle! When Ford said, “the Russians are coming” – let’s get organised” another flash back from the history lesson and it is well represented in this argument, where the entire nations gets organised and it always starts at the local level, where the momentum begins, eventually culminating into a national force.

For SMEs and BIM “the Russians are coming” is the same as the Darwinian threat.  If you don’t change and adapt effectively and efficiently with the changing surroundings, there are only two true outcomes - either evolve as a superior BIM species or drop down the food chain and eventually get swallowed or become extinct.

Bimbo Making it easy

Making it easy in not referring to 5 Jagermeister, some swagger, glittering vajazzles, and facilitating one’s inhibitions on a night out.  Now no one is suggesting getting hammered and having a riot, but is here to explain things simply.  This analogy is sympathetic to achieving the desired intent.

The Jagermeisters refer to loosening communication lines; the swagger is referred to the confidence, the vajazzles refer to maintaining the fun and interest and the rest is the desired intent.

Now making it easy is not the easiest thing to do.  The world and individuals work and think at different speeds and external forces shower you with disruptive intent.  This is where the story of interfacing in the BIM (Building Information modelling) world unfolds.

Some years ago we got the privilege of working with a forward thinking client and his consultant who had suggested that all the models during the development would be interfaced using IFC.  Coming from a can do camp, nothing is a problem.  Admittedly, in the first instance the old guess work genie suggested that IFC could include “I” to be intelligent or interface and “F” to be file or format, but to my surprise it turned out to be something called Industry Foundation Class.

It was like parents naming their offspring India, Apple and Brooklyn.  Here the parents are, Mr & Mrs BuildingSmart, they did the same.  The naming as stuck and life goes on.  Mummy and daddy BuildingSmart are not shy of their fertility or too many Jagermeister – LOL, but IFC now has siblings, IFD and IDM.  It seems that the vajazzle still hasn't lost its luster!

Now trying to explain this to less “data & software” gifted people what IFC was not the easiest.  So in lay speak, it was explained to all members of the organisation in single a presentation.  The analogy used was that of an address book.  The address book containing all the details of all the contacts and it can be opened by Outlook, Google contacts, the iphones, etc, etc and new contacts can be added by any one device and it will be in the same address book.  “Oh I see”, was one the masters of the organisation responding.

So the IFC becomes the address book, the modelled data in BIM becomes the contacts and being able to open it in Outlook, Google Contacts, icloud etc, etc are the different applications that access the contacts.  Simples...

Making it easy is a good idea generally.

Bimbo and the Red Light District

Having sold the soul to the devil –clients in this case; the work starts to take a different guise.  The red beacon starts to flash.  Not the ones in streets of Amsterdam, but the red light pulsating over the sleazy houses in the legal and insurance districts.

In the year dot, neither the legal nor the insurer’s fraternities knew what the BIM stuff was.  Even today these fraternities are still pretty much in the dark.  Working collaboratively is the essence of BIM.  These fraternities have to start developing new structures and solutions and foremost need to disassociate themselves from pimping risk and the transfer of risk.

Vis major (Act of God) aside (or force majeure in legal speak), as part of project management, we introduced within the collaboration policy the concept of “Delineation of Risk” (DOR) – not the Nintendo game! – LOL.  Simply, the collaborators have to identify the risks and act upon these with mitigation measures throughout the project.  It is an iterative process, so when structured into the collaboration policy, one project at a time, the transfer or the intent of transfer of risk is reduced and demonstrated by simple measurement.

It is done in other industries, from bio medics; to the oil and gas; to the aerospace and even banking, so porting the procedures into the AEC was simple.

One may argue that risk assessments are done all the time in the AEC, in particular for Health and Safety requirements, but this is only one component of risk.  When applied to the full design and construction process, but with the measurand embedded in the workflow starts to show effective risk management making the project risk adverse. So the DOR measurand makes the risk and the intent of transfer self-regulating – not so bad.

To reduce the industries cost burden, is it possible to have a shift in the antediluvian and avaricious insurance practices within the AEC – I wonder.

BIMBO's clothes off - new meaning

The story continues.  We had now rolled out all this BIM stuff and were jumping around in joy. I think we had started to celebrate too soon!  Another email appeared from the masters, with polite verbs and adjectives of praise and concluding with “    it was time for you to take your clothes off and sell your stuff”.  They meant the BIM stuff, I think!

So here goes as to how the Bimbo Man started to earn his beer tokens.  It did not degrade to walking the streets or dropping my pants for favours, but to the contrary it was a simple strategy that paid off.  We had realised that we had an increase in efficiency in the design phase of some 35-40% - this is man hours.

There were, are and will be two distinct groups of clients.  Those who want things done yesterday! Those whose favourite line is, “What? How much?”  Both the groups were and are blind to the BIM stuff.

What we sold to the first group was speed, not the drug, but delivery ahead of time.  To the second group, we sold the concept of fixed heavily discounted price with an overage for quick delivery.  Both were risky strategies but worked as there was no opportunity given to complacency.  Where the contractor was the client or partner, the speed of response was the selling point.  RFI (Request For Information) became web based and interactive and free lessons as to how to view the model and interact with it became part of daily tool box talks.

BIMBO gets a headache

The Biggest Headache for us was the Cost and Technology Requirements.

For most people this is a moving target, but you need someone on board that is smart and understands the demand, access, reliability and security requirements.  Each organisation will have their requirements depending on their size and work load.  The prerequisite is that you have an excellent network and an excellent outward link (internet connection(s)). A good server, backing up to a SAN (cloud).  If you are starting off, keep it simple.  Spend on a robust network which has low maintenance requirements.

Remember, you are building models now and not drawing lines, so the software package that you pick should suit your budget and you should be comfortable with.  There are several discussion and threads out there with the pros and cons of various packages.  Don’t get duped by the software vendors! Test everything for yourself.

The Pearl - Consider, leasing instead of buying both software and hardware, remember, things go past their sell by date very quickly!  There are a lot of companies providing leasing service now.

If you don’t need it, don’t get it.  There will be costs and there will be costly mistakes.  All I can comment here, as the bulk of the costs are soaked up in the technology strategy and the choices you make. 

BIMBO plays SIMS

BIM Timetable and resource. The management suggested that the time given would be one year.  To make it meaningful, I suggested that this should be done on a real project.  To eliminate risk, the visionaries suggested that the project would be run as a conventional 2D CAD and BIM in parallel.  The Pearl - This was the best decision that was made and gave us bench marks and base line for comparisons.

For those interested, there were 4 persons working on the 2D CAD version and the Bimbo team had 2 people.  Both the 2D CAD and the BIM took 5 months to deliver to the contractor, with one difference; for the model, we also prepared the “How to” procedures in this time frame.  The real test came next.  We had 5 RFIs in the first month.  It took 12 days to answer the RFIs using the 2D CAD system and 4 hours using BIM.  It is very difficult to put a time frame, but this is one way to get things right.  Don’t take short cuts and produce a half-baked process.  This needs to be robust.

Bimbo had to be a reality soon and at the start there were only 3 people who had become proficient, or truthfully, just knew their way around the software package.  In between doing day jobs, running a BIM project for the first time and writing procedure and learning, there was no time for teaching.  We needed a teacher.

I digress again; - heads in hands, sitting in the pub one evening after work, drooling over a laptop trying to figure out how to …. And Jo, our coffee lady walked in, after juvenile banter, she asked what were we doing? Oh 3D modelling stuff for the company and the presentation you were at last week.  She replied “I do this all the time,” looking at the screen, “and I have built several houses”!  Jo grinned, “…this is the same a SIMs; I built a house yesterday, but it caught fire and the social services took the kids way”.  Rolled with laughter for the next 20 minutes.  As a joke, I said go ahead and build me a house from scratch using this.  Gave her the laptop, sat back and supped beer.  In an hour we had a building with basic components hanging together without any direction or teaching and it was much better than some of the CAD idiots produced in the office.  On quizzing her, she described, her sequence almost perfectly as if a building was being constructed – like a duck to water.  We had found our teacher. Jo’s mum took over the coffee duty and Jo became part of the Bimbo team, our first and only new recruit in this process.

After we found a tutor, we set out a training program of teaching, testing graduating the 2D CAD boys and girls.  We have continued teaching and have discovered new ways of doing things even today.

BIMBO does Armani

The New Thinking Concept : Getting away from convention. Cesar’s description – “removing inhibitions” - As a practice we were delivering drawings and documents to our clients. Our deliverables.  Now we were going to deliver a model as our deliverable.  This was great, but we faced a problem.  We had two distinct camps, those who knew how to construct and those who thought they knew. Although subtle, this made a huge difference. It took some time to figure out a solution, but the bottom line was that we borrowed a psychometric test of field work aptitude from a Health Charity and gave it to everyone.  It was a surprising result; the first group - those people who were hands on and had worked on sites adapted a lot quicker.  The second group - the people with soft clean hands who had never worked on a site or seen the materials actually applied and true academics would become very resilient to the new thinking.  There was a coup developing.  The Pearl - The solution was to get every one of those in the second group out on sites as soon as possible to get an appreciation of how things are put together in the real world.  This was the best thing ever done for this group.

I digress; there were some fun moments, which I must share.  One of our architect, who was always immaculate and was nicknamed Armani.  Now Armani took great pride in producing his drawings and documents and his desk was so well organised it would make the British Library look untidy.  Armani, as part of the clean soft hands brigade, went to a site where he saw some of his drawings on the floor.  These drawings had seen reasonable abuse, typical of a site.  On seeing this drawing he summoned the foreman.  The foreman listened, shrugged his shoulders, shook his head in despair, picked up the drawing and rolled it into a neat cohiba, gave the Armani the birdy with this rolled baton, shoved it into his back pocket and carried on with his business.  This wasn’t the last we heard!  An email followed from Armani, to our MD, “The heathens of construction need to respect people’s work and this sort of behaviour was not tolerated…[ 100s of words later]…. an apology was due from the contractor.”  Now our MD, following due process, naturally, forwarded this to the principal contractor.  The principal contractor, in response apologised, and sent a gift to the upset architect.  The gift was an Armani Tie – LOL.  Armani soon left, as he thought he didn’t fit in to the insanity that was being played.  Back to business or insanity as some would say.

This new thinking concept also changed the sequence in which things were done and how they were done.  We needed a new process.  The thinking behind this process was lifted straight from the aerospace and automotive industries.  There were two types of designs requirements; form design (what it looks like) and functional design (and how it works) – self-explanatory.  While BIM is important in form design cycle, it is the key to functional design.  The process we created was for the latter.  We created “cells”, for a better word within the process.  These cells carried out specific function within any design project.  The first group of cells was the material and component.  The second group was assemblies. The third group was systems and the fourth was integration.  Today, we have 3 groups, [1] Elemental Design & Engineering, [2] System Design & Engineering and [3] Integration Design & Engineering.  Whether you are building an office block or a railway station or even a single dwelling, the hierarchical process is followed to the letter.