The timing of when to engage a surveyor needs to be rethought. Early engagement with both commercial managers and geospatial engineers is key to releasing efficiencies. The first step is to determine what data the project needs throughout its lifecycle.
Engineering surveyors are often called to provide professional services within a very narrow window of requirements by the project stakeholders to meet an immediate need. However, by working with clients, as an appointed consultant, they are best placed to specify, procure and manage geospatial information throughout the planning phase through to operation of an asset. This holistic approach enables clients and appointed parties access to geospatial information at an appropriate level of need in the lifecycle of the project.
The geospatial engineer is a custodian of location data. This kind of data has until now been managed in appointed party silos through the phases of an asset’s lifetime. Geospatial information needs to be managed through a balanced and structured approach throughout each phase. Engaging a geospatial engineer as an appointed consultant is key to unlocking the transformation from individual stakeholders managing and setting their own requirements for geospatial information to a collective plan of project needs embracing specification, collection, added value and handover of geospatial data between stakeholders. This adds value to design integrity and provides as-built information to aid and inform asset management and monitoring.
Survey4BIM’s Survey and the Digital Plan of Works1 can help pinpoint what survey data is essential at what stage of a project and is a useful resource when commissioning and planning geospatial data requirements.
Our focus groups revealed some commercial managers still struggle to see the benefit of information management. One quantity surveyor commented: “The 3D models I’m told to use present a pretty picture but the data behind them is often unusable.” The perception persists that planners and BIM managers provide data they think the commercial team needs without talking to them first. This can lead to mistrust and the contractor’s commercial team commissioning its own data and working on that independently in a silo. To get over this mismatch of presumed usage and actual takeup, a combined data/commercial cost plan is needed. Monitoring integrated cost models, data levels and reports needs to be a key activity on the programme, with all involved responsible for driving it forwards.
Commercial teams have to step up in adopting new work practices that leverage the opportunities from information management. Reliance on traditional trusted, but actually inaccurate, methods has to go or the efficiencies of digitalisation will never be realised. Within a project controls team, this shift is naturally facilitated, but on smaller projects where commercial, planning and design teams sit separately, it is imperative that these teams no longer see each other as stumbling blocks. The commercial management team should be fully engaged and asked at the start what their information requirements are and how they need to see information presented. By integrating commercial, planning, design and BIM specialists – or at the very least, having weekly interdisciplinary meetings – information requirements can be clear from the outset and processes around sharing and management defined.
When data and information deliverables are agreed, they should be recorded in task information delivery plans. These are amalgamated into a master information delivery plan, together with the geospatial project execution plan encompassing the data requirements and the technologies it has been agreed will manage the process. This will provide a foundational framework to maximise data efficiencies.
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1 https://survey4bim.files.wordpress.com/2017/08/survey-and-the-digital-plan-of-works.pdf