Concrete was going in while we were still BIM coordinating.
That sentence shouldn't happen on a well-run job that finishes on time and under budget. But this wasn't a normal schedule. This was Qualcomm's Building Q — a $300M+ campus project with 585,000 SF of labs, cafes, offices, and auditoriums. I worked on it as a BIM Manager and Senior Project Engineer at C.W. Driver, from 2012 to 2014. The schedule had been accelerated to a 14-month build, and everyone was absolutely flying. Coordination and construction weren't happening in sequence anymore. They were happening at the same time, on the same structure, and we all knew it.
Here's the scale of what that meant. Because of the accelerated schedule, the construction drawings we were handed looked more like design drawings. The models for those drawings carried roughly 200,000 clashes per floor across a five-story structure. That's a staggering number to grind through in coordination — trade by trade, floor by floor. There's no clever software trick that makes a number like that go away. You just have to grind it. Six weeks of it.
And about six weeks in, on the last floor, we hit an impasse.
A structural column and a major MEP run could not coexist. We looked at it every way. The whole coordination team sat with it, and there was no route, no drop, no reroute that solved it without huge change orders or compromises to the design. The only solution left was the one nobody wants on a live pour: move the column.
So we got the architect into the trailer with us and put it in front of him directly. Everyone worked their own model at once until we converged on the best solution as fast as a room full of people can when the clock is a pump line. Four inches. That's what it came down to. Move the column four inches.
We ran out there and got the column moved in time.
I still think about what the change order would have been if we hadn't. The cost of catching it in the trailer versus discovering it in the field wasn't close. The change order and schedule ramifications would have been astronomical.
There are three ideas I carried out of that experience.
That last point is what I want to focus on in future writing — but that's a longer story. I just wanted to start with a real one: a column, four inches, and BIM coordination.