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What is BIM? “Building Information Modeling”

According to Wikipedia, “Bim is a 1974 Trinidad and Tobago film written by Raoul Pantin and directed by Hugh A. Robertson.” According to John Green, author of Paper Towns, Wikipedia is Omnictionary.  However, neither of these pseudo-facts gets us any closer to the subject of this blog posting. Building Information Modeling (BIM) is most commonly

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The Upside of Risk

When most people think about risk assessments or risk management: they think only of avoiding potential risks.  Sometimes, risk can also mean issues or problems.  But risk management has another important component: opportunity.  A thorough risk assessment will evaluate potential opportunities that can be exploited along with risks which can be avoided. Dr David Hillson

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Netpoint & Napa River Salt Marsh Restoration

The Napa River Salt Marsh Restoration project is a pretty big endeavor.  We’re moving a whole lot of dirt.  It’s a complex project with many details that cannot be overlooked.  For instance, there is an endangered bird that nests in that area, so you can’t do any work within 500 feet of its nesting and

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NetPoint User Conference in New Orleans

The Third Annual PMA User Conference is being held in the wonderful city of New Orleans on Friday, January 25th.  And on Saturday the 26th, at the Conference Center at the Sheraton Hotel in New Orleans, Dr. Gui Ponce de Leon is going to be presenting, free of charge, a newly envisioned 20-point protocol.  This

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The Importance of Risk Assessment

For mega-construction projects, organizations usually borrow money – because, of course, most organizations don’t have a few billion dollars sitting around.  If you’re going to borrow money, it’s important to know how much money you will need to borrow and when you’ll need to borrow it. Project management in the construction industry creates plans in

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The Ubiquity of Risk

Risk management is a broad term, the application of which can vary in the extreme depending on the field in question.  For instance, many of the tales told about the 2008 financial disaster reference disenfranchised or disemboweled risk departments within organizations such as AIG and Merrill Lynch. The field of international relations has its own

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“Man Plans, God Laughs”

Planning and risk mitigation improves project performance. The boom arm of a mobile crane is supported across the three tracks of the Metra’s Burlington Northern Santa Fe tracks near the Westmont station just west of Cass Avenue, after the unit it was on tipped over, disrupting commuter service to the western suburbs. The crane was

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BIM = Building Information Modeling & NetPoint Communicating new ideas made easy

Pat Weaver has an excellent-as-usual piece on the emergence and role of Building Information Modelling (BIM).  The key feature of BIM is that it does 4D modeling of schedules (the fourth dimension is time).  An image of the project is rendered in 3D, while the schedule is rendered in more traditional form (like a Gantt

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Great Words about NetPoint from the Massachusetts Gaming Commission!

“What this tool does most helpfully is allow…people to get together and actually talk about the consequences of doing one thing or another and having those consequences appear in real time.”  “…you can tell instantly the effect of extending a deadline for three weeks or missing a deadline by two weeks or advancing a deadline

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Getting by the “Tripping Point!”

I recently read a post on Techrepublic that told a story about a manager who was working on a project using the Critical Path Method. The manager expressed frustration about the impact the holiday season was having on the schedule.  She thought that a solution would be to add some of of the not so

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