Discussion Papers
Half of all construction projects fail, in the sense that they over-run either their contract
budgets or their agreed schedules, or in most cases, both of these.
A quarter of all projects overshoot their targets by 10% or more.
Stop and consider that
fact for a moment. You, as a client, consultant, project manager or
contractor have, at the outset, no more than a 50/50 chance of
completing your next project on time or on budget. As for finishing
both on time and on budget, well forget it, the odds are simply
stacked too heavily against you.
This astonishing level of
unpredictability is surely the defining feature of construction in
this country. It leads often to catastrophic consequences for firms
and individuals in the industry. It contributes significantly to the
subsistence nature of the construction economy, to the persistently
low levels of profitability of the industry and its utter lack of
appeal to outside investors.
Despite the wonderful
architectural and technical success of the vast majority of
projects, the industry's pathological failure to complete things on
time and to budget undermines everything, engendering fear and
trepidation in the minds of would-be customers, rendering them
hesitant and suspicious in their dealings with us. Ultimately and
most damningly, it discourages talented young people from pursuing
what most people in construction know is otherwise one of the most
stimulating and rewarding career options available.
There have been
innumerable official and academic studies of construction and its
ailments. The latest and probably most influential are the various
Latham and Egan reports. The Latham / Egan critique attributes the
industry's poor project delivery record mainly to dysfunctional
individual and corporate behaviour patterns that are perceived as
being endemic, somehow inherent in the industry. The view seems to
be that adversarial attitudes and confrontational relations in the
industry are the main cause of project failures. They suggest that,
if only project people could learn to collaborate, to behave more in
a spirit of teamwork, then project failures could be avoided and the
industry would become more harmonious and more profitable; an
altogether better place to do business.
This analysis
confuses cause and effect. Projects don't fail because people are
confrontational; people are confrontational because so many projects
fail.
Construction projects are
inherently complicated, risk-laden enterprises that are very close
to the limits of our ability to manage effectively. Every individual
project has the potential to destroy careers and businesses. The
apparently dysfunctional behaviour castigated by Latham / Egan
et al is in fact the
entirely rational response of intelligent firms and individuals to
hugely threatening levels of uncertainty and un-predictability in
their environment. To exhort construction people to behave in a
collaborative, un-confrontational manner without first resolving the
underlying reasons for that behaviour is likely not only to fail,
but actually to make matters worse as the expectations raised by
such initiatives are frustrated.
One of the greatest
challenges that faces a construction project team is that of
managing and making sense of the huge volumes of rapidly changing
information generated by modern projects. The basis of most of this information is the design
documentation produced by architects and consulting engineers, and
also by specialist suppliers and contractors. The key feature of
this information is that it is more or less entirely unstructured,
ambiguous, un-computable material, generally requiring considerable
levels of skill to interpret and understand.
Errors of
misinterpretation and misunderstanding of this information give rise
to many of the problems encountered on today's projects. They also
contribute significantly to the cost and schedule over-runs which
characterise the industry's performance.
Recent developments in
the use of more advanced computerised design tools offer the
possibility of overcoming some of these problems. These tools
support an approach to architectural design called Building
Information Modelling (BIM). The key feature of BIM tools is that
they use explicit, unambiguous, three dimensional representations of
real world building components to generate very vivid, precisely
accurate 3D models of buildings.
3D CAD modelling has
of course been available for some time. The special thing about the
BIM approach is that, in addition to basic geometry, it enables a
wide variety of other types of information to be attached to the
model components in such a way as to generate an "intelligent"
representation of the overall building. In this way the model
provides a framework which enables the information about the
building to be managed in a much more systematic manner than has
been possible previously. Essentially, it reduces the level of human
judgement and interpretative skill required to manage project
information. Logically, it will also reduce the likelihood of errors
and misjudgements and thus, ultimately, the likelihood of cost and
schedule over-runs.
The purpose of the
extended discussion paper "Transforming Construction?" is to
consider how this new approach might evolve over the next five to
ten years. BIM will impact on all three of the major project phases:
design, procurement and construction, so its impact in each of these
areas is addressed.
Ultimately however, the
crucial contribution that BIM makes is to provide an analytical,
computational framework for the management of construction data.
This will enable firms to harvest construction data in just the same
sort of way that retailers use Electronic Point of Sale (EPOS)
systems to harvest sales and stock data in their stores. Of all the
benefits that BIM has to offer, this is the real game changer. One
has only to think back twenty or so years to see how EPOS has
transformed the retail sector. The penultimate section of the paper
therefore considers briefly the analogy between BIM in construction
and EPOS in retail.
The final section of the
paper considers some of the obstacles that might arise to obstruct
the evolution of the BIM approach, how these might be overcome, and
how the industry will be shaped in twenty years from now. Who will
be construction's Wal-Mart or Tesco and what will happen to the
others?