Two Posts in the Same Day!?

I know what you're thinking...here we go two months without a post and now, bam two posts in the same day?! Crazy I know.

Moving on. It seems lately that everyone is in the HAVE TO GET WORK mode lately. And of course this is completely understandable and justifiable. I know we have been cranking out proposals and RFQ's right and left, while still managing all of our other projects. But every now and then I find myself at a point that is very rare...I call it the "Between Things...Thing". (While this is not too technical of a term of course, those who follow this blog or know me, also know that I think too much seriousness takes a lot of the fun out of what we do and doesn't really help in the end.)

Some people call the BTT (Between Things Thing) down time, EBAY time, check your 401k time, write on your blog time, update your LinkedIn profile time or time to visit with coworkers and talk about The Office season finale.

For a BIM Department...the BTT (Between Things Thing) is gaps in time between issuing clash detection reports, coordination emails, 4D updates, model builds, redesigns, RFI's and field coordination reports that can be used to increase your efficiencies to continue to complete this work even faster.

Here's the deal, every week my team and I have a meeting (a Lean meeting of course we have to practice what we preach) and I outline the standard/tutorials that need to be completed in the BTT gaps. These can include everything from BIM Project Startup Checklists to Coursework for our guys in the field to use to BIM specification customization. All of these continue to expand our ever growing standards and reference library.

I have included a sample snippit of a standard we distribute to team members who want to review the model clashes and 4D of a project with Navisworks Freedom here

While this current library of standards is growing into quite an impressive document/book, the intent is to begin using it for:

- New hires - both in the field and in the BIM Division to better acquaint themselves with how to do things the right way and limit "over the shoulder time"

- Executives - to orient themselves with our processes and technology

- Marketing - to stay away from "Hollywood BIM" and make sure we are promising what we can deliver

- Ourselves - believe it or not from time to time we forget things and this has served as an excellent reminder on more than one occasion.