If you want to deliver remarkable work, the quality of meeting specifications is required, but no longer enough.
We all love stories. Great stories are those that resonate with our internal narrative, with the world view of your audience.
The RCMonkeys team had the opportunity to work on a project that required to use laser scanning to monitor the deflection of a roof steel structure during the decentering process. At the same time, our client’s field engineers used traditional surveying methods to monitor the steel in accordance to the roof erection plan. Our goal was not to replace the traditional workflow, but rather to find a creative way to turn an ordinary fail/pass check into a deliverable that would tell a story about the performance of the building under designed load.
The challenge of this project was to generate a deliverable that would meet our audience’s expectations. The result needed to be clear, visual, and interactive. So, we asked ourselves a question: which instrument tells a better story: a total station or a laser scanner?
It is a difficult question to answer. As always, it depends on who is consuming the information, who is your audience. In most cases service providers do not craft a deliverable to tell a clear story to the audience that they serve. The final deliverable is clear in their view; hence it should make sense for everyone else too. The truth is that your customers, most likely, consume information differently that you do. The first step in any project is understanding the target audience.
Let us go back to our monitoring project. Consider two ways of approaching this task:
We check the specification requirements and we set survey markers at each indicated location. We establish the survey control and shoot each marker to establish the baseline measurements. We shoot the markers again after each step of the decentering process. We input all the measurement values in a spreadsheet and calculate how much the steel deflected at each decentering step and check if the values meet specifications. The result is a fail/pass report.
This is the traditional workflow. It produces an outcome that most people are familiar with. It is reliable and simple. The deliverable tells a short and concise story: the steel deflection is either inside or outside the specified tolerance. This approach is totally fine. But what if we can come up with different approach. Something that is remarkable, is worth talking about, and the deliverable serves a larger audience.
The second option involves using terrestrial laser scanning to capture the as-built condition of the roof steel. First, we establish the survey control, preferably black/white targets that will remain visible throughout the duration of the decentering process. The steel is captured before the decentering begins to establish a baseline, and then again after each step of the decentering process. The data is captured with a survey grade laser scanner. Once all the scans are processed, we start analyzing data by comparing the point clouds. This analysis is performed by specialty software. For each decentering step we create a visual report. Let’s call it a point cloud report. For instance, the scans captured at the first decentering step will be colored using a deviation heatmap representing the deformation values between it and the baseline. Each point cloud report can be used as standalone deliverable and it can be visualized by a large array of tools. If desired, the point cloud can be used with tools like Revit or AutoCAD to develop 2D documentation to enhance the final deliverable. This approach is complex, and it requires a lot more work. However, the result tells a story that can be understood by all the project participants. It reassures everyone that the steel erection went according to plan. In the end the deliverable met all the requirements to tell a good story. It is clear, visual, and interactive.
If we can do this for a simple task like monitoring deformation, imagine what happens when we bring the same mindset to complex projects.