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?

Penn State BIM Execution Plan Review

I have to apologize to you, one of my loyal readers for taking so long to get back to the review of the Penn State BIM Execution Plans v 2.0. I'll get to the FM Planning Guide in a couple of weeks.

If you used this product before, you will find just about everything just as you left it, but there are better controls for what goes in and how you manage the elements. If this is new to you, then spend 30 minutes with the documentation and you will find a real gem. I still don't really like the use of a spreadsheet to deliver the working content, but it is easy and approachable for everyone. Most people will find it easy to use and modify if you have just a bit more than the basics in modifying and creating spreadsheets.

I would love to see this as a data-driven java or php app that could be implemented on a Unix LAMP or MSIE web server instead of the spreadsheets. There isn't very much in the sheets that makes a spreadsheet handy other than the all-pervasive tabular format of the process. Being tabular in presentation reduces it to a hierarchical data format which a MySQL data schema would handle very well. Modifying the elements would only be changing the variables and pseudo table headings and names, the linkages would likely stay all the same. If delivered in this format, then we would have a true collaborative environment where more than one person could reliably work on the project information anytime and from anywhere they were given permission. For one of you inventive and courageous programmers out there here's a ready-made project for you.

I really like the initial project information, documentation of goals, rating of the ability of the team members to perform tasks and the associated risks. It does make for the ability to make rational decisions about who will be making decisions about what and who will need help to get through the project without creating undue hazard to the rest of the team.

Communications between the teams, naming conventions for files, components, levels/layers, workgroups, even libraries of components can be defined here so everyone knows where and what can be used. I like the ability to give web addresses or file locations for these elements. If there is a wiki used to hold much of this information, then the url's to the correct pages and tags can be documented here.

Since it is delivered now as a spreadsheet, you can use as much or little of the framework which suits your project. If you have other sources for execution plans such as the one from Indiana, Texas or the Feds, then you can add those as additional sheets or rows within the framework as is needed.

In all, the authors have done a great job of creating a thorough and flexible framework for anyone just getting started or an old hand at BIM authoring a leg-up to better manage an increasingly complex job which has grown to be a central document contributing to the success of any integrated or collaborative BIM project.

In the thumb's up rating scale of 5 I'll have to give it a 5 for thoroughness and content and a 3 on delivery because it doesn't go far enough in my opinion to encourage collaborative participation.

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

Ideate BIMLink for Revit

As an old data hack from ages ago one of the prime gripes I've had with Revit, even from the early pre-Autodesk days was data manipulation without having to use Revit to access the data. Ideate BIMLink for Revit helps to solve part of that problem. First, getting the data out so you can work on it. Second, getting data back into Revit easily and reliably.

While this process is manual, it is easy and with a little planning and coordination you should now be able to extract data from Revit, change it, spell check it, even add new associated values and then reinsert the data. Of course all the editing is taking place in an outside application, MS Excel. Now I want to make this perfectly clear, as I said before this is a manual process and those can be easily messed up because of our human tendency to err. I would much rather see these extractions to a simple data manager that allows automatic updates for data changes in the external data application, that way everything is always up to snuff, so to say.

In the second part of the solution getting the data back into Revit is as simple as selecting the BIMLink addon in the Revit menu bar, select the spreadsheet file you want to load and then presto! the data is added. At least that's what they want you to believe, but you have to know that the data format have to match up with the data elements defined already in the model, but that should go without saying.

So in the end, even our most novice users can learn how to use this software and get some really needed extended value out of B<I>M and make everyone's life easier.