Information usefulness versus information overload

“Communication is key” is a catchphrase used by everyone from general contractors to professional basketball coaches to marriage counselors. The goal of communication is to let all stakeholders know what’s happening: where the members of your team are, who has available bandwidth and what the forecast for success is. But there is also a danger of overcommunicating: flooding the pipeline with too much information, or worse, overwhelming people with useless information. (Ask any marriage counselor about a partner who “overshares.”)

In the construction industry, “information overload” can be a significant problem to overcome. With a mass of information available to people up and down the workflow – from manpower to inventory to deliverables to even weather – impacting the project, a key bit of information can be overlooked or lost in a flood of data flowing back and forth among the job site, the specialty contractors, the general contractor, the office, the architect, and the engineers.

This makes it all the more critical to not only get access to information, but get access to the information you need when working on a project. The goal of a successful building information modeling (BIM) platform like Revit is to not just get you access to all the information available; it’s to get you the information you need to know when you need to know it and in a form that’s useful to you.

Undoubtedly, the availability of information is important. The ability to drill down into a design, model or spec to get a specific data point is invaluable, so collecting all the data is necessary, because you don’t know what someone’s going to need to check at any moment. Not all information is needed in that fashion, nor can important information be identified in such a manner.

Information management promotes the idea of getting information to you in a timely, useable manner. Having the information you need to know right now is important, but so is developing a process to give you the information you need to know for tomorrow or for next week. A good platform will also alert you to new information that you need to pay attention to immediately, which can influence how you prioritize what you need to look at now.

Scheduling reports and alerts within your MEP construction workflow will not only save you time, it will help you better manage the project and deal with issues that arise as the build moves forward.