Overview
Simon was part of the management team at Torsion Care during this period, playing a key role in the development of the in-house design department and aligning architectural delivery with the contractor's requirements. That work was not a single building project but a programme of practice improvement: how information is planned, produced and coordinated across a design team.
Two strands of that work are set out below. The first is a more integrated approach to delivery planning. The second is the establishment of Revit workflows and cloud-based model collaboration to support the in-house design capability.
The Problem
Design deliverables, contractor requirements, programme and available resources can easily exist as separate sets of information.
When they are held separately, the relationship between them is difficult to see. A drawing is required by a certain date, the programme shows when it is expected, and the team has a view of who is available — but nothing brings those together into a single working picture of what has to be produced and whether there is the capacity to produce it.
The Approach
Simon developed a more integrated delivery-planning process linking the drawing register, information requirements, TIDP, programme, drawing-level time allowances and team resources.
The delivery planner linked the drawing register to the contractor's Information Release Schedule (IRS), preserved drawing references and generated an aligned Task Information Delivery Plan (TIDP). It also integrated Gantt programming, drawing-level time allowances and resource availability. The planner was configured, presented and issued to the contractor at the start of Stage 4.
Removing Practical Obstacles to Delivery
Running alongside the delivery planning, Simon established the technical working environment the in-house design team depended on. The emphasis was on removing day-to-day obstacles so the team could concentrate on the information being produced rather than on the software.
Recurring Revit crashes and performance problems were diagnosed and resolved through systematic testing of software updates, graphics drivers, server issues and model health. Simon proposed cloud model hosting, secured the directors' agreement and implemented Forma Design Collaboration (formerly BIM Collaborate Pro) across the team.
The wider work on standards covered drawing standards, Revit templates, ISO 19650 aligned processes, quality checks and staff mentoring.
Why It Matters
The intention was to create a clearer working view of what needed to be produced, when information was required and whether the design team had sufficient capacity to deliver it.
The same principle applies to the technical environment: stabilising Revit performance and moving models to a cloud-hosted collaboration platform removes some of the practical obstacles to coordinated working, and allows the team to spend its time on the information itself.