Everyone has their own traditions, their own way to do things, whether it’s your early morning routine before work or the one family member who always cuts the ham on Christmas Day. But sometimes when something unexpected happens and your traditional way of doing something is forced to change, things can become a bit chaotic and inertia can start to set in, even when the changes are for the better.
This week’s lecture was titled ‘Constructing the Future’ and was presented by Michael Harkes on Hyway, which is an in-house collaboration for Hansen Yuncken and an information management platform. The implementation of this revolutionary platform will effectively usher in an innovative new era, where project management and effective communication will ultimately change.
There’s that word again, change, which often subconsciously scares us, where humans are made to naturally resist change. It’s true, google it if you don’t believe me. But to move forward, change is inevitable. And with HYway it’s hard not to see the benefits. It’s purposely designed to integrate disparate systems, in order to produce an intelligent report on all levels of the subject company. Which, results in an enhanced visual representation, enabling Hansen Yuncken, along with their partners and clients to better understand individual partners and their business as a whole, and consequently all levels of the business become more efficient.
But Hansen Yuncken hasn’t stopped there; they have also followed other innovative businesses by adopting BIM across their whole business. However, this meant Hansen Yuncken had to tackle the tough challenge of changing 600 people to a new way of doing something, and this was obviously no easy task.
It meant changing the way people traditionally knew how do to things, and was difficult for those that had implemented the traditional systems, which had worked so well and where they were in the limelight. But Hansen Yuncken had no choice but to change to BIM, otherwise they would risk foregoing a lot of potential customers. So traditional processes have now changed to innovative processes, where BIM is applied across the enterprise to harness its true potential. And as forecasted it didn’t take long for the traditional lovers to soon see the benefits and efficiency, even though 70% of the benefits BIM provides isn’t derived until after it’s used.
Take the new Royal Adelaide Hospital for example; this $1.8 billion PPP project adopted the latest technologies allowing all those involved to work more efficiently, smarter and faster through improved collaboration across the supply-chain. A similar result has been seen in the School Stimulus Package, where there was the transition from spreadsheets to databases, which meant those early morning meetings on site were redirected to the warmth of the boardroom in order to resolve issues.
But by now you’ve heard me talk about all these companies being innovative and using BIM, which may diminish the significance of one using BIM. But if it’s so useful and the benefits are infinite as such then how come we haven’t followed the UK’s footsteps to make it mandatory? Well I guess it’s a lot easier then it sounds, but it may be too premature to mandate it when it’s still relatively new. It could end up a big chaotic mess where the whole industry has to be taught how to use BIM, and with so little professionals who actually know how to use BIM, it may result in a long and costly process. Apart from this, the key challenge recognized by the Australian Institute of Architects stopping Australia from making the change is the lack of a documentation framework to underpin contracts where BIM is used. So for now we will sit tight and watch the numbers rise for those companies using BIM.
So as the department stores roll out the Christmas Trees and it slowly leads up to Christmas, the excitement builds up, and the word tradition becomes an important role in most of our Christmas holidays. But as much as we love our traditions sometimes the best things come from times when they are untraditional and unconventional, like the year the BBQ set on fire.
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