Letter from the President - December 2015
Collaboration
I was sitting in a meeting about collaboration recently. An interesting premisewas brought up early in the meeting. The presenter put two words up on the screen with their definitions. The presenter mentioned that these two words are often used interchangeably when they really are not interchangeable.
Coordination: The process of causing things to be the same or to go together well.
Collaboration: To work with another person or group in order to achieve or do something. I feel that the presenter “cherry picked” the definition for coordination, because there is another definition: “the process of organizing people or groups so that they work together properly and well...” which is similar to the definition for collaboration. But there is an interesting point here about the definitions chosen.
Coordination can be about physical things, whereas collaboration is only about people. This can be taken a bit further. You could have a project with separate models for each discipline that are coordinated in the absence of a collaborative environment. Think of it as lobbing models across the silos until they are coordinated.
I wouldn’t want to work on such a project. I’m guessing you wouldn’t either. How do you feel about collaboration, especially as it relates to a BIM project? Do you feel that people tend to think the model can take the place of communication person-to-person? I feel that collaboration means what the definition above describes. It is about working with another person or group.
How does this relate to a BIM project? Just because you have a project with a model does not mean that you can forgo communication. Yes, I’m sure you have heard this before. Yet I have seen, amongst some project teams, a disheartening trend to discount communication (it’s just another BIM project).
We learn from every project we do, do we not? Why wouldn’t you take the lessons learned on the prior project and communicate any improvements on the process or procedures? The written word is still one of the best ways to keep a record of the decisions made. This means that a BIM Execution Plan or BIM FAQ will help your projects.
But collaboration is more than just sending out the written word. Communication needs to include talking to one another, sometimes even face-to-face. Don’t be reticent about picking up the phone to ask the author of another model for the project to correct an issue in their model. I certainly want someone with an issue with one of our models to contact us about it!
I will leave you with this blended definition: Work (communicate) with the other person to achieve (collaborate) a well-designed building (coordination)
