Moving from disconnected documents and spreadsheets to dynamic online resources

At the start of the year and one month into a new job at ALEC, I felt the timing and opportunity was right to bring in a software platform to act as an ‘information hub’ that would enable us to begin building new ISO 19650-aligned template resources, in preparation for our organisations BIM Kitemark certification later in the year.

I’dwanted to try this approach for a couple of years as I had seen the successes had by pioneers such as Rob Jackson at Bond Bryan Digital when implementing similar underakings using online solutions (notion & airtable) for developing and managing information requirement / project execution ‘documentation’.

We decided to go with Morta, and after a short trial it became apparent this was the right solution for us. It had the desired functionality, a good UI and was impressively flexible. We are now five months into the annual subscription for our Digital Construction department and haven’t looked back since.

After some initial training and guidance, building the BIM execution plan online became more efficient. Being able to drag/ drop sections and subsection content to reorder, and creating tables where specific text could be entered just once, but be displayed in multiple places for varying purposes (we all know how many times we have to type the same information in multiple locations with a Word-based BEP) was even somewhat cathartic.

Tables are where Morta excels though (no pun intended), with support we were able to build a dynamic information delivery plan, with linked tables informing pick list codes, and then permission controlled ‘views’ of the IDP facilitating task information delivery plan data entry informing the read only master information delivery plan view. With a little bit of python scripting, we were able to keep plain language descriptors against the field codes, but only deliver the code element from each field into the concatenation script to populate the information container ID. On this project the client’s information naming convention also had parent-child dependencies between a couple of fields, such as ‘document type’‘document subtype’, and ‘area’-‘venue/ building’. In Morta we were able to create these dependencies so that after selecting the parent code, only the applicable child codes would be displayed in the picklist. We were also able to build in some simple validation rules and tooltips to help users enter data correctly. I’ve worked with Excel gurus in the past to build similar approaches, but these are prone to breaking and human error from bitter experience.

Deploying resources on a project successfully confirmed the direction was right so we started to build ISO 19650-2 ‘lead appointed party’ template resources in Morta from scratch. As I’m writing this, we have just finalised our ‘Information management hub (templates)’ project, housing templates for;

• Information management function assignment matrix

• (pre-appointment) BIM execution plan

• Mobilization plan

• Detailed responsibility matrix

• Exchange information requirements (LAP)

• Information delivery plan (TIDPs-MIDP)

Note that we have decided to record information risks along with other risk register items within our ERP, as well as sending out and recording capability assessments.

I’m looking forward to presenting at the BIM Coordinators Summit on this topic and show how some of these resources have been built, and dynamically link to each other in places. We have also connected Morta via their API to other software such as CDE solutions (Aconex and BIM360 Docs), to automate progress reporting and highlight any mismatch between planned (IDP) vs actual (uploaded to CDE). The possibilities are expansive!

For me this kind of approach and solution is also very scalable, and I hope to support other departments in the company. My advice if you haven’t already, is to trial Morta or similar solutions to start digitizing documentation as well as the processes and deliverables we generate and exchange throughout the BIM process.