The jobsite trailer, the construction site office, has now become more like an
air traffic control centre - it's where people are making sure
that information in the cloud and digitally is being provided to the right
people, at the right time, when they need it. People used to have to physically go
into the job trailer to get their drawings or go to the drawing rack or
something like that, whereas now it's all in the cloud. There is a tonne of
coordination going on - there's things coming in front from every
direction. They're managing the logistics of all those deliveries, they're
organising information so that it can be absorbed and
you know processed by the people on site. That environment used to be
physical and these days it's creating that virtual environment, that virtual
experience where people can find the information they're looking for.
There was a risk when you had to travel some sort of physical distance away from the
job trailer, you maybe were there for the day. Sometimes the the pace of change on
some of these big projects where information is changing very quickly or
things get updated adapt to that that wouldn't feed through to people in
locations that were physically distant from the job trailer - whereas now it's
instant. When stuff gets uploaded or changed everyone's got the right information,
in the right place, at the right time.
That's always been one of the most challenging you know pieces in our
industry is making sure that everyone is working off of the same information and
we used to physically spend time going and checking on people and making sure
that they were you know on the latest version, that they were building off of
the properly dated drawing and there's even a time when we printed
those on different colored you know sheets of paper so that you could you
could spot the pink paper from across the jobsite - but these days you have
systems that can track you know who's opening the documents, who's read them,
who's added you know their comments and that allows you to
really understand you know who's interacting with the data that you're
distributing and sending out to the project.
Within the last you know a few years you know things like drone imagery,
360 imagery, site video cameras they're all giving us that
better sense of what's going on on the project and these days it's it is more
important than ever to be able to to communicate with the owner about what's
happening you know on their project to catch errors you know before they become
you know larger problems. I remember in the past working with with an owner out
of New York and they were able to walk the job site virtually every week
with 360 imagery and they pointed out one of the walls that was was
painted the wrong color - a really simple easy mistake and very quick to
fix but if we had waited for them to come in town, all the time that
would have transpired, that time is so crucial to our project teams to
shorten that gap.
What all of this hangs upon is is good IT systems and infrastructure so whether
actually on the physical jobsite, good mobile based networks,
or now with people working from offices in
different parts of world and working from home, people's
local bandwidth matters. IT has become an ever more important part of
our industry's toolkit. Bandwidth and connectivity has really
become that crucial linchpin to all of the operations you know for a
construction company you know I've also often said how as
technology becomes a bigger and more important part of the operations of an
AEC firm, it's more important than ever that they have you know people and staff
that know how to you know manipulate and leverage that technology to enable
their their workforce to get their job done.
I guess one of the other big changes has come about really with the pandemic and
with the lockdowns and the restrictions on people's movement and the introduction
of social distancing, is that lack of physical interaction so you know a lot
of the industry runs on face to face interaction on conversations, on
people debating things, discussing things, arguing about things in some instances.
It's almost like digital collaboration it hasits
benefits, it helps massively in terms of efficiency,
you know avoiding rework, helping find the right information at the right time but
ultimately it's not about replacing teams or placing people it's
just about better enabling those people to do their jobs more effectively,
more efficiently, and in a more collaborative manner utlimately. I very
much think that human interaction, that ability to bounce ideas
and thoughts off of one another, is really crucial you know to the work that
we do you know in our industry. The bar for technology and digital
adoption doesn't have to be so high. This doesn't necessarily have to be expensive
or complicated, I think the beauty of tools like Bluebeam and other
platforms like it - is it's incredibly intuitive
to use and it is at a level that actually seeks to democratise
information and democratise technology to the whole of the industry - it's not
ultra complicated and expensive design-authoring software that you have to have
hours of training to use, it can literally be picked up on a tablet, on a
smartphone, wherever you are on the world and you can get going
straightaway.