One often-heard idea for making design software more efficient is the idea of allowing more than one person to work on a design (a layout) at the same time. The argument goes like this: I have truss people, I have EWP people, and I have panel people. I have each one do a layout, because I don’t have time for them each work on the layout in turn, each doing their own specialty. I have to turn around the (quote/order) quickly. So each person does their own thing.
We don’t want this:
So we do this:
The (quote/order) is done when the last guy gets done with his part. The inefficiency is pretty obvious, the plan needs to be interpreted three times. The layout is drawn three times. Wouldn’t it be nice if they could all collaborate on a single model?
Now it’s time to confess that I’m a skeptic of this idea. Maybe it can be done, and we’ll all be using software that can do this in the future. But I see this problem: Does each person start in a corner, start putting in walls, and we meet in the center? If so, aren’t we all still hovering over our own copy of the blueprint, figuring it out? If not, and one person does the walls, what do the other people do while that is being done?
Now once the walls and planes are in, I can see it being a nice thing to have (say) three people all working on their own areas of the layout. It might be a little distracting to see trusses popping in while you are doing the walls, but on the other hand you would get to see them right away and take them into account when doing your walls. But – here’s a catch. You put in your walls with critical studs where you see the hip girder resting. Five minutes later, you look, and the girder’s not there anymore. The truss guy decided to make it an 8’ setback instead of a 6’ setback. Unless you are communicating, you could have a real problem there (as we do now, doing our own layouts.)
So let’s put the designers in the same room and really collaborate. That makes sense, although more than half of our workspaces are designed to allow us to work in splendid isolation, not as part of a collaborative team. So if we could co-locate (work in the same room on the same thing at the same time) and have collaboration software (which we don’t now) we could probably get through the work in the shortest possible time. Even so, we are still paying three people and we are still requiring three minds get wrapped around the plans.
The alternative?
Train people to do the whole thing. Let’s put it this way, if it takes this one guy three days to do this job and it took the group above two days, then you saved a day, but it cost you twice as much (1 guy times days vs. 3 guys times 2 days.) That’s 100% more design cost. Add to that the fact that when a single designer is involved, there is zero possibility that problems like “Designer A didn’t know that Designer B put a beam in there” will occur. Seems like the better plan to me.