All together
A major driver today, as Michael Murphy of BAM Contractors points out, is that Building Information Modelling [BIM] is now mandated by most major project clients and all state contracts across the EU. Around for decades, BIM has been steadily gaining ground since the nineties. In essence, it means that absolutely everything about a construction is digitally input and recorded, from the earliest brief and designs throughout the project using a 3D geometric model until the total database can be handed over to the commissioning client. It then becomes the core of the facilities management system for its lifetime. Data content could range from the specs and supplier of a door handle to all of the communications between the project team members to dynamic models of internal air flow.
Murphy is BIM Manager in BAM Contractors, our leading construction and civil engineering company (formerly Ascon) and subsidiary of the €7.4 billion Royal BAM Group of the Netherlands. “Our projects involve multiple professionals and partners, starting with our own internal specialist divisions like BAM Civil or BAM Rail. Our main collaboration platform is the web-based Business Collaborator from Unit 4 Software and corporate policy is to conform to the PAS 1192 standard for information management in all projects. We also use unified comms with Microsoft Lync and various Cisco resources. Everyone reckons that ‘presence’ is one of the great features, incidentally, and would never do without it anymore.”
“Complete auditability is important to us, not least because we are involved in many public/private partnerships, often all the way from design and construction to operation and facilities management for 20 years or more. We would be collaborating with six or seven external firms on any project, for example four architects and two consulting engineers in our current schools construction programme for the Department of Education. Working together on common communications and project management platforms gives all of us control over the processes involved as well as the accuracy and security of the data,” Murphy explains.
“We are very conscious of security but also believe in the KISS principle. So, for instance, we think collaboration involves full access to shared data resources. Projects are in many ways communities, it’s ‘our work’ and based on mutual trust and 95% and more of people behave very responsibly. In the end, everything is auditable anyway. Everyone can see who did what and when, which is actually the nature of technical collaboration and BIM processes.”
Team work
Another useful word for the closest collaboration is ‘teamwork’, which is why the rapidly growing Cork project management software company of that name eventually paid $675,000 (€490,000) for the Teamwork.com domain after several years of negotiation. With global sales this year heading over $6 million (€4.35 million), Teamwork.com is the brainchild of founders Peter Coppinger and Daniel Mackey, formerly the Digital Crew team of web developers and consultants. Unhappy with the quality of the project management tools they were trying to use to keep a busy studio efficient and even profitable, they set about developing something to do the things they wanted to track and control projects.
“It’s all online as a web SaaS, with over more than 20,000 users and nearly 8,000 paying clients and growing, largely in the USA but spread globally,” Peter Coppinger says. “From the beginning we had a number of features that distinguished us from other similar collaboration and project management tools. One very successful offering, for example, could not track individual working time. Others could not track to a completion deadline.
“Our features and functionality came initially out of what we wanted and understood the value of in a practical and busy real world, controlling projects and priorities, tasks and talents. Task dependencies are always crucial, for example, what comes first before something else can proceed. Teamwork creates ‘Task Templates’ that can be adapted for the specifics of any element of a project or for your standard business tasks.”
“We launched our first version in 2007,” Coppinger says. “It was functional if not very pretty, but very quickly users found it and liked it and the ideas started to feed in. Now that they include Fortune 500 corporations and universities, retailers and professional services, client feedback continues to be a rich resource!”
Teamwork is a cloud service, with unlimited users per project and the number of concurrent projects varying according to the payment plan. It even offers a free trial service for SMEs. Project data is held and worked on and communicated through Teamwork but data and summaries can be exchanged with services like Dropbox or Google Drive and with ERP and other applications. “You can record time and billable hours and materials and so on in Teamwork, for example, then export to your own system for actual invoicing,” says Coppinger. “The next development aimed at large enterprise clients with special security or compliance concerns is SaaS with all data held on and streamed to/from their own servers.”
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