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Focusing your investment in Bim
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what you are trying to manage—either personally or for your project team—is this predictability
versus innovation while trying to maintain a level of happiness and morale.
Evolution vs. Revolution
While you’re in the process of trying to manage the amount of change you’re willing to endure,
you also need to consider the rate that change will affect your project teams. Progress and
innovation are iterative and can take several cycles to perfect a technique or workflow. That can
become a real challenge if you’re working on a very large-scale design. The process of change
and creating new methodologies using BIM is an evolution, not a revolution.
Figure 1.14 shows two bicycles. The image on the left is the penny-farthing bicycle taken from
Appleton’s Cyclopaedia of Applied Mechanics of 1892. Although not the first bicycle (which was
invented in 1817 in Paris), it does demonstrate many of the rudimentary and defining features
of what we think of a bicycle today: two wheels, a handlebar, and pedals to supply power. The
image on the right is the 2006 thesis design of Australian University student Gavin Smith. The bike
was designed to assist people with disabilities or those with impaired motor skills in riding a
bike unaided. The basic concept is that the bike would supply its own balance at low speeds,
and the wheels would remain canted. As the bike moves faster and wheel speed increases, the
wheels become vertical and the rider is able to ride at faster speeds while balancing mostly on
his or her own. As the bike slows, the wheels cant back in again, giving the rider the necessary
balance needed at lower speeds. The bike on the right, still possessing all of the distinguish-
ing characteristics of what we define as a bicycle, is an evolution of the bike over many, many
iterations. A similar evolution will occur with your use of BIM—the more often you iterate the
change, the better and more comfortable it will become.
Focusing Your Investment in BIM
One of the common assumptions is that larger firms have a bigger investment than smaller firms
in their capacity to become early adopters, take on new technologies, or innovate. Although
larger firms might have a broader pool of resources, much of the investment is proportionally
the same. We have been fortunate enough to help a number of firms implement Revit over the
years, and each has looked to focus on different capabilities of the software that best express
their individual direction. Although all of these firms have varied in size and individual desire
to take on risk, their investments have all largely been relatively equal. From big firms to small,
with very little variation, the investment ratio consistently equals about 1 percent the size of the
firm. If you consider a 1,000-person firm, that equals about 10 full-time people; however, scale
Figure 1.14
Understanding
replication vs.
innovation
Replication
Innovation
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