Wednesday, May 18, 2011

Delegate to Relegate (information); Remote to Demote (information)

“Your theory is rubbish! I have the perfect draughtsman – he knows what I want in the design even before I think of it...”
Advises a friend of mine, an HVAC engineer with significant experience under his belt.
He could be right, but one cannot possibly build a business on this.

“What if the draughtsman departs?” – I ask
“I find another one just as good” – he says.

What I observe in the industry still backs my view, that project delivery where one party does the ‘thinking part’ and another the ‘documenting’ is risky. And costly.

Just look at a typical ‘design team’:
Most BIM presentations start with a picture of a round-table and various team-members gathered around the ‘project’.
Criss-crossing arrows represent the difficulties in communicating between members. The project suffers.
I too occasionally roll-out a picture like this.

What these pictures omit is the fact that few of the participants around the table are hands-on.
Every one of them drags behind an army of documenters that are charged with making sense of their sketches calculations and notes and capture in a set of presentable drawings (or models).

Apart from the cost and risk of multi-handling and constant repurposing of information there are significant side-effects.
Inflated, inferior document-sets, design-team-members that have no in-depth knowledge of their projects and increased bluffing.

My friend may be an exception.


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