Planning for BIM: Using Construction Schedules to Enhance the Coordination Process

NICK DYER: All right, so they shut the door, so I assume that that means that they want me to get started. [LAUGHS] Hope everybody's doing good. Second day of AU, we're coming down to the end of the day here. This is about the time in the conference when my brain starts to melt a little bit, but thanks for coming. So there's plenty of stuff up here in the front. [LAUGHS] It's best seating in the house.

AUDIENCE: Yep.

NICK DYER: Awesome. So I guess technically we still had a couple minutes, but they shut the door so I guess it threw me off.

All right, so today we're going to be talking about planning for BIM using construction schedules to enhance the coordination process. It's a little bit of a mouthful, I realize that, but basically, what we're going to be talking about is being able to build a schedule that we can then use in order to keep people accountable, build transparency, and enhance that overall coordination process. Because a lot of times what happens is you get a blanket statement, like six weeks in your schedule, and it doesn't really define all of the things that have to go into the coordination effort. So that's what we're going to hopefully discuss here. Also as a quick note, we do have some parts of this that are live demonstrations, so we're going to move through those pretty quick. But if you have any specific questions, we'll wait to the end to do that, and we can go back and re-evaluate some of our stuff.

So my name is Nick Dyer, work for Oakland Construction, have been there for about seven years. And been in their BIM department for pretty much that entire time, working on projects all over the Western United States, mostly in health care, though, there's been a few things mixed in here and there for some different opportunities, some lab spaces and things like that. Overall, it's been pretty good.

Oakland Construction is headquartered out of Salt Lake City, Utah. We do work all over the western United States. And we also have offices in Tempe, Arizona and in Boise, Idaho. And we just broke $1 billion for the second year in a row. So we're pretty excited about that.

So and then, in our BIM tool bag, we use a lot of different tools when we talk about BIM, but today, we're going to focus on BIM 360 Plan. And also, we're going to be using Excel. And really, the only reason we've chosen those is because they're kind of widely easy for people to access.

So we're going to get started with just jumping into building our schedule. Of course, it's the first part of this whole process, and we have a couple of quick videos to comically introduce these subjects so--

[VIDEO PLAYBACK]

[MUSIC PLAYING]

[PHONE RINGING]

- My new five year plan looks like this.

[PHONE RINGING]

- Well, how can you have a five year plan when you don't know what will happen in five minutes?

- We have this room now.

- Bad timing. Shoo, shoo.

[PHONE RINGING]

[BELL RINGING]

[END PLAYBACK]

[LAUGHS]

NICK DYER: And then, just one more here.

[VIDEO PLAYBACK]

[MUSIC PLAYING]

- Do you prefer that I spend the day planning, which doesn't look like work, or should I plunge into my project with aggressive randomness?

- He told you not to work?

- Yeah. He doesn't know it yet.

[BELL RINGING]

[END PLAYBACK]

NICK DYER: [LAUGHS] All right, so when we're planning, we're going to focus on the six P's here. And those six P's are prior proper planning prevents poor performance. Because when we go at things in aggressive randomness, we get a whole lot of random things done, but the whole thing doesn't really come together. And because we haven't planned for it properly. And that's part of the problem that we have with scheduling when we just have blanket statements of we're going to do this in a week, or we're going to do this in two weeks, or something like that. We haven't really built in that level of detail to understand what needs to happen in that period of time.

So when we're selecting a software, I chose today to look at BIM 360 Plan and then also to work through Excel, and only because those things are accessible to people who have access to BIM 360 or just have access to Excel. A lot of people don't have access to or don't know P6, or at least maybe that's just at Oakland, but your company might be different. But it doesn't really matter which one you choose as long as they allow you to make updates so that when you're building your schedule, you're not stuck to a rigid course of activities. And that you're able to go back and add delays. You're able to go in and add roadblocks and those kinds of things so that your schedule is detailed.

The other thing, too, is that you need to be able to share it with people who don't have access to your software, whether that's just a PDF print out, or whether it's Excel, pretty much anyone has access to Excel. Excuse me.

So for this class, we're going to go through a two story medical clinic. Basically, it's meant to just be really easy, but it requires BIM coordination. And it's going to require BIM coordination to a pretty significant level of detail. And we've got an imaging suite. We've got physician's offices, some procedure rooms, and then we have a mechanical penthouse, a pretty typical two story clinic.

So first thing we're going to do is we're going to break this out into stages. Now these stages are the ones that we typically use when we're planning out our coordination schedule. And we start with equipment submittals, move to content modeling, then BIM coordination, shop drawings, and then we're ready for construction. Then we have a construction start. We're going to jump into these phases because we even break these down further into specific activities.

So looking at our master schedule in this scenario, we're going to have these pour dates. Now the reason for these pour dates and why they're important is because at the time that we look at the schedule or at least in this scenario, we don't have an activity for hangar placement. But we need a coordinated model in order to have hangar placement. So we need to beat that day by seven days. That gives time for our trades to be able to say OK, the model coordination is complete. Now we have some time to actually go out and place hangars before the pour happens.

So and it's just from that lack of detail in our master schedule. As we approach closer to that date, our master schedule may include hangar placement. And, at that point, we can update our coordination schedule. But for now, this is where it stands.

So first thing we're going to do, I'm going to jump into Excel really fast and introduce you guys to the Excel spreadsheet that we've got. So this Excel spreadsheet that we're going to be using has everything laid out. Formulas are already built into this and actually in the additional files for this class. I've provided you with the same template. So you can toy around with it as well.

But basically, what we can do in here is that we've got our dates preloaded there on the end, and we're going to pull plan this a little bit. So we're going to start with our seven days and just enter those into the cells. And you can see there that we've got dates starting to auto populate in there. So the same thing, just to give a contrast to BIM 360 Plan, when we pull this one up, we've got our dates added in here already. And if you haven't used Plan, it's another pull planning software, but we're going to use it for planning purposes today.

So for right now, we're just going to add some activities. So it's really simple to do that. We just add a new activity. It brings us to this task bar, preloads in some activities that we've added in the past.

But in this case, we need to just add level one is being ready for construction-- lost my mouse. Ready, and then we said it was going to be seven calendar days, which equates to five business days. Within here, we can eliminate Saturdays, Sundays, and holidays and do calendar days if we want to, but really, it's five working days. Anybody that's done some scheduling can make that conversion pretty fast in their head. But we're going to be doing that in five days.

So then from our schedule, we know that we need to-- we know that that's going to happen. That's the date we have to beat. It gives us our finish date. We need five day duration, and it gives us a start date. We can, if we wanted to, build a work breakdown structure, WBS. In this case, we're not going to just yet.

And then we can add a handoff. Now the handoff is basically what is the next activity. So for this one, we need to start building that logic, and we're going to do the slab on deck pour. Then we can save and add another. This process becomes repetitive, but the nice thing is is that Plan gives us some tools.

So then we know that we need to beat the next one by the next day. And then our handoff is not going to be the level two slab on deck. It's actually going to be our penthouse slab on deck pour. And then so on, down the list.

All right, so we've saved those in there. So now we can start in our Gantt chart. We can start to see that logic starting to be built in here. So somewhere along the way, we ended up with a repeat activity. So we can just get rid of one of those, and then just click delete activity. And now it's gone.

But then also, you see that our pour and our day that we're finishing is the same day. So we probably don't want that. It's really easy to just pull this back a day and snap that into place. And now we're finishing the day before, and then the next morning, they're ready to go. And it's pretty simple to just keep pulling this back and letting that take place.

So for some reason, this one doesn't want to snap to the 10th. So we can actually just come in here and just force our finish date to the 10th, and then it auto updates. So this becomes a pretty powerful little planning tool. Even if your company is not necessarily leveraging pull planning, it allows you, at least, as your coordinator, or the BIM lead, or whatever it is that you call it on your project, an opportunity to come in and build a very detailed schedule within this, with logic and everything like that.

So being that this takes a little bit of time to build here live, we're going to focus mostly on Excel for the rest of the time period to give as much time at the end for questions and that kind of thing. But we can jump into this, and I'm willing to go through any features and that kind of thing with you guys. So jumping back into our presentation here.

So we had this construction start versus ready for construction. And what those basically is is the ready for construction is the day we're ready to go. It's the day we say, "All right, we are finished with our coordination process. Everything is ready for construction." And the construction start is the day that your master schedule says, "This is when the activity is actually ready to go."

So in this case, because our master schedule didn't quite have enough detail to place hangars yet, we're using that time in there to say, "We're going to be placing hangars during this period of time." But really, as our schedule updates and we start getting more meat and potatoes in our master schedule, this time becomes float. And it becomes very easy to manage the amount of float that we have.

So another couple of little videos here to talk about shop drawings. I know this isn't quite related to construction or the coordination process, but I'm sure you guys are smart enough to see the parallels.

[VIDEO PLAYBACK]

- So I'm happy to report we have succeeded in rebooting our flagships. Way ahead of schedule yet again. This has allowed us to improve our USBs by 90%. That's nine out of every 10.

- Excellent. Thank you, Samuel. Timothy, what's the status with the linear solutions? Could you give us the latest on the square project?

- The linear solutions department has yet again functioned at full capacity, and we have fulfilled 114% of this month's objectives. You can read the handouts for a detailed account, but, in short, as I reported last week, we've decided to use the right angle for the square project. Now there's still some debate as to how big a right angle is, so we're testing currently at 90, 97. 100, and 101 degrees. As agreed, I have ensured Anderson cross checks the design, removing any left angles and doesn't use them in future. Overall, we have very good progress with the design.

- Are we on track for the schedule? When are we required to start delivering?

- I'm happy to report that we are ready to start first deliveries tomorrow, which is way ahead of the requested delivery schedule.

- We've only just finished system testing the prototype and are only half way through performance testing. We haven't even released an alpha version yet.

- As I said earlier, we've had very good progress with the design.

- Yes, we've had very good progress, but I'd say the design of the product is only 75% complete.

- Well, exactly. That's three out of every four, so we're ready to start shipping tomorrow.

- What? It doesn't work like that.

- We'll produce, say, four units, but only ship the first three. Then when you're finally 100% complete with the design, we can then ship the fourth.

- Excellent work, Timothy. You can proceed with the production. Anderson, send me please a revised delivery schedule so I can share it with a client. Well, thank you everyone. This was very productive yet again.

[END PLAYBACK]

NICK DYER: So the rest of that video goes into some deep dives. It's actually the third part of a four part series, but basically, that's how BIM gets treated sometimes. It's like hey, did we get the coordination complete? Great, we're ready to rock and roll tomorrow and start Ruffin. We have had no time to create shop drawings. [LAUGHS]

So it's like this. We're only 75% of the way there. It doesn't work like that. We do need time for the shop drawings. It's true that we are building that spine for the shop drawings in the background for our model, it's just that we need to finish up the drafting. But that drafting in those details, that's what the field is actually going to use to make their installation. And it's also the point data that we extract from those that they're probably going to be using if they're using a total station layout system.

So we then split that into shop drawing creation, which is the time to actually build our shop drawings. It's the time to draft in those details, add the callouts, those types of things in order for our 2D deliverable. And then we have a shop drawing review time. This isn't an internal review time. It's review time for our design team. Oftentimes, you have a spec that says that shop drawings have to be submitted as a deferred submittal. That time needs to be accounted for because even though you could potentially start, let's say doing hangars during that review time, something might come back that you didn't account for, or that we need to go back and change again. So you do you do want to account for it.

And then we have this material fab and procure. Particularly if you are not chasing pour dates, for instance, and you're chasing a rough install date, you do need to have time to fab your stuff or to procure your equipment so that it can actually get to the job site and be installed when the rough install date does show up.

So the coordination process is the next step. But real fast, I almost forgot to jump back into Excel to add in those dates because this becomes important later on down the line. So we had our three activities here. We need days to generate them. Let's say we're going to give people seven days because they've already built their spine. Spec says we have to give three weeks to our design team in order to review those. It's 21 calendar days. And then the fab and procure time. If we're leaving out any outliers of long lead items and that kind of a thing, we're probably going to do that in about a two week period of time per floor. So we end up with 14 calendar days in there.

So now when we come back into our coordination process being the next step, we've split these out into-- we have our initial model upload, our BIM coordination time, and then also our model sign off. And what these are is that the initial upload is that, even though you might have uploaded stuff to your FTP site, Box, BIM 360, Glue, whatever the case might be, this is the day that 100% or really close to 100% of that modeled content from your trade contractor has been uploaded to Glue. That's your drop dead date.

The next one here is the coordination. This is the only time in the schedule when we've allotted for clash rounds. This is the time that we have in order to be able to do clash detection, look at the clashes, resolve the clashes, and do that part that we most associate with the BIM coordination.

Then we have model sign off. Sadly, model sign off has one of two forms. It can be either clash free, or it can be that our schedule says we need to move on. More often than not, it's that we need to move on. So that model sign off date is just there to say, "This is the milestone that we have to work towards. Let's get clash free by this date. And if we can't, then we need to have some kind of discussion as to what happened." Or it could be that we've just reduced our clashes to an acceptable amount, and the rest can be taken care of in the field.

So let's jump back into Excel. I know there's a lot of jumping back and forth here in order to build this out. But with the formulas here, all we need to do is put in our time that we're going to spend actually doing clashes. And let's say that this can be done relatively quickly, meaning that we have maybe a weekly meeting, we're doing the first meeting, we have a meeting in between, and then we have a sign off meeting. So with weeklies, that means that we're going to take three weeks, so it's 21 calendar days.

All right, next part in here is content modeling. Now content modeling, a lot of times, it's what content are we going to use. If we're using the design team's model, then we need to wait for the design team to have that content ready for us to coordinate. That probably isn't going to happen until, at a minimum, 100% DDs. Leading up through schematic design, you probably don't have enough content in there. And so we need to wait for it.

If the trades are going to be doing it, we need to have which trades are going to be providing models, already on board and engaged, and make sure that they have time to generate their own content because what inevitably happens is that we get a superintendent, he's like, OK, we've got our electrician on board. They're ready to go tomorrow, and that's just not the case.

Electrical engineers are great, but they don't model in all of the small conduits. We require our electricians to model in all those small conduits. So they need time to actually model it. Otherwise, we can't coordinate it. We can't clash it. And we're just going to talk in a bunch of what ifs, and it's not going to be very productive. We need to allot some time in there to do that.

Also, when we have specialty trades, like P tube and that kind of thing, they need time to generate their own content. Whether we're doing that in the design process or whether we're doing it in construction coordination, we need some time to be able to generate this content.

So in our scenario, we're going to assume, just for the intent of the class, that our trades are going to be doing it. We're going to give them two weeks in order to be able to do that. And I just dropped my mouse. So that's awesome. All right, so 14 calendar days, there we go.

All right, then we have equipment submittals. Now equipments submittals, it's odd that we've placed this before everything. But the whole thing happens in a sequence. We need equipment in order-- or at least that submittal before we can make the content modeling because if we have to model to LOD 400, we have to know what we're modeling.

We can't just say, "Yeah, it's a VAV unit." OK, which VAV unit? Is it Siemens? Is it LG? Is it GE?

Whatever the case might be, same thing happens with the VRFs and those kinds of things. There's lots of different companies that make them. We need to know what we're going to model. And then we need to know what equipment we need.

Now the whole thing is that I would argue, we need everything. But there are some things that are probably higher priorities then, and some things that are lower priorities. A two by four troffer light has a certain amount of clearance that every single troffer light, regardless of manufacturer, is going to need in order to be able to install the light and repair the light and that kind of thing. So we can let those things slide a little bit.

But air handlers, you need to know what air handler you're putting in. If you don't know, then you're just talking in another what if scenario because you don't really know. You don't have that information in there.

So and then owner provided equipment becomes very critical at this stage because our trades aren't providing it, but we need to know about it. So particularly in this case, we have an imaging suite. Chances are they're going to have an x-ray that is owner provided. That x-ray requires structure to go up above the ceiling.

Now it's whose job is it to provide that structure? Is it going to be the supplier, or is it going to be coming in from someone like Unistrut? And we're going to have the structure ready for them that they can connect any x-ray machine to. We need to have that discussion early.

So what we're going to assume here-- yeah, that's where I put it. As we jump back into Excel at least for right now, we're going to start assuming that all of our guys have been engaged for at least a week or so. They've started on their submittal process, and they really only need probably another two weeks in order to finish that out per floor.

So now we have some actual dates in here, and what is really fun to look at, now that we have some dates, is that if we were handed this project today and we needed to coordinate it chasing these January dates, we're not going to make it. And the reason is we should have started two months ago, back in September. That's when we should have been engaging our trade modelers. That's when we should have been starting this whole process.

Now all is not necessarily lost. At this point, we can come in and we can do probably something, but we're going to have to start negotiating some of these durations. Maybe we're going to leave out a stage or something like that. Maybe we're going to say, "You know what? They're going to install hangars even though it hasn't been through the review process." That saves us three weeks.

So we can start playing with the numbers here. So we get rid of that review process time, and now we're getting into October. So or maybe we just say, "You know what? We're good enough with whatever the design team's given us. We're not going to worry about doing the submittal process." And now we're getting closer to our actual dates that we're at right now.

So this process becomes very important because now we have a conversation starter. Now we have actual firm dates that we can go back to our project team, or our owner, or architect, or whoever is the one that we need to sell our schedule to, as to when we need to get started and show them, look, if I need to beat this date, I need this amount of time, and we need to start next week, for instance. So this becomes a very powerful planning tool, and then we keep it up to date throughout the process. And we'll talk through that.

All right, so our schedule detail when we jump into this, we need to have enough detail that we're showing everything basically. But, in here, we are grouping all of our MEP subcontractors, all of our steel, all of our specialty trades into one single activity. And that's what we've done thus far, which goes against a little bit of what standard scheduling practice would necessarily be. And that's because BIM is really an all for nothing, or all for one workflow. If your plumber starts to fall behind, it hurts everyone.

Now that doesn't mean that we can't do phased work. We can do phased work. It's just that you have to plan for that appropriately. And if you don't plan for it appropriately, things start to get muddy. So with phased work, we would add additional activities, maybe we would say instead of grouping all of level one, we'd have level one plumbing. And we would know that hey, it's going to be seven days into the coordination process before our sheet metal guy is engaged and has a model uploaded to the BIM 360 Glue site or whatever case might be.

And this is where Excel and Plan start to differentiate themselves because Plan, you can just add in those specific activities, and you don't have to worry about adding additional lines to your Excel spreadsheet, becomes a little bit easier to manage that logic. We do need to add project specific activities to our schedule. No two projects are the same. We break it down pretty good for the process here that process is pretty repeatable, but no two projects are the same. You're going to have stuff that is a little bit different.

Then you need to get on your master schedule. So even though you as the BIM lead, you might not have access to P6, or you might not know P6, but your company uses P6 in order to do the master schedule, but your master schedule is what you order. When you go into sub meeting, that's what they're looking at. At OEC, that's what they're looking at.

So you want to be on the schedule that they're looking at. Otherwise, you will get lost, you will get left behind, and then it turns into a little bit of a cluster later on down in the process when you think you're humming along just fine. But they sped up the pour dates by a week, and you didn't know about it. But having your stuff in the master schedule will prompt your scheduler to come and talk to you and say, "Hey, we affected your dates. We need to talk about this, and what we can do for a plan."

So which leads us right into collaborating with stakeholders. Now we do have another funny Dilbert video here.

[VIDEO PLAYBACK]

- Sales are dropping like a rock. Our plan is to invent some sort of do hickey that everyone wants to buy. Ah, well, the visionary leadership work is done. How long will your part take?

[BELL RINGING]

[END PLAYBACK]

[VIDEO PLAYBACK]

[MUSIC PLAYING]

- I need you to facilitate some meetings.

- What kind of meetings?

- We're creating a process to fix our product development process. But first, we're having some preplanning meetings to decide on a project name.

- How about death spiral?

[END PLAYBACK]

NICK DYER: [LAUGHS] OK, everyone hates the whole thing of let's have a meeting to plan the next meeting. I know everyone hates them. I hate them, but sometimes, they actually do have some importance.

So we have our pre-kickoff meetings. So in this scenario, we've gone through that Excel spreadsheet or we've gone through Plan, we've added our activities, we've added durations. But we haven't talked to anyone yet.

So we do need to do that exercise on our own in order to account for planning, but then we need to have a pre-kickoff meeting. And this is one on one with each of your individual trades. It can be over the phone, and it needs to be really quick. 30 minutes is usually sufficient. I can pretty much get through my agenda in about 30 minutes. So these are not meant to be long, lingering meetings.

Basically, we're going to be talking proposed schedule. We're going to be talking submittals. And we're going to be talking our RFIs.

Now if they've been engaged for a while, they're going to have some of all of this complete. So with the proposed schedule, we need to make sure that they're on board, that we've got a consensus, that the durations and dates that we have provided, that they actually feel like they can hit. If we haven't talked to them, it's like that Dilbert cartoon where he goes, "Hey, I've done my part. How long is it going to take to do your part?". We don't know because we haven't talked to him yet. That's the point of this meeting.

The other one is that we need to make sure that our submittals are complete. And then what long leads we might have because if we have a long lead item, we need to get that submittal in now basically. And we all know that, and your project team is probably going to help you through that process anyway because it's so important that long leads get taken care of early. But a lot of times with long lead items, we can go to the manufacturer for let's say, our heat pumps or something like that, and we can get those cut sheets early and get them into the model before the submittal is necessarily approved. We just need to make that decision.

Then with RFIs, chances are, during the bidding process, they've already submitted some RFIs, but did they get RFI responses that were complete? I always hate it when they only answer 70% of the question, or you ask two questions, and they only answer one. Sometimes it happens, though. We just need to make sure that anything that needs to be submitted is already into the system. RFIs are our enemy during the BIM coordination process, and I'm sure most of you are already aware of that.

So next introduction here.

[VIDEO PLAYBACK]

[MUSIC PLAYING]

- I desperately need to take this training.

- We can't spare you. Send Wally and have him tell you what he learned.

- I'm awed by the shear artistry of your mismanagement skills.

- Thank you.

[BELL RINGING]

[END PLAYBACK]

NICK DYER: Yeah, so the whole thing is that with the kickoff meeting, you need to get people there in person, and you need to have everyone, the more, the merrier. I hate it when the subcontractors will bring to the meeting, and they will bring their project manager, and that's it. And it's like, dude, it's a BIM coordination kickoff. We need your modeler, and we need your foreman. Those are your guys that are probably we're going to be talking to more often than the project manager for the trade.

So we need those people, and we need them in person. Another reason for having them in person is that a lot of times, we do the telecommunicating where it's Go To Meeting, or Zoom, or one of those other services. And so we need to make sure that people see each other face to face because we're going to clash, we're going to have conflict. And the thing is, is that you're more willing to say mean things to somebody you don't know than to people you do know. So by having that, you tend to have a more civil conflict resolution process.

So again, we have an agenda. We have our proposed schedule, our submittals, and our RFIs. Now this is it in addition to whatever else you might have on your agenda for your BIM kickoff meeting. But we're going to hit these big three again.

Here, since we've talked to everyone, no one should be surprised by the coordination schedule at this point. Everyone should be on board with the durations, dates. We know where we're headed. It's just a reiteration of what's going on.

Then here, we are going to look at what's complete, what's our long lead items with submittals, what's important because sometimes, what'll happen is is that something that's not necessarily important to the sheet metal guy is really important to the electrician. And it might be the sheet metal guy's submittal that they need to get pushed through. So we need to make sure that submittals are getting pushed, and that we've got the right priorities.

And then again, we need to hit on RFIs. In this case, we're going to talk about open RFIs because, at this stage, we should have gotten all of the answers back. But if we have any open ones, we want to make sure to talk about them, especially since what happens is the domino effect.

I just had a problem on my current project that I'm working on where we moved some duct, the duct moved steel. Luckily, it was steel that was just field welded into place, a couple of brace angles and that kind of thing. It was really easy to move, but because of that duct move, it affected the steel. And the steel contractor wouldn't have known about it if we had not talked about it in the coordination meeting because our structural guy did not issue new drawings for the steel change, because it was a duct change. So it happens.

Then we have the coordination meeting. Now the coordination meeting, in addition to clashes and however else you do your coordination meetings, isn't really important, but I do these things first. We talk about schedule. We talk about where we are. Here's where we're at today. We should be working on shop drawings for level two. We're in the middle of coordination on the penthouse, and we should have been fabbing all of our stuff for level one.

You had a lot of activities going on at that point. You need to make sure that everyone's aware of what activities should be going on. And if there's some kind of roadblock, this is the time to talk about it.

Again, we're going to hit on submittals. But it's this never ending train of submitters at this point. And the same thing goes for RFIs, so--

[VIDEO PLAYBACK]

[MUSIC PLAYING]

- My project has no progress and no hope for progress. I scheduled a meeting so I can fantasize that it will produce a breakthrough. I recommend that we have a meeting next week so you can fantasize that you'll coach me to higher levels of performance.

- Sounds good.

[BELL RINGING]

[END PLAYBACK]

NICK DYER: So meetings are actually important. If they're not going to be productive, don't have them because then it's just a fantasy. So we do need to hit on these things in order to be able to hold our stakeholders accountable. So we have, I promise, one last video to introduce assumptions here when it comes to transparency.

[VIDEO PLAYBACK]

[MUSIC PLAYING]

- I need help making unrealistic assumptions to support a business case for a bad idea.

- Easy. There's a hole in the back of our wardrobe closet that leads to a magical world of preposterous business assumptions.

- We don't have a wardrobe closet.

- Assume we do.

[BELL RINGING]

[END PLAYBACK]

NICK DYER: OK, so assumptions, you know the old saying they make an ass out of you and me? So the reason for that is that if we start assuming that everyone is trucking along, and that they're doing what they've been told to do, and we aren't verifying that people are doing that and holding them accountable, it turns into a giant assumption. We're going to assume that they knew what to do. We're going to assume that they're on track. We need to have that check.

So accountability and transparency, they start to sound like the same thing, and the reason is is that they are very interconnected with each other. Now with this, because we've had a schedule, because the trades have had input on that schedule, we can ensure that they know what the schedule is. But we review it in every single meeting because it's really important to note that they're on track. We need to double check and just make sure that everything is going well.

When it comes to transparency, because we've reviewed the schedule again in every single meeting, everyone knows where everyone should be. No one is questioning why if we have phase work, for instance. No one's questioning why fire protection hasn't uploaded their model yet. They know that, in the schedule, that they might not be uploading that until a week after we've started coordination.

We might be phasing in the work if that's the case or something around that. And then I always hate it when the coordination meeting is brought to a halt because the duct guy is curious because there's a whole bunch of clashes in there that's not even his scope, not even something that he should be paying attention to, but there's a whole bunch of clashes assigned to the electrician that haven't been cleared up. And it's because the electrician is on a different schedule than our duct guy.

It happens when we phase the work like that. And having a schedule brings forth that transparency so we know where each other are. It also lets people know that, at a certain stage, if we've signed off duct, they're not going to move. We need to move around them. And the cycle continues

And then we have the example here that you have a subcontractor falling behind for the second week in a row. That subcontractor knows that they're falling behind. We don't assume that they know that they're falling behind. At this point, they know it. And it allows them the opportunity to say, "You know what? We're putting two more guys on it in order to catch ourselves up."

So we're going to talk about incorporating a roadblock or a delay. This seems like a pretty outlandish hypothetical scenario. But I actually have encountered a scenario similar to this where we've placed a bathroom group above an electrical room. Now sometimes this happens, and we install drip pans, and everything's great.

But in this case, our owner came back and said, "Nope, no plumbing over the electrical room period." Now we have a problem because the design team has to either redesign the electrical room, or they need to redesign the bathroom group up above. So this does need to be accounted for, and it needs to be accounted for through a handshake. And the answer to that would be a solid no.

And it needs to be accounted for in meeting minutes. And that is true, but probably should be accounted for in other places. And the answer is that it needs to be accounted for in our schedule. If we don't account for it in the schedule, then we aren't looking at it when we go to our schedule update meetings, and then we've lost our transparency.

So we're going to say that our baseline had gave us 21 days in our schedule. The RFI's response was received on day nine. And then the design team wants 21 days in order to redesign this. And we need another seven days to incorporate it and catch up to where we were in our coordination effort.

Now this doesn't mean that we're not coordinating the building in other spaces, but what it does mean is that this particular area of effect is on hold. So because we don't know what's going to happen, it's not worth our time. It's not responsible to keep moving forward.

So we get our 21 days. We have nine days in the coordination. We add our 21 days of design, and then our seven days for the trades. And we end up with 40 days total.

But we take our 21 day baseline, and we subtract that from the 40 days. And we end up with a 19 day delay. So we've minimized the amount of delay that we're going to experience on this because we're going to assume that this is the only area that's going to be affected by that 19 days. And I know I just said the word assume, but sometimes, we have to.

So we're going to coordinate the other areas. We started off. We're in day nine, so we're well into our coordination process. We're going to coordinate in the other spaces. It's only this area that's been affected that we're going to pause.

And so when we come back after the 21 days from our design team, we have seven days to coordinate this area and get back on track. So we've minimized a 40 day delay down to a 19 day delay. We've cut that in half by leveraging our schedule and continuing to move forward.

All right, so with RFIs, small RFIs that only cause maybe two days of effect, they're probably not going to affect our schedule. In fact, we should just plan on them in our duration. If everything went perfect, we could probably finish buildings a whole lot faster.

But what ends up happening is that you end up with 12 small RFIs that all take two days apiece, and now we're up to 24 days instead of 21 days. So these things have to be accounted for. So even if an RFI is only going to take two days, you need to account for it in your schedule because if you don't, then, all of a sudden, when you're only three days behind, everyone's going, wait a second, you Said you'd be done three days ago. What happened?