[Project Delivery Series #4] Better Alignment with Information Coherence

November 30, 2019 Chris Aquino

Photo of Phil Bernstein in SF workshop on project delivery

In his fourth post for ArchitectMagazine.com, Phil continues exploring the inefficiencies of project delivery in the AECO sector and offers ideas for improving the process. In this post, he notes a recurring theme – the efficacy of new tools, and the willingness of architects, engineers, builders, and clients to adopt them. The challenge, he says, is to enable all stakeholders to have access to trusted information. That requires a system the provides “information coherence” across disciplines and technology platforms.

Phil identified key trends and potential solutions discussed during the project delivery workshops in which the participants explored the relationship between emergent digital collaboration technologies and the AECO sector. “What differentiated the workshops from the everyday conference was the attendees’ willingness to propose solutions to attack the endemic problems of disintegrated information in project delivery,” he notes.

Attendees at the workshops identified a combination of technical, procedural, and cultural strategies for improving collaboration. These strategies include better-integrated software, hardware, and related data; more well-defined standards, measurements, and principles of collaboration, and contracts; and stronger industry and management support for standardization.

“Our participants argued not for a reduction in the current heterogeneity of tools, but rather a common data environment—a cooperative sandbox—in which these tools could work logically together,” says Phil. “They expressed strong interest in the careful consolidation of workflows and the ensuing connections between the data exchanged among project designers, builders, and operators.”

Workshop participants also discussed the need to redefine risk standards in information-driven project delivery models. There was a general consensus that new models of risk and return are required to create an ecosystem in which information sharing is viewed as a benefit, not a risk.

Learn more about Phil’s thoughts on the need for better information alignment by reading the full story on Architect’s site.

Also check out how Glumac went straight from concept to helping create shop drawings with technology in this story.

The post [Project Delivery Series #4] Better Alignment with Information Coherence appeared first on Convergence.

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