Getting ready for BIM Level 2: How difficult can it be?

Last week I talked about the five vital behaviors needed for BIM Level 1. Teams that adopt these ways of working will have taken the first big step towards being ready for BIM Level 2 when the specifications for this are published at the end of 2014.

 

Of the five behaviours some are, of course, more difficult than others. Here is my view of the level of challenge each of them poses. Two are 'easy wins', two are 'more work needed' and one is 'BIM's big problem'.

Teams that create and follow BIM Execution Plans (BEPs) together: More work needed
Many projects already have BEPs. However often Project Managers see these as only being of concern to the CAD team and do not engage. I am really looking forward to rolling out our training for PMs to help them understand the issues around the key documents that PAS1192-2 requires clients and teams to use. EIRs. BEPs. MIDPs. Plenty of new acronyms that a PM needs to understand, drive within their teams and assist clients with.

Using WIP, Shared, Published and Archived data storage areas in a Common Data Environment (CDE): Easy win
From the show of hands at our recent BIM champions meeting this has been quietly happening across our UK teams already. However, usually only the CAD team know about it, and I found one PM who didn't realise it was already embedded in his project! The concept of the CDE and the progression of data storage defined by PAS1192-2 needs to become the language of the team, and must be used for all data, not just drawings - reports and calculations for instance.

Correctly named data with a defined purpose and status: Easy win
Again our BIM champions have already implemented our standard naming conventions across most of our projects. However, as for the previous behaviour, we need to extend this across all our documents and make it the language of the team. We need to look at our standards to make sure everything is in place to allow them to apply this to everything!

Only properly checked data getting Shared and Published: More work needed
A team of us are working at updating the review procedures in our BMS (Business Management System) to bring advice right up to date with both BIM requirements and the Atkins Design Principles. Collaboration requires the sharing of data that everyone can trust it for the defined purpose so, as ever, review is extremely important. In particular the whole of our industry needs to better understand what checking a model entails!

Delivering the defined Level of Detail for Stages Zero to 7: BIM's big challenge
This is the area where the UK's construction industry needs to do most work. Each discipline needs a clear definition of what delivery to Level 2 means. When you working at Stage 3, say, exactly what should be in your model and what exactly can clients and other team members use that data for? Over delivery at the early stages of projects, both real and perceived, is a problem we are seeing already, especially in the MEP disciplines. For instance, ducts are now looking so realistic at scheme design, shown complete with flanges and hangers, that some contractors are believing they can construct  straight from these drawings. The reality is that no one has 'designed' that information - they are just pictures.

I hear that defined levels of detail as part of a digital plan of work will be published in the UK at the end of 2014. We can't wait that long, and are defining the contents and uses of our models stage by stage. If a client requires something extra we can of course agree to do more, but that will be agreed in conversations based around a clear starting point - true collaborative working!

The vital behaviours for BIM Level 1

I've just finished reading a 'management' book! All the way through! In the past I've found these tend to peter out after the first third once the authors have set out their big idea, but I kept with this one to the end.

 

It was "Influencer: The Power to Change Anything" and I think Anne Kemp has forgotten I borrowed it about 9 months ago. But it became my Christmas reading because I have just been asked to 'Sponsor' the BIM Level 1 roll-out in our part of Atkins.

So how can I influence a thousand people to 'live' BIM Level 1? I think just telling them to read our new Information Management standard and PAS 1192-2 is not going to persuade them - great though they are!

The book tells us we should focus on 'vital behaviours' - behaviours that create a cascade of change. What would we see if we were all, every one of us, doing BIM Level 1 as business as usual every day? How would we be managing ALL our information?

It would look like this........ 

• Teams that create and follow BIM Execution Plans (BEPs) together.

• Using WIP, Shared, Published and Archived data storage areas in a Common Data Environment (CDE).

• Correctly named data with a defined purpose and status.

• Only properly checked data getting Shared and Published.

• Delivering the defined Level of Detail for Stages Zero to 7.

Deceptively simple - and not a 3D model in sight.

But what we need is for ALL of us to do this ALL the of time. Not just models and drawings! Reports, calculations - everything.

Once we behave this way we can collaborate in confidence. Until we consistently do these things anyone who thinks they are approaching Level 2 is just mucking around with Revit and kidding themselves. Many people get distracted by the rising line on the BIM maturity 'wedge' diagram. That's where the new technology is, new machines that go ping - and we all like shopping.



But the key step is Level 0 to 1. That is about personal and organisational change. Not doing things. Sharing. Doing the same thing every time. Trusting. All these are less comfortable things to talk about than what software you want to buy for iBIM. And they don't sound much fun.

But if you don't fully implement Level 1 any new technology is just adding new complexity to the old information chaos. Who would want to collaborate with that?

You are going to hear me banging on (sorry, 'influencing' you) about these five headings constantly for the next few months. You can have your book back now Anne! 

A Cloudy Future: Four liberating things I did in 2013

At New Year, as well as thinking about all the things we should be doing in the year ahead, we should also celebrate what we achieved in the year gone by.

Alongside 'important stuff' like working on a nuclear job, running 10k and going to Santorini I made four big organisational step changes for the better:
- silencing my email,
- filing in the cloud,
- piling in the cloud, and
- getting unlimited broadband at home.

Silencing my email.

I blogged about doing this last year and it works! In my efforts to make sure that I was in charge of my inbox, not vice versa, I turned off all dings and buzzes on my phone and Ipad when emails arrive. I now plan to go to my inbox three times a day - and when I do I don't read, I 'process'. 

In particular I make sure everything is read and planned in the evening so I don't need to look in the morning and can drive my own agenda. It's the best time to actually do the work I need to do and my inbox should not be my 'To Do' list.

To be honest, this is still a work in progress, but it is so much better than last year! It was very difficult to keep on top when I was on site and off network. 

Alongside my blog, if you want to read more, Paul Morgalla recently sent me this great link.

Filing in the cloud

Whilst 'on site and off network' I needed to edit and send someone a copy of my CV, but it wasn't on my Ipad. It took half an hour of calls from a car park to get one emailed to me; no one was picking up the phone! Aaaagh!!!

But this set me thinking. I had various copies of my CV scattered in various places on drives at work and at home. Many of them out of date and none accessible when I was on the move...... and that was actually true for nearly everything digital in my life.

And since the storage of my (and my family's) data was so complicated, ensuring that it was all regularly backed up was really difficult. With the number of photos my wife has I was one hard drive failure away from divorce.

So I've moved into the cloud and paid for 100Gb of space on Dropbox($99 per year - some free space available). All our home computers now use it as their 'My Documents' and anything you put in there gets back up, mirrored up into the cloud. It is configured so each of us sees only our own stuff, unless you access the whole lot via the web browser.

And I have done the same for 'work-related' stuff and have it as a drive on my work laptop. I need to point out that project data, commercial data and data about our people MUST only be put on our own servers. But I had a load of technical reference, useful spreadsheets, other stuff.... and those CVs. I now have them stored in one place and they get backed up, and best of all, I can get at them from all my devices. Fab! 

If you ask me for a CV you get a link to the cloud sent from my Iphone - from a car park if necessary!

Piling in the cloud

What do you do with all that 'interesting stuff'? That article from New Scientist. That PDF explaining a standard. Those notes scribbled on a whiteboard. The receipt, guarantee and instructions from those lights you just bought.

If you are like me they are probably tucked away in all sorts of piles and drawers, in places you have to remember - and then don't.

Again, I have moved into the cloud, but this time with Evernote (£35 annually for Premium but you can start with free. There are Limits on how much you upload per month, not total storage). The key thing to realise is that you can search inside every document you put there - inside PDFs only for Premium users.

I now have Evernote on my home laptop, work laptop, Iphone and Ipad and they all access my data in the cloud. I email interesting emails to it along with their attachments. I can drag and drop Office documents and PDFs into it. I photograph papers, receipts and whiteboards with my phone and upload them to it (Evernote is really good at reading handwriting inside photos!).

I started by treating Evernote like a drive and trying to organise it. Now I have realised it is my own personal Google and just shove everything into the 'pile' with a few relevant tags. Minimal effort and I can find stuff by searching wherever I go. It works.

Best of all, those 'that might be useful' things you see.... stick them in Evernote and forget about them. They are there if you need them.

Getting unlimited broadband at home

In parallel with the last two, this one is really important. My BT deal was limited to 40Gb and I was aware we were often close to the limit. Then my daughter discovered the new season of Supernatural online, and we rather expensively blew through that.

However, when I asked it turned out that for £5 more per month I could go unlimited. That allowed me to go Pro with Dropbox - in the first month we used over 100Gb as things went into the cloud and we are regularly over 70Gb now.

Final thought

We happily spend money on hardware - PCs, laptops, monitors, hard drives, smart phones and tablets. As we move into the cloud I think we need to give more thought to spending on the services we buy to store and access our data, and 2013 was the year when I started that move.

And as I said in the title - having everything available everywhere is very, very liberating. Have a cloudy 2104!

My 2014 BIM resolutions

This is the third year of my BIM resolutions and there is one big difference between this and previous. For 2013 they seemed focused on me and what I was going to get up to - on how I was going to behave.

This year we seem to have several corporate imperatives breathing down our necks - it's all about delivery and "evangelisation" in 2014!

As a reminder - 'Information Management' and 'Checking and Review' were my two 'Back to Basics' themes for last year. No.1 was to personally become red hot about the way I handled all my data as a key step towards achieving Level 1 BIM. No.2 was to revisit our existing requirements for checking and review.

Fulfilment of both these resolutions got significantly complicated by an 8-month posting 'behind the wire' at a secure site at the start of March. I'll write a separate blog piece about some interesting things I did in response despite being 'off plan' but this year's Resolutions feel as if they are completing and expanding the themes set last year.

The biggest BIM-team achievement of 2013 was the completion and then sign-off of the Atkins "Corporate Standard for Managing Information on our CAD and BIM projects." This provides the standard approach we should all be using for information management and is, in effect, our own definition of what Level 1 BIM looks like. Anne Kemp is leading the charge to implement this for the whole of Atkins on the UK in 2014. In Design and Engineering I've been given the challenge of rolling it out by April!

So, 2014 Resolution No. 1 is to implement the IM standard in D&E - an expanded version of 2013 Resolution No. 1. Expect to hear a lot more on this blog about this soon!

No. 2 is even more of a carry over from last year - get the 'Check and Review' section of the D&E Business Management System updated and integrated with the Atkins Design Principles. The E&MP board has asked me present a way to do this in January, and then I want to see if I can sell this to the other parts of our business.

I was involved with several webinars around this subject in 2013 and some good work around this has been done in several areas of Atkins. However, I think there's is still a big opportunity to better embed the Design Principles in our processes in a usable way that re-emphasises the importance of getting things 'right first time'.

If we can deliver on these two 2014 resolutions we will be firmly established in 'BIM Level 1 base camp' ready for the ascent of Level 2 by 2016.  And that doesn't mean just some - that means all of us!

I am already preparing the puns about 'peak performance'!