Collaboration Drives Construction Project Excellence

The dictionary says that collaboration means “working jointly with others or together, especially in an intellectual endeavor”. Construction projects are both intellectual and practical endeavors, and a shared project understanding is critical to their success.

For building project teams to enhance their collaboration, they need a tool that provides the right information to the right people at the right time. That tool is a common, constructible building information model (BIM) that stakeholders can share throughout the entire design-build-operate project lifecycle.

To make this vision of a common project understanding come to life, team members need to grasp the details of every task in the context of the proposed structure’s “big picture”. Integrated project team workflows enable all stakeholders, including engineers, detailers, fabricators, contractors, trades, and customers, to establish a single source of truth to support decision making at every level.

Construction workflows and stakeholder communication leap to the next level when team members can work from one constructible model in real time, from any location. Timely access to accurate information deepens everyone’s understanding, boosting quality and reducing project risk.

Effective collaboration also inspires dynamic teamwork. Stakeholder synergy drives the knowledge and resource sharing that construction project teams need to achieve common goals.

Outmoded Approaches: Division and Rivalry

Construction projects involve divergent teams of distinct professions and trades employed by multiple, independent firms, corporations, and contractors. Traditionally, this has often caused roadblocks and information silos within project teams.

Information silos on building projects are obstacles to effective project coordination. Deadline pressures can elicit vague designs and cause vital changes to go undocumented, triggering miscommunication, miscalculations, clashes, and costly rework.

The architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) industry can be fiercely competitive. Business challenges sometimes compel stakeholders to push through assignments and shift focus to the next customer, instead of thinking strategically about their current project roles.

The tension inherent in conventional approaches often triggers confusion, disagreement, and delay. Too many projects still experience roadblocks like these, but leading-edge, digital ways of working are now available to transform outmoded team dynamics.

Collaboration Benefits

Collaboration creates a common project vision. Collaboration enhances project stakeholder alignment. All team members understand the project plan’s timelines, activities, tasks, and dependencies. Successful collaboration creates a shared vision between design teams in the office and field crews onsite.

Collaboration promotes information sharing. When project teams share the same information model, they gain insights. Those insights improve accuracy while eliminating confusion and delay.

Team members, contractors, and crews often work simultaneously on complex building projects. Without timely access to accurate information, team members can find themselves spending more time searching for information than on completing hands-on work.

Further, lack of information means lack of insight. Without a shared project understanding, miscommunication, duplication, errors, and omissions arise, preventing teams from completing a quality structure on schedule and within budget.

When architects, engineers, detailers, fabricators, contractors, and trades collaborate via a shared BIM, they have the information and insight they need to make optimal decisions. For example, a timely, collaborative model review can identify clashes before onsite work even begins, eliminating errors, conflicts, and costly remediation.

Collaboration boosts teamwork. Planning work collaboratively, based on a shared, constructible model fosters motivation and more supportive work relationships. Stakeholders accomplish common goals as a team, boosting one another’s confidence, trust, and momentum. The old saw is true, “nothing succeeds like success”.

Collaboration improves decision making. On conventional construction projects, many stakeholders have no access to key information that could empower them to improve projects or processes. Collaboration provides access to relevant project plans, timelines, estimates, and equipment laydown plans. This improved information access empowers stakeholders to consider and discuss project details with colleagues and peers on the project team. Through collaboration, all professions and trades can contribute valuable, and sometimes unexpected, insights to the project plan.

Collaboration encourages health and safety. Divergent teams working in silos can inadvertently create health and safety risks. By increasing project understanding and stakeholder relationships, construction project teams can identify hazards, conflicting activities, and overlooked compliance requirements.

Collaboration encourages clear communication on health and safety issues, reducing risks and making expectations explicit. Working together as a team streamlines risk mitigation and hazard management.

Constructible BIMs Encourage Collaboration

When construction project teams share a genuinely constructible BIM, they establish more effective collaboration. The 3D BIM provides a digital twin of the proposed structure, enabling stakeholders to visualize the building at a level of detail that clarifies design intentions and expectations.

The constructible BIM finally provides project managers with the tools they’ve always sought for delivering the right information to the right people at the right time. A constructible BIM provides a clear, relatable view of your structure’s aesthetic features.

By sharing the constructible BIM, stakeholders gain a common understanding of the design, constructability, execution, budget, and sustainability of the proposed structure. Examining the 3D image of the structure eliminates information searches, requests for information (RFIs), and heated tailgate talks at the site.

The 3D BIM and the data it provides synchronize team members’ work, streamlining the building design’s implementation. This fosters more in-depth and timely conversations with contractors and trades.

Field crews can help designers identify potential clashes and constructability problems before the work begins. This eliminates the need for RFIs, rush change orders, and rework during the onsite construction process.

Collaboration that includes all stakeholders throughout the design, build, and operate construction project lifecycle mitigates risk, improves productivity, and makes projects more profitable for everyone on the project team. The constructible BIM delivers these benefits by enabling all professions and trades to share, examine, collaborate, comment on, and update the model, plans, and reports together in real-time, from any location.

A constructible 3D BIM provides an intuitive visual representation of your proposed structure at the level of detail crews need to construct it at your building site. This encourages more in-depth communication among stakeholders and streamlines construction project workflows.

The result is a clearer, more intuitive project plan that eliminates duplication and inefficiency. Your customers, executives, and project owners can rest assured that your project’s budget is money well spent.

BuildingPoint Canada Can Help

BuildingPoint is committed to a collaborative building information modeling process that all stakeholders can apply at any phase of the design, build, and operate lifecycle of any structure.

Why not contact BuildingPoint Canada to discuss how our constructible process tools can help your project team deliver quality structures more accurately, efficiently, and profitably?