ICE Bridge Conference 2014

I find a conference a great way to rapidly take the temperature of a subject, and since I am increasingly discussing the future of bridges attendance at the ICE's Bridge Conference 2014 seemed a useful chance to plug into the state of the art.

According to Mike Chrimes, chairing the day, the three key subjects would be Design for Manufacture and Assembly (DfMA), Digital Engineering and Asset Management. These are where it’s all happening for bridges at the moment but I found there were lots of the last, some of the first and surprisingly little BIM. Let me highlight some of the key moments:

Roger Ridsill Smith of Foster and Partners discussed "inevitable design" - not imposing solutions that fly in the face of 'the right path', having the courage to do the obvious. His key example argued that the right place for the Millennium Bridge had to be at the foot of St Paul's steps to connect to the City - not on axis with the Tate as many wanted. He also showed a great graph summarising research revealing a straight line relationship between the embodied energy of a material and its cost. His message was this requires you to minimise material usage, whatever the project type is. I liked that message.

As always Roger was thought provoking, with ideas that other speakers returned to. However, despite agreeing, part of me wanted to debate the flip side of the same coin - where the right path is the one which no one else is prepared to take. 

Steve Nicholson, Chief Executive of Mersey Gateway gave a summary of the five years it has taken to reach financial closure and how the relatively small Borough of Halton is dealing with building this major transport link. Reduction of CAPEX over the next 30 years has been the key. Construction is planned to occur from deck level, driven by the large tidal range beneath, with insitu pours and some very clever movable, collapsible formwork.

Mariapia Angelino of Bristol University looked at the next phase of developments in the Eurocodes for Bridge Design. Ease of use will be a key driver of change, as many of these codes are tough to use at the moment. The opportunity to influence the new versions is now!

Keith Ross of Network Rail discussed a subject I had never looked at before: Bridge strikes and more specifically the interface of roads with rail bridges. The number of times some bridges get hit per year is amazing! One bridge in Tulse Hill was hit 21 times in 2013! Also what is going on in Grantham!!!There is an amazing amount of disruption and work tied up around this issue and really shows the importance of planning the future life of an asset. Guidance on the prevention of strikes on bridges over highways will be available on a www.gov.uk bridge strike page and all bodies involved are supporting the initiatives.

The next two presentations felt like a connected pair. Fernando Osan Sarasa, who I met quite recently, talked about some beautiful work he has done in Spain designing precast continuous bridges. For one example the bridge decks was finished only six and a half weeks after the climbing formwork of the tall piers was complete and the bridge was in service three weeks after that!

Thomas Garcia, the lead bridge engineer for HS2 then spoke of their key aim to develop families of structures that maximise off site solutions - music to my ears. HS2 has 135 over bridges (taking things over the railway), 185 under bridges and 70 viaducts totalling 30km, so the need for a solution is clear. Laing O’Rourke’s approach at Leadenhall was highlighted as the example of the DfMA behaviours needed.

HS2 has developed a BIM model of a 50km section of the alignment and the plan will be to link models and information into the final asset management system as a key deliverable. Building up BIM related skills across the whole team is needed. As soon as someone says 'Just print off the PDFs and I'll mark it up' the process begins to break down. They plan to investigate links to gaming technology as a way to keep people 'inside BIM.'

The intention is to go out for tender in a few weeks to find a consultant to develop these families. A key part of that work will be to develop specifications driving a reduction in the inspection and maintenance required. During questions a member of the HS1 maintenance team observed that they can't use standard inspection access equipment on apparently similar bridges. Standardisation of maintenance and inspection will also need to be solved.

Barry Colford, Bridgemaster at the Forth Road Bridge gave a fascinating overview of the last 50 years that really brought home the need to consider asset management. Fun fact of the day was that the bridge cost £11.5 million to build and has cost £250 million to maintain. Wow! We later learned that when it gets repainted in 2016 there are 200,000m2 to paint, and of the £350 per square metre, only £7 is for the paint - think about that as you design!!

Paul Monaghan from the City of London and also LoBEG (London Bridges Engineering Group) gave an excellent overview of the ways they are improving the management if their assets. Their approach is based around four key areas: data and information, systems and processes, decision support tools and procedures and finally training and continual improvement.

I was impressed by what he showed of the Bridgestation mobile web-based system. Contractors will need to engage with this developing language and software as fulfilling the client's needs via information and processes is of increasing importance. Designers also need to think about maintenance right up front! It takes up to 8 people to change light bulb on the Millennium Bridge (no joke), so single failures are left until they are dealt with in a batch. The design had required site drilled holes, but the owners only discovered that after they had taken off all the covers and got them mixed up. It took 4 months to get them sorted and back on. Finally, what is a client to do when contractors and consultants say a bearing has a life of 30 to 50 years? What is the test they must apply to decide replacement is needed?

Bill Harvey made a poetic point that we bring energy together in a bridge and from that point we need to invest energy in order to stop it leaking away.

Wrapping up, Cam Middleton, the Laing O'Rourke Professor of Construction Engineering talked about the technologies that are shaping the future of bridge engineering. The key was standardisation and off site manufacture: the legoisation of bridge construction. American examples of Accelerated Bridge Construction (ABC) were discussed and I must find the US government web sites he mentioned. For new build the aim is "get in, get out, and then stay out". Key aspects for the future include digital asset information modelling, smart sensors and monitoring, advanced analysis and the use of new materials.

He finished with a great idea: " Systemicise new-build so the best minds can work on refurbishing the old assets." Simplify the new so we can all focus on saving the old. That takes some thinking about for our industry!

The Death of Driving

This has been kicking around my mind for a while now, and recent thinking about the future of rail in the UK prompts me to get it down 'on paper' - or whatever the blog equivalent of that is.

I think that the insurance industry is going to kill off driving as we know it. And they may do it quite soon, and quite suddenly.

We seem to be nearing the point where Google and others are going to get permission to operate driverless cars on our streets. Rigorous testing has been done, and their insurers will have made sure they think this is safe. Indeed, why isn't it going to be safer than having a human playing with their phone, or thinking about the weekend at the wheel? New Scientist has discussed about cars that 'talk' to other nearby cars to effectively 'see' around corners. Humans can't do that.

Driverless cars could soon be very safe. Very, very safe.

So, if you were a human (ok... You are a human, I know). If you were a human and you chose to drive a car yourself. And then you hit someone, and injured or killed them, wouldn't you have behaved negligently? And if you have been negligent, and someone has died, won't the lawyers take you to the cleaners?

Now, insurance companies don't like deliberate negligence. They run a mile. You can't insure yourself to be deliberately negligent.

So as soon as we reach the tipping point where society accepts driverless cars are safer than drivers, I think insurance companies will pull out of car insurance (at least for humans). And that will be the end of hands on the wheel. Top Gear, Clarkson and Petrolheads generally - all consigned to the cultural waste bin. And why wouldn't it happen quite soon?

Personally, I won't mind this at all. Yes, I do like driving occasionally, but in India I had a driver for over two years and it was fab. A driverless car can drop you outside work and park somewhere cheap elsewhere. It picks you up from the pub late at night when you are in no fit state for anything. It takes your kids places without you. Imagine the possibilities! You want one, don't you!

So now, why don't we reimagine the future of the car. Why do you own a car when you could just buy it as a service? Why wouldn't your car profitably drive for other people when you are not using it? Why wouldn't it be electric, going off and charging up whenever it's not in use? Why wouldn't cars start behaving like trains, 'platooning' to travel more efficiently with minimal gaps? Why wouldn't they always stick to the speed limit? The cars could talk to make jams a thing of the past. In which case, why do we need a rail network?

All this change could flow from a decision by the insurance companies that driverless cars are safer than drivers.

Why won't it happen?

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'!

Errors on a terrible day - the importance of job-culture for site safety

This weekend's shocking news footage of the crane collapse at Sao Paulo's World Cup Stadium skipped past the names of the two construction workers killed and moved straight on to the problems it may cause to next summer's football fest.

 Sao Paolo 2013

The sight of that crane wrapped around the stadium sent a shiver down my spine and took me straight back to the worst day of my career in construction. Crane accidents are often'construction related' so it is tempting to think that the work ofdesigners is not linked. But are these deaths linked to projects that are behind programme against a deadline that cannot be missed? How does our work as designers influence job culture and how can we help reduce the risk of these errors happening, particularly when faced with tough programme deadlines?

In the late 1990s, before I joined Atkins, I was on site in Milwaukee, USA, where the 180m span retractable stadiumroof designed by my team was under construction. Dominating the construction site was 'Big Blue', a mobile crane that had turned up on 60 trucks, taken 40 days to build, and was now lifting 400 ton roof sections 400 feet into the air. Since I was not often on site I had wanted to see a lift happen, but we were told it was too windy. It wouldn't happen.

That afternoon we were in the site huts around half a mile from the stadium when there was the most terrible sound I have ever heard. It was the sound of 2,000 tonnes of steel falling in into the stadium. Hundreds of truss members buckling and being ripped apart. Perhaps it went on for 15 seconds but it felt like it lasted forever. Strangely the sound of a car on gravel still reminds me of it - for the first few years afterwards I would literally freeze when I heard that sound unexpectedly.

Miller Park 1999

Instantly we all knew that the sub-contractor had pressed ahead with the lift and the crane had dropped its load into the stadium, bringing down half the building's roof into the bowl. Once we stopped staring opened mouthed at each other we ran outside and Big Blue, the crane that had dominated the city skyline, was gone.

 

And it had brought down a smaller crane assisting the lift, and in its basket were Jerome Starr, Jeffrey Wischer and William DeGraves who fell 400 feet to their deaths.

 

The police cordoned off the site as a crime scene, but late that night I was called onto the pitch to provide some drawings for the District Attorney. Under the floodlights one side of the stadium, 'left-field', looked stunning, spanning 180m. Perfect.  Just as we had designed it. Turning around, the right-field was a twisted mass of metal – 2,000 tonnes of scrap.

 

And here was the outline of a body drawn on the gravel. We've all seen these in police dramas - they are almost a cliché. But the powerful absence of the man who had lain there is what I will always remember. I can't begin to imagine what that absence meant and means for his family and friends.

 

As unfortunately seems inevitable a protracted court case followed. Eventually this concluded that poor decisions by a few key individuals on site were the primary cause. I recall from the court case that the winds were gusting above the crane's design speed. The anemometers measuring it were in the wind shadow of the stadium. The piece being picked was slightly heavier than calculated. More louvers had been fixed on it, increasing wind drag. On the day those were the errors that killed three men.

 

But what other things led to a culture on site where these errors could happen? It came out court that the client had created a muddled procurement route for the roof, muddying issues at bid and creating conflict throughout the design stages. The design team had agreed reluctantly to a very challenging delivery programme and then struggled to get complete information issued. The sub-contractor switched itsconstruction approach to a radical new way late in the day. Disputes occurred about whether the design requirements were being followed.

 

Stories typical of many projects and spread over several years, but do they contribute to a job-culture that can influence key construction decisions?

 

And meanwhile the 'drop dead' date of the first game of the season got ever closer as the programme started slipping behind, and evidently key individuals were introduced on site with the aim of whipping everyone to go faster.

 

The London 2012 Games had an exemplary health and safety record. Note also that there was never a panic in the press about it being delivered late. No doubt things dropped behind schedule sometimes, but realistic plans must have been put in place to pull that time back. Evidently a culture where corners were cut never developed.

 

So, as designers what can we do to reduce risks, particularly when projects face tough deadlines?

•

- All the way through the job we must engage with and support all the project-wide safety initiatives. We must be an active part of the safety-culture that the project develops.

•

- We need to agree to realistic delivery programmes and then deliver fully to them. If we hand over late or incomplete information we are putting those further down the line under extra time pressure, which increases the possibility of error.

•

- We need to have the courage to be the whistle-blower. A disregard on site for quality and design issues can be symptomatic of a culture that also shortcuts on safety. As individuals we sometimes need to step forward and point out the thing that everyone else doesn't want to see.

•

- Finally, be aware that looming deadlines and delays put pressure on the whole supply chain, which in turnincreases the chance of error. Be extra sensitive and do everything you can to relieve that pressure.

At the stadium in Milwaukee a statue commemorates Jerome Starr, Jeffrey Wischer and William DeGraves. Immortalised but gone. Sadly I don't know the names of those who died at São Paulo. The news’ focus remains on the immovable first game.