6 Improvements to Design Collaboration To Beautify Your Design Life

The need for speed hasn’t really changed in in the last 30 years. Everyone still wants everything yesterday. Fortunately we now have the ability to make things happen nearly instantaneously – and that is true beauty when it comes to the construction industry. It has revolutionized the way things are built.

When design and production are happening at breakneck speed, everyone involved had better be on the same page, or things can get ugly pretty quick. Today, it’s all about collaboration. Follow this link for a Brief History of Collaboration.

The architecture department designs something – let’s call it “a thing of beauty.” The engineering department figures out how to make it stand up. The production crew creates the parts to build it. And these processes are really the bones of the entire project, all interconnected. Enter: collaboration. You spend 8 (or is it 10? 12?) hours a day in an industry where errors in the final product cannot be tolerated. Surely you’ve heard the saying, “The beauty of a project is only skin deep, but ugly is to the bone.”

How Can Real-Time Collaboration Get Rid of the Project-Uglies in Your Life?

• Accuracy inevitably increases. The questions and changes that used to be handled by phone calls, voice mails, sticky notes and faxes (ugly) can now be handled online in packages and issues. If your project manager’s desk is as “busy” as some engineers’ controlled chaos, this is a very good thing. Many years ago, when everything was still paper-based, I heard the chief structural engineer call out another on mistakes in her calcs. She asked him, “What do you expect? Perfection?” I’ll never forget his answer: “If I only expect you to be 90% accurate, what are you going to be aiming for?” Accuracy is a beautiful thing.
• Your Revit is still Revit. Bet you’re used to how it works. You probably have months (years?) of time invested in becoming really good at using it. Bet you don’t want that to change. With BIM 360 Design, you won’t have a lot of downtime learning a brand new base program. It makes sense, and the workflows are streamlined. Beautiful.
• You won’t have to teach your team members a brand new base program either, or have your productivity limp along until they get the hang of it.
• Collaboration accelerates your process. Even someone who doesn’t use Revit can look at the latest project designs. The project owner decides who they are. They can’t mess with the drawings, but they can track progress and see what’s going on. They can view the project details without having to continually ask you for progress prints.
• By using the cloud, you don’t have to “file share” (but you can choose to share a stand-alone model if you want to). Remember the days when you, your IT department, or some other team member (who felt like he was being punished) had to set up a central repository for job drawings on a shared server? That’s kind of ugly. But it’s not needed with BIM 360 Design.
• No more Heartbreak of Revisions. Everyone will know the most current version of the drawings. I remember the day so clearly: A submittal was due, and then someone screamed, “I’VE BEEN WORKING ON THE WRONG SET OF DRAWINGS!” Now that’s ugly to the bone. BIM 360 Design provides centralized models that every team member can tap into. Updates are available immediately after upload.

Want to change your design life for the better? Use the tool that helps you do that – BIM 360 Design. After all, the arch-bone’s connected to the eng-bone; the eng-bone’s connected to the shop-bone; the shop-bone’s connected to the arch-bone . . . now rock those project bones.

To rock your next project’s bones, request a demo today.