It’s a common misconception that you need a perfect, Kumbaya-style IPD project with all parties using issue tracking software to take advantage of the benefits.
Are you emailing your colleagues screenshots that remind you of your high school French teacher with an abnormal fondness for red pens? Then you and your project will definitely benefit from using issue tracking software internally.
Figure 1.0 - Annotations in Revit with BIM Track
Why does BIM Track make sense for internal use?
1. You still have internal quality control deadlines for your models
At the end of the day, your models need to be of a certain quality before sharing with other teams on the project.
Even if you are a team of 2, using confusing email chains with screenshots like the above buried in emails, and taking 2 minutes to find each issue in your models is not a smart way of working. Why not have clear assignees, status, priorities, due dates and be able to see your issue in the models context instantly? If you’re a larger team, you can even have approval limitations for supervisors, ensuring only they can mark an issue as closed to keep your standards high.
Also, let’s be honest: it’s nice to not have to leave your modeling environment to see, raise, comment on, and resolve your issues. Stay in Revit. Stay in Navisworks. Stay in Tekla Structures. Or to put it more plainly: email stinks. Amberg Engineering reduced email by over 60% just by using BIM Track internally.
2. The challenges interdisciplinary teams face are also there internally:
- Even small teams are often not working in the same offices. Technology is there to help us share the workload and get things done more easily.
- On the flipside, tech can be disruptive and not easy to trace. Instead of being poked in 5 places (Slack, emails, dedicated app etc.) with issue history everywhere, BIM Track gives you one place to check, and that can still be directly in your usual modeling / clash detection environment to avoid app fatigue. Notifications can be tailored to each user’s profile to cut out the extra noise in our mad digital construction world.
- Need a notion of accountability of the team to managers. Everyone works better deadlines.
- Managers need to be able to see the workload and redistribute as needed to make sure internal deadlines will be met.
- PMs won’t all be BIM guys; BIM Track gives them access to all issue details and models context without having to use the authoring software.
But I really wanted the external teams on my project using the same issue tracking software
While it is something special to see issue tracking software used seamlessly across project teams, there are some great benefits to starting off by using it for your internal models quality control communications:
1. Walk before you run
Using BIM Track internally gives you a chance to you can master issue communications on a small team first. This means when you are able to launch issue tracking across external team, you’ll have the basic down pat.
2. It spreads like wildfire
We can guarantee that when you use BIM Track internally, other teams will see the simplicity and want to get on board. We hear this story time and time again from our clients.
Just try it
If you’re thinking about maybe using issue tracking internally, my best advice is just get in there and start playing. You have 50 free issues to start off with; more than enough to see what kind of value you can get from efficient issue tracking.
Happy coordination,