Many construction professionals obsess about managing their project information.
Consider an employee who maintains photocopies of every piece of correspondence he sends or receives simply because he doesn’t trust the office filing system. He knows it would be too easy for someone to misfile a memo he’d want to find later. Or, consider an engineer who re-saves every email he sends or receives on a detachable hard drive.
And there’s more than one construction project manager whose information management system involves paper logs that duplicate information stored in his computer and on his company’snetwork. It seems that none of the dozens of software programs they’re using meet their needs.
It’s understandable why people put so much effort into managing their project information. Milestones are met, profitability is achieved and lawsuits are avoided based on how quickly and accurately a person resolves issues and responds to inquiries.
Industry Demands
AEC executives often report information is hard to find, FTP is too much work, and there is no simple way to identify and track changes in drawings. Despite the time spent logging and tracking the flow of information among project team members, information still slips through the cracks.
They also complain about the failings of email: It’s hard to file with other project documents; it’s hard to find; and it’s isolated on the computers of those who receive or send it, even though others may benefit from access to it.
But as frustrated as people can get, they do not want to change their software or their processes. They simply want those elements to function more efficiently and effectively.
That’s where project information man-agement (PIM) software comes into play. PIM is coming to the industry not a moment too soon, considering integrated project delivery (IPD) promises to exponentially raise the volume of information to be managed. IPD involves more team members in every phase of a project, which means more emails, more file transfers, more everything.
PIM at Work
Grunley Construction, a 250-person, full-service general contractor based in Rockville, Md., has renovated and modernized more than 4.8 million gross square feet of building space in the Washington, D.C., area in the last decade, with nearly 90 percent of the work occurring in occupied buildings.
The logistical complexity of these projects has driven Grunley to adopt building information modeling (BIM) software to improve coordination between design and construction, and to adopt PIM software to manage the flow of information and communications relating to the model— information such as project email, action items, markup sessions and transmittals.
For Grunley Vice President and General Manager Greg Druga, a driving factor behind the decision to implement PIM software is its ability to solve one of the industry’s biggest headaches: project-related email.
“IPD requires effective communication among project team members, which means we have to solve the problem of vital project information that gets lost or hidden in individual email inboxes,” Druga says. “The solution acknowledges the near-universal use of Outlook for project communication while putting the information back where it belongs—in the hands of the entire project team and senior management.”
Benefits of PIM software include:
- preventing time wasted trying to locate critical project information, which by some estimates is 20 percent of total staff time;
- shifting the focus of upper-level staff away from low-value information management tasks;
- recapturing administrative hours for billable activities;
- making it easier to reuse project information;
- accelerating the orientation and assimilation of new team members on projects;
- giving senior management more visibility into project issues;
- finding any project document immediately, even with no previous project involvement;
- preventing project knowledge from being lost when employees leave the firm;
- augmenting manual quality control efforts with computer-assisted change detection;
- preserving an accurate audit trail of all issues and transmittals;
- ensuring information the firm disseminates can be reviewed for unintended omissions or changes; and
- ensuring accurate and complete archives can be easily assembled and searched.
PIM addresses the basic needs of organizing, finding, tracking, sharing, monitoring and reusing technical project information and communications in a way that is completely aligned with the people and processes that depend on that information.
![]()
Friday, September 3, 2010