Goolgle Takes Big Step in AEC World

Google may be your favorite search engine, but they just took another step into another part of your life, well that is if you have a Nest thermostat in your home. Google understands the conservation of power on the grid is one way we can help create a more sustainable environment, so the Nest programmable / learning thermostat is a logical acquisition for them. Besides it gives them a platform to allow them to understand more about the living cycles of one of the most active buying segments in our economy.

You may be a skeptic or a naysayer, but, as the saying goes, "The train has already left the station." when it comes to the advent of the "internet of things." Nest is just another one of a growing segment of things which are connected to the larger electronic network we all live in.

Googlizing the AEC Industry

IPD-BIM and SMART Culture Launches AEC Industry to New Levels

I recently posted an article "Googlizing the AEC Industry" on our NoSilos.com site outlining the basis of a new series of live seminar and workshop events to be held in 2014 and 2015. In keeping with our goal of breaking down silos of information and operation within companies and project, we are offering a full two-year training effort called "The Smart Built Culture" to transform those who attend this series. There will be other webinar and free website information and presentations to inform our readership about these resources and presentations so, even if you can't make the live events, you will be able to get some of the benefits of our research and experience over the past ten years in this emerging business model.

BIM mandates ... Is Snake Oil not far behind?

Many of you know I'm a very strong proponent of Building Information Modeling for many reasons, but when I start seeing government mandates for public works projects I have to take pause. Why? Well frankly after being involved with several GSA projects here in the US for remodeling, repurposing and new construction, I've not seen the GSA leverage the reality of BIM in their life-cycle use and maintenance.

What happened? I thought what we were doing was going to make a long term difference in the cost of operations for our government, but as I dug deeper, I found the operations folks didn't have the appropriate tools to take advantage of the products we delivered to them. Further, they didn't know if they would ever get the tools to leverage our work for their benefit.

Formula 1, Babies and Buildings A String of Connected Possibilities

A recent Ted Talk Peter van Manen of Mclaren electronics visits the possibilities of taking the thousands of data points of a Formula 1 car and applying them to to a pediatric intensive care ward. I applaud the inventiveness of the folks at Mclaren for taking a system which helps the most competitive motor sportscars perform at the highest level, to increase the survival of babies in their most fragile time of life.

As I listened to the presentation by Mr. van Manen I was intrigued to think if we monitored buildings with the same level of density as a Formula 1 or Indy car what would we learn about the interdependencies of the systems of the buildings we create. While racing teams build a new car for each season and then continually  refine the car with new parts over the racing season, buildings aren't tuned to the same level of razor edged performance. But how could buildings benefit from the clouds of information such systems create and how could they be built to allow for more constant upgrading to increase performance?

While the real-time streams help teams during the race, the real benefit to the teams is the pattern analysis of different systems interacting and the stories they tell about the performance of the vehicle. Patterns of interaction which warn of impending failure. Today there is a distinct possibility of converting buildings from acting like consuming appliances to being a cooperating, interdependent network of producers of power and electricity. But to accomplish this task will require a nervous system at the level used in the Formula 1 auto racing business.

So while we are using the continuous monitoring of and using real-time analysis of the data to forecast future performance of both machines and mankind, we might also be thinking of applying the same ideas to buildings to raise their performance levels, extend their lives and provide greater comfort and safety all at the same time.

See related article about Google Contacts


This is a continuing chapter in the interrelationships of discovery and application of technology and the built environment. The suggested connections and links between seemingly different applications can open new possibilities as a String of knowledge to make our lives better. 

Hospitals and a Barcalounger?? What happened to my hospital?

As an ex-CIO of a small healthcare insurance company. I remember attending some of the earliest conferences on the future of healthcare informatics beginning in 1984. The big discussion was the EMR or electronic medical record and privacy being implemented by HIPPA. Today you hardly go in any sizable clinic or community hospital without having some information collected about your health status which is stored in a form of and EMR. Even my small-town MD uses an Ipad to take notes for her records about my health and to look up information while we talk about a health issue. No she isn't one of those 'just out of school' MD's but in her 60's and ready to retire. So EMR's are in use and here to stay as they take on many different guises. UPDATE: Google announces diabetes monitoring with contacts

Texas Revises Legislation to allow more CoGeneration - Designers Awaken

If you don't know much about the power system in Texas they are about the only state in the 48 which has their own power grid isolated from their neighbors and it's been more blessing than curse to them. They don't worry about neighboring regional power glitches creating problems for them. Their energy policy is obviously driven by the oil and gas reserves they have which generates nearly all the power in Texas. But the folks in Texas aren't blind to the issues petrol-powered energy has and has a pretty aggressive policy to see a diversified energy production profile for the state.

Recently the legislators did something pretty bold for them, they lessened regulation on CoGeneration facilities. You see the Utility Commission has previously looked at these facilities as small utilities and as such it hampered the development of significant CoGen power where it could really help the grids in TX.

The Texas Legislature recently passed House Bill 2049, which removes regulatory barriers and improves the business climate for cogeneration facilities by clarifying language in the Texas Utility Code. "…this policy change will help the entire Texas grid by relieving grid congestion, increasing grid capacity and reducing the amount of water used in the generation of electricity," said Paul Cauduro, executive director of the Texas Combined Heat and Power Initiative.

See an article on this new legislation here from Fierce Energy

So how does this tie into the issues surrounding the Built Environment and my interests expressed here? Well it's pretty simple. While PV power is nice, it is designed as an add-on system to normal operations and is by it's nature diurnal. CoGen isn't. GoGen systems are designed to recover waste energy and increase overall efficiency by using that waste heat to create more power. Too many times we don't look at our buildings in terms of their waste energy profile. How much energy are our buildings throwing away with single-pass heating and cooling and even the recapture of excess heat in the summer being exhaled from our buildings by cooling systems.

The important thing to realize here these systems have been around a long, long time and even today there are emerging technologies which can absorb more and more excess energy to be either stored and used later or recovered and used immediately to generate power. We do have the technology now, we can use commercially available systems which are designed from residential scale to large industrial complexes. The problem is we are so in love with the PV solar story we have likely forgot some basics of systems design along the way.

My challenge to building design and execution teams is get educated about CoGeneration and it's advantages and educate your client base to it's advantages and quick paybacks and long-term benefits. Our neighbors in Texas have decided CoGen makes sense for their power needs, maybe the rest of us should start looking at CoGen harder and push for easier regulation and implementation in our own back yards.

Infrastructure and AEC Possibilities "Fix It First"

President Obama announced in his State of the Union Address we should be focusing on fixing the broken infrastructure elements in our country. Not long after President Obama's address the civil engineers announced our county only earned a D+ in infrastructure condition and performance. While a lot of focus has been on the roads and bridges our water systems are in deplorable condition. Many cities have pipes which leak almost 20% of their input back into the ground at a tremendous cost to rate payers. Electrical grids and telecommunication networks are aging and in rural communities are often among the oldest installations left in our country.

Roads: Why Fix Them When You Can Build More?

Democrats would rather build more than fix much of anything. Building new cost x times more than to fix what is already there. 

 

Obama Details ‘Fix it First’ Plan

Cutting red tape, increasing private investment, and designating $40 billion for urgent repairs are the three cornerstones of President Obama's new plan for U.S. infrastructure.

Fleshing out the "Fix it First" plan announced Feb. 12 in the State of the Union Address, the White House issued a Fact Sheet on Wednesday (Feb. 20) with more details of the proposal.

"Investing in infrastructure not only makes our roads, bridges, and ports safer and allows our businesses and workers to be as competitive as they need to be in the global economy; it also creates thousands of good American jobs that cannot be outsourced," according to "The President’s Plan to Make America a Magnet for Jobs by Investing in Infrastructure."

Here's Barack Obama's Plan To Fix America's Crumbling Roads And Bridges

... What remains unclear, however, is how the Obama administration plans to pay for this and other infrastructure initiatives that the President outlined in his State of the Union speech last month.

In a speech to the National Governors Association Monday, the President fleshed out additional details of the plan, announcing that his administration will create "regional teams" that will assist states in implementing infrastructure projects.

Fact Sheet: The President’s Plan to Make America a Magnet for Jobs by Investing in Infrastructure

White House fact sheet on infrastructure projects. 

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Finally, what appears to be a 'shot in the arm' for the basic needs for the country is only a temporary fix to a systemic problem. Costs of federal procurement is higher than any other roadway and infrastructure project type of its kind. Lower real value is produced per dollar spent than in any other kind of construction. While welcome to the larger infrastructure design and construction firms, smaller firms will have to scratch it out to gather their part of the pie. And when the pittance of 40 Billion is spent when we are really talking about over 1 Trillion in needs, the short-term fix will leave us with significant needs to deal with.

Call and write your federal legislators in both the House and Senate to use this as a starting shot in the arm for real wage growth in the country. While you are at it introduce them to the idea of integrated design and delivery to help each dollar go further. 

Muda Walks in September: Guest Article

Hi everyone,
I've been rushing about the last couple of weeks and part of that was to broaden the writer base for Strings, Connections and Links. One of the really interesting and knowledgeable folks I found was Dennis Sowards. Dennis has been working as a lean practitioner for quite a while now and he has what I think is one of the more refreshing viewpoints on lean. I would encourage you to take him up on his offer to conduct a Muda (that's waste for those not in the know) Walk.

Here's Dennis' invitation. Oh yes, you don't have a lot of time, so sign up by Aug 28th. Take it away Dennis.

Muda Walk 2012

Dennis Sowards

How to improve operations? There are thousands of answers to this question and more are developed every day. One simple way to improve is to follow the Lean approach of “Go & See.” Masaaki Imai, a leading expert on Lean techniques, says that in companies

The Top Five Questions to Assure Survival in the AEC Business

Phil Bernstein, FAIA of Autodesk has an interesting article posted today on the Architecture daily news feed. http://goo.gl/yML4A.

Phil, gives you five questions to ask yourself. Strangely enough, these are almost the same five questions I've been challenging firms to ask themselves for the past 10 years. Phil, thanks for giving them the press time they deserve.

The Top Five Questions to Assure Survival in the AEC business
1. Where are you going to be in five years?

BIM Without Collaboration Doesn't Measure Up

A couple of weeks ago Ted Garrison of New Construction Strategies interviewed me on one of my favorite topics, collaboration in context of the use of Building Information Modeling. Here's the quick synopsis Ted used when he posted the interview. Just click on the link below to listen. 

“BIM isn’t about drawing lines, it’s about building buildings virtually;” declares Andrew Abernathy. As a principle in Collaboration Consultant, Abernathy provides expertise on project management collaboration. Listen to him explain how BIM can improve your projects.

Listen Now

This  post is a part of a String of posts part of a conversation about design and virtual design and construction and BIM

BIM and XPM: A Made Marriage - Part 4

So far in the previous parts One, Two and Three of this series I've introduced you to an alternative work management method using eXtreme Project Management theory (XPM). XPM is a variant of the Agile light-weight management movement. The roots of this management theory caught hold in the software world and has moved into other business domains. If you want to change your management to fit more closely with collaborative efforts and use BIM in your practice, then you need to give XPM a very close look. It has a lot of advantages to offer and gives a lot more control to the people actually doing the

BIM and XPM: A Made Marriage - Part 3

Part 1 and Part 2 of this series introduced you to a new light-weight management method based on Agile and XPM planning methods. In Parts 1 & 2 I told you I would tell you how we used this theory so in this installment I'll make good on the promise.

We started out trying a piece of web-based tracking software which is open source. We abandoned it for a couple of reasons, the biggest reasons being a serious bug in the software and a lot of terminology specific to software development. As a second attempt we backed off and started over with a stack of 3 x 5 cards to represent the elements of the plan from Releases right through to the Tasks / Tests. Later on the team wanted to use an online solution and we agreed on a simple online forum as a platform. It meant a little more manual work than the previous online software, but we found it worked just as well and was simple to use and it didn't have all that foreign lingo of software development. We were free to make up our own language. I'll also say at this point we also tried spread sheets as an alternate to the web forum, but that was just too unwieldy and didn't have good multiuser support. Spreadsheets really are built for single authors. We did find the spreadsheet was OK as an alternative to the 3x5 cards for planning.

We created several different structures in our forums but the following became our standard of practice.

A list of categories called Active Projects, Completed Projects, General Discussions, and Food for Thought. We used General Discussions for topics that weren't germane to the production of any single job, but something someone wanted to pass along as a supporting thought or reference for the general practice. Food for Thought was used only for discussions that directly related to the management practices and how they might be improved or extended.

Next under each forum category we had the projects themselves. Under these we had children forums for Planned Work, Current Work and Completed Work That looked something like this.

So you can see a very simple mechanism implemented in a simple to use software tool like a forum, gave us the majority of the functionality needed to organize our work. It was easy to move the elements of the discussions as well as the discussions around as their information matured.

It only took us a very short amount of time to teach anyone in the office how to set up and maintain this organization method so we used the junior team members to do this task. That way they got used to the tool and how it was used every day.

The Language of the Forum
Next we had to create a lexicon and grammar to organize the information at each level. We tried a lot of different solutions with varying results. We finally gave each project team some latitude on their choices due to the preferences of team leadership and the complexity of the project. We had a range of organization that had little if any sorting string thought to some that could organize the views by selecting string or substring values along with numbering schemes that produced views with only a very selective result. For instance some teams chose to use a title string that looked like the following organization
[completion] | release | Iteration | story | task | [Responsible] | title and looked like....

[y/n]2.3.15.100[] Model interior sound partitions

If someone only wanted to see incomplete release 2 tasks they would look for a string like "[n]2.*". Or all the incomplete story 15 tasks with "[n]*15.*" If someone wanted to see all the work they had taken charge of they could look for "*[aa]" if their initials were "aa". So you can see there is a lot of flexibility in an open string and search tool to quickly create searches to display results. Our forum also had a listing view to show all the past activity as new or changed information in the forum, which made it easy to watch the work being completed without having to do a lot of searching.

We also included information in the body of the task / test entry like when it was due as a calendar date [11/15/11] and any reference documents back to the Project Notebook or other web resources before the task description. Work completed was created as a reply to the forum entry and signed / dated along with the hours used to complete the task and test. Both the Task and Test portions had to be completed before the work was marked completed. 

The wiki project notebook
The companion to our forums was a wiki organization which we implemented using Mediawiki. The wiki held both the higher order project information like clients, contacts, project budget and schedule information as well as specific information regarding selections for materials, assemblies and all the other design requirements information. In addition we used template pages that organized much of this higher level information so all a manager or other assigned team member had to do was select one of the template documents, duplicate it in their project and then fill in the blanks as needed. This normalized both the information and the organization pattern for this kind of information and gave each element a url page location which could be used in the forum to point back to when needed. So the wiki became the project notebook and it was uniformly accessible by anyone at anytime from anywhere they could get a web connection.

We also had sections in the wiki to assist project work planning teams to easily create stories, and task collections by creating lists of common stories and tasks / test combinations. They could cut / paste the needed information out to make it easier to create the forum entries. 

So there you have the core of our tracking and documentation methods. Nothing fancy, but it works and it is free. There is enough flexibility in the methods to accommodate a lot of differing need so if you need a simple implementation, pare off what you don't need and use the rest. If you have more people and work to manage, you can step up the organizational framework to meet your needs.

Advantages
This level of project documentation made it easy to add new members to the team. They only needed to read the information necessary around the work they were assigned to. If they needed some background on how the model was organized the BIM Execution plan gave them that info housed in the wiki and referred to in the tasks / tests they would work on. Instead of having to brief someone for 20 minutes or more, it took about 5 minutes for a new person to join in and get productive, and that was without a senior team member giving them a briefing. Yes this did take some time, but it kept people focused on their work. Work that was needed was completed in timely manner. Work that was not needed yet didn't get worked on. And tracking the completion of work or where there were issues were easily identified and solved quickly by the team or an outside source when needed. After setting the expectations and training this system was very effective in keeping our projects on track and eliminating waste.

I hope this helps you understand how we organized our work. In Part 4 I'll share the measurement indicators we used to track progress. Until then remember "Collaboration is the glue of success."

Now on to Part 4, the last one

 

This article continues a String of Connections between practice management, BIM and Agile management practices. 

"Right" BIM Thinking

Does our thinking need to change in order to do BIM well? How?

What is "right thinking" when it comes to BIM, anyway? How is it different than "right thinking" was 5 or ten years ago? How do you train for it? Can the playing field to accommodate "right BIM thinking" better?

Question by Brian Lighthart in LinkedIn Group BIM Experts

It's Saturday AM and I'm catching up on reading I didn't have time for earlier in the week, so I thought I would pass along this gem I found. I would suggest you read the discussion since, in my humble opinion, this is one of the more insightful questions asked around the general topic of BIM. Those of you who are part of the new rush to use BIM will find this discussion either enlightening or obtuse or even dark. The truth of the matter is Building Information Modeling / Management is a technology still in it's early development. An adolescent at best. All the stakeholders who could benefit haven't weighed in yet. All the potential benefits haven't even been defined, discovered or delivered. And definitely not all the right questions have been asked.

Yeastiziced BIM?

Research scientists in London's Imperial College have discovered proteins that behave like wires to connect DNA in yeast. Now scientists can begin to create new biological circuits which change the behavior of DNA in yeast allowing yeast to be re-engineered to become trackers, tracer items, test monitoring agents and a whole new class of identification and monitoring agents in both inert as well as carbon-based environments.

"Future applications of this work could include tiny yeast-based machines that can be dropped into water supplies to detect contaminants, and yeast that records environmental conditions during the manufacture of biofuels to determine if improvements can be made to the production process."

BIM and XPM: A Made Marriage - Part 1

Prelude...
Since writing this article back in April, It is ranked #2 for the number of all-time hits on this blog. I'd like to encourage you to read all four parts. The hook is I reveal how all this works in the later parts. These lightweight management theories will radically transform your business and professional practice. If you want to see more $$ at the end of the year and create a better working environment, then I strongly advise reading all of the series. aa June '12
 
Introduction
BIM and XPM were made for each other. BIM authoring tools of just about all forms are characterized by elements or families which have some kind of data construct attached to the graphic elements. The graphic elements can be driven by parametric data or not. Not surprisingly, the elements are organized in large categories which roughly approximate the organization of the construction material sets needed to erect a building such as foundations, floors, walls, ceilings, furniture, casework, equipment and the like. Views are organized in a way that traditional document sets have been assembled for decades such as plans, elevations, sections and tabular schedules. Since the model is 3d there is also a new view for 3d perspectives, isometrics and other similar views. A very modular and structured way of thinking.

Most importantly from a work management point of view all these elements and views are very atomic and largely independent of each other. They can be created with or without any data or graphic content in them, or at the very least only the barest of information or graphics as place holders waiting for more specific information. The other important

Complex Problems and Light-weight Project Management

I'm currently working on a new project which aims to reexamine one of the key components of our economy and how it might be modified to reduce waste, risk and in the process increase productivity and profit. As you might surmise, it is connected to the built environment.

I was reviewing some thoughts and notes with one of the team members last evening and the topic of  light-weight project management tools came up. If you aren't familiar with the term you probably have heard about Agile and Lean methods. They are the two leading PM methods classified as light-weight methods. Each has their own areas of application, one does not substitute for the other and there are dialects within each of these major classes. On the Agile side are two major dialects called Scrum and eXtreme Project Management (XPM). Scrum being the oldest and eXtreme being younger and having Doug DeCarlo as it's creator and proponent. Scrum came out of a skunkworks kind of environment and is almost totally focused on software development where Mr. DeCarlo's methods are used largely in the software world there is a growing interest and adoption of his simpler more transferable concepts in other domains.