Local authorities and other public sector organizations work 24 hours a day to provide a range of essential services for their communities.
Increasingly, they are doing so amid growing financial stress, with some predicting that a growing number will hit reserve funds in the coming months or file for bankruptcy.
With resources under pressure, more local authorities are turning to digital technology to assess, approve and monitor the delivery of projects.
This article looks at how Bluebeam can help public sector organizations respond collaboratively to the needs of their communities and businesses, saving time and money, but not at the expense of quality.
Time saved, standards maintained
Time is money. A system like Bluebeam has the ability to make stakeholder resources count, increase the effectiveness of the delivery team and ensure that the product is delivered to the highest standards.
Bluebeam enables project teams to collaborate digitally in real time and access their work from any device. This means that office and field staff are always in sync.
Using Bluebeam also makes it easy to invite internal and external team members from anywhere in the world to mark up documents together more efficiently.
Experience in the private sector
The private sector has been involved for some time. Take British developer Ballymore, responsible for delivering Wardian London, which consists of two high-rise residential towers in the capital’s Canary Wharf district.
Terry Arnold, Project Manager at Wardian, says Bluebeam Studio Sessions on Revu enable full collaboration between the design team, even before a project begins.
“You can be in different parts of the world, or different parts of the country, and still review the drawing at the same time,” he says. “This will generate cost savings not only in terms of site, but also in terms of consultant cost time.”
Using Bluebeam means storing and managing entire projects in the cloud is simple, while team members can be invited to securely access documents and edit them on the go.
Documents can be marked up at once, with automatic tracking of edits and comments. And collaboration permissions can be customized to ensure the right people have access to the right information.
Collaboration through digitization
Many organizations still use paper documentation in their planning and approval departments. With the complex workflows involved, reliance on well-established systems is understandable, but this can lead to long project delivery times.
Having an entire project team digitally annotate documents is a huge plus, and giving stakeholders the opportunity to work collaboratively throughout the design, construction and delivery stages of a project is Bluebeam’s strength. In addition, being able to access and annotate plans and documents online is proving to be a boost not only for private companies but also for the public sector.
In California, the Merced County Building Inspection was switched to Bluebeam a few years ago.
According to Charlie Mendenhall, the county’s supervising building inspector for local plan reviews, Bluebeam has boosted internal collaboration, while communications between different divisions and departments have improved to the point where everyone can see the corrections and comments made to a set of presentation documents.
“It also saves more time,” Mendenhall said, “since there tends to be a lot of overlap in reviews; users who see something has already received a fix can move forward instead of duplicating work.”
Better communication through a project
Across the Atlantic in South Wales, Merthyr Tydfil County Borough Council (MTCBC) wanted to build a new bus terminal in the town, one that would be a modern transport hub suitable for in the 21st century
To deliver what was a complex project, MTCBC had to work closely with developer Morgan Sindall and architect Capita, no easy task amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
Real-time collaboration throughout the project was enhanced with Bluebeam’s design review tools. This allowed project partners to mark up and collaborate on the same documents in real time or remotely. This meant the team could better communicate project data, with personalized and in-depth annotations.
All marks appeared in a built-in, customizable list for easy tracking, while the team could also save and organize custom marks in the toolbox, using features like PDF Markups, which add annotations such as text, highlights or highlighted text to the documents.
Ross Williams, Site Director and Project Manager at Morgan Sindall, took full advantage of Bluebeam’s capabilities to communicate the change in an open and transparent manner.
Reflecting on the team’s day-to-day experience with Bluebeam, Williams said that when a feature is clear and simple, “it’s really amazing to those who use it.”
The entire delivery team worked more efficiently, opting for collaboration over confrontation, while forming a range of exceptionally open and supportive relationships. That meant the team pushed to exceed the brief’s expectations, making decisions that would benefit both the local economy and the environment, Williams noted.
More productivity, better served
The built environment has always been a collaborative business, involving designers, planners, engineers, contractors and suppliers, developers and clients.
As industry seeks to work better and be more productive, whether through modern construction methods, using more sustainably sourced materials or greater use of technology, recognizing the potential of digital software is more important than ever.
For those cash-strapped local authorities and public sector organizations who have to work even harder to deliver the services their communities and businesses depend on, this is particularly relevant.
By Hamish Champ
