It should come as no surprise that we at Tocci love colocation. We’re sure you do too, but in case you’re still on the fence, here’s what’s going on in the “colo room” for one of our projects.

The full team (architect, engineers, CM and subcontractors) are colocating close to full-time (Monday – Thursday) to collectively produce a CD deadline. (Most impressive – it is under a traditional contract, no fancy IPD). Here’s how it works:

• the team has a shared “hot items list” and prioritizes issue resolution in daily huddles
• multi-disciplinary groups form organically to answer questions and resolve issues as they come up
• models are developed and exchanged each day, so that everyone (designers and subcontractors alike) have up-to-the-minute information

And the benefits:

• Reduction of design schedule, ~7 months from no design to 100% CDs and shop drawings as compared to 18 months for 100% CDs only on a similar project, that excluded subcontractor/contractor colocation
• Construction documents and shop drawings are one and the same, reducing duplication of both production and coordination efforts
• Transparent flow of information and communication which ultimately creates a sense of mutual ownership and responsibility for the success of the project as a whole.
• RFIs are eliminated: questions are answered immediately, issues are resolved in minutes and hours rather than weeks

Ultimately, the colo process also greatly reduces or hopefully eliminates any need for future change orders from items that would tend to fall through the cracks in a traditional delivery process.

Moises doning his cape at the Rodino jobsite. (It’s actually for the project team exceeding weight lifting goals during their daily 6:30am workout regiment, but we like to believe it doubles for superhero coordination and building efforts as well.)

NVDIA newest technology – Maximus – seems to fall in line with how the industry is in “streamline” mode. Whether it be lean construction methods, IPD, or similar, the trend in the AEC industry has a recognizable impetus to make processes more vertical. For technology’s sake, there seems to be no better time to introduce hardware that is aligned with those same goals. As NVDIA’s site presents, the traditional workflow is to design/create, then send off for rendering/processing. This method typically puts the traditional workstation in resource lockdown mode, making tasks as simple as checking your email a catastrophe.

The new Maximus workstation is a veritable nuclear power station of resources. They’ve introduced a technological tango of processing power and through-the-roof GPU acceleration to assist in handling a myriad of resource-intensive tasks simultaneously. This means being able to achieve complex simulations responding to geometry changes in real time. The stats may not yet be available, but I’d be willing to bet that one could clash-detect the WTC projects in a matter of minutes? Probably far-fetched, but still, the specs in this setup are hard to not see as an appealing addition to your next project (assuming the price isn’t terribly cost prohibitive).

Read more here.

Connecting the two sounds like a stretch, right? Taking down the kingpin in a global terrorist operation and keeping your building on budget / on schedule don’t even appear to be living in the same timezone – much less the same ballpark. However, you might be surprised to see what lessons can be learned about executing on your next mission project via the team that ended a 10 year journey to find the world’s most wanted man.

Plan Backward from the Goal

When it came to verify bin Laden’s identity, though, the team came up lacking. They had to find a SEAL member who was six feet tall, and have him lay down next to bin Laden’s corpse (estimated at between 6-feet 4-inches and 6-feet 6-inches) for verification. A battle-hardened SEAL likely wasn’t traumatized by this makeshift measuring. But mentally moving backwards from the moment of victory might have kept that handy item on the checklist.

Then again, it would have denied President Obama his reported zinger: “We donated a $60 million helicopter to this operation. Could we not afford to buy a tape measure?”

Disprove Your Own Theories

Osama bin Laden died on May 2, 2011. By August 2010, however, C.I.A. officials had pinpointed the likely residence of bin Laden’s courier, and had observed in the compound a very tall man who hardly ever left his third-floor lodgings, and who absolutely never left the walled compound, where the trash was burned rather than taken out. Intelligence officials and Obama’s advisers ranged in their confidence, stating their beliefs at between 40 and 95% sure that the world’s most wanted man was right where they thought he was.

But the President’s advisers instead began an “interrogation of the data, to see if, by that interrogation, (one could) disprove the theory that bin Laden was there,” John Brennan, Obama’s counterterrorism adviser, told The New Yorker’s Nicholas Schmidle. In other words, as you’re racing toward a conclusion, one with a very satisfying return, find a way to summon up your own inner skeptic, or find someone who can play the role, and try to use your own facts to come to a different conclusion.

Every Team Member Must Know the Mission

The man who planned the special-operations raid in Abbottabad, Vice Admiral William H. McRaven, wrote a book on planning special-operations raids: Spec Ops: Case Studies in Special Operations Warfare: Theory and Practice. So it was only natural that someone–in this case, three sharp writers at Popular Mechanics, would compare the playbook to how a major raid played out. And it’s telling what factors an experience planner considers important in a crucial, fast-moving mission.

Multifaceted plans and the element of surprise? Not so great. Complex plans create “an overabundance of security (which) hinders effective preparation,” and surprising an enemy isn’t much help if you cut corners enough so that you’re “ill-equipped to fight.” More helpful, McRaney suggests, is that “in the heat of battle, no matter what else happens, the individual soldier understands the primary objective.” McRaven also noted that anything that wasn’t rehearsed before a mission invariably failed, but you already know that from, say, almost any big software launch you can remember.

Know Your Most Important Question, and Who Can Answer It

Before anyone could actually assault the spot where bin Laden lived, it took 10 years to find that spot. Alliances and support of Afghan and Pakistani forces, elaborate bombing and drone surveillance coverage, and other standard tactics had yielded close misses, but bin Laden and al-Qaeda were eerily good at communicating orders, maintaining secrecy, and filling vacancies, even when the leaders seemed to be cut off. So the question moved from “Where is bin Laden?” to “How does he communicate?”

At the same time, the tactics moved from sending waves of troops into disparate locations–which looked like a more serious effort–to a less exciting small group of experts back home, immersing themselves in books and transcripts. As one intelligence official told theWashington Post, “Lots of people who knew little was almost certain to be less efficacious than a small, dedicated cadre of people with experience working the problem.”

Reading bin Laden’s son quoted in a book on his father’s preference to stay in populated areas to avoid U.S. bombing tied in with vague mentions of a courier in intelligence reports and interrogation transcripts. Those eventually came together in a specific person, and meticulous checking and re-checking gave the best possible chance of finding bin Laden. And the rest is well-planned history.

Article originally appeared on Fast Company

Librado Romero/The New York Times

Green costs green; everyone knows it. Energy efficiency = $$$ upfront. Therefore, environmentally friendly aspects of many projects become the first targets on the VE list down the road.  This apprehension isn’t without warrant. Paying it forward with these projects can leave many wary, not knowing the return with much certainty. There are many speculations and little hard research into the rewards to be reaped when being sustainably proactive. Recently, a non-profit out of Germany aimed to move past all the conjecture and attempt to uncover some tangible benefits of even the most modest of energy-reducing retrofits.

A snapshot of their findings among the 19,000 retrofitted affordable housing units in New York City:

• 19% savings in fuel bills and 10% savings of electricity.
• This translates to and average of $240/yr. savings in gas and $70/yr. savings in electricity.
• Terrific Tenements’ 88 unit building installed new boilers and heating controls for a savings of $551/yr. per apartment.
• Terrific Tenements’ sister building saved an average of $355 annually per unit using similar methods.

The retrofits at the Terrific Tenements “was not achieved with any particularly exotic technologies” like solar panels or a green roof, Mr. Zuluaga said. Rather, this is the simple story “of how an owner took the worst-performing building type in the city and turned it into one of the best-performing buildings in the entire city.”

You can read on to the full story at the New York Times.