Transcript: Bluebeam Collaboration with Carol Hagen Part I

Hello, this is Brittany Campbell Turner and this is the Constructor Podcast, session number 5. Hello and welcome to this episode of Constructor. My name is Brittany Campbell Turner and this podcast is dedicated to helping property owners have certainty in their decisions about their construction projects. My goal is to help property owners foster trusting relationships with your design and construction team, lower risk in your construction projects, be under budget and on schedule and ensure that your end user's desires are exceeded. Hello everyone, thank you for joining me today.

I'm so excited to bring to you this interview and share with you an excellent approach to achieving better collaboration amongst construction teams. The interview I'm about to share with you is with Carol Hagen. She fell in love with the construction industry after having the opportunity to see the opportunities for software. Who could resist? Soon after, she encountered Bluebeam Review and awesome collaboration platform and became a trainer for the software, understanding how this could revolutionize the construction management industry.

She shared some unbelievable aspects about what can be done in the construction world when utilizing simple collaboration tools and techniques. Without further ado, here is the first half of our interview with Carol Hagen. Alright, thank you again Carol for joining me for this podcast. I appreciate you accepting and we'll jump right into the questions. So how did you get started in the construction management industry?

Well, I'll say that it was a long time ago, 1985. I had been working for an office technology business solutions company when the internet didn't really have much on it. We had a construction client approach us and ask if we could find an accounting construction management solution for them, something that was all in one. We went making phone calls to companies and only one replied and that was my start. That blossomed into selling that software for a while and then opening my own business and the rest is history.

That sounds like you kind of fell into it, but you never looked back have you? No, I find it a fascinating industry. Many people approach things differently and yet they come out with the same results. That's awesome. How did you get into starting with what you're doing now?

Tell us a little bit about that. Now, the accounting software side of things has been part of my core for quite a while, but getting involved in more of the newer technologies has really been a result of watching what's going on on the internet, a few of the leaders in publishing for the industry, ENR, ConstructTech, those types of places, keeping in touch with some of my larger clients and seeing what they're interested in or what they're trying to solve. I found Bluebeam when it was version 9, so that was a few years ago and started talking to people about it, found out that most people hadn't heard about it yet.

That's how I ended there and yet I still manage to keep my ear to the internet and also attend a number of association events, things like CFMA, Theatech, the Construction Users Roundtable, AGC, so that I really have the pulse of what are the hot items, the hot solutions, the big problems that need solving. Seeing all of those, you really get a good flavor of what the expectations are of where we are going in this industry. It's not just everybody throws out the word BIM. There are some really advanced things going on with data collection and how they collect data today.

I expect that I will add more solutions over time and with that, I'm hoping that people will think technology and then think Ask Carol first. I know I certainly do think that already. The way I found you, and you may not even know this, but I think I found your group on LinkedIn that you host. I realized that you were definitely a resource for software, just period in the industry. You've definitely done that for me.

I think we're going to have to talk a little bit more about this data collection, maybe in another interview. That sounds pretty intriguing. What makes you passionate about the construction management industry? This is a simple one. It really comes down to things are always changing.

When you're looking to finding a solution, there's always something new. Developers always have new challenges because there's new materials, there's new methods. I love that it's always changing. Who wants to be stuck in a cubicle all day doing the same thing every day for 25 years? That's just not what anybody does these days and says they enjoy it.

That's one thing that I find about the industry as well, and I enjoy that very much as well. Let's get into the topic that we plan to discuss, collaboration or the idea of using a collaboration platform. I think it's mandatory today for the construction industry to be collaborating all the time. It's a form of communication that eliminates being misconstrued. That is so important because you can think you know the answer and spend hours or days and then come back and somebody say, that's not what I meant.

With a collaboration platform, you can visually see what you're talking about, not just in 2D but 3D, and have all your responses collected, all the replies, all the questions in one place so that if you need to review what was said, you don't have to bother somebody again. You can just look it up. It's all there black and white. If there's a new problem that sprouts from the solution to the old problem, you can use that same platform and have it as a continuing conversation. I noticed you talked about the collaboration piece as it relates to how we can utilize it within software.

How were people collaborating before? Well, I'll say email, I'll say snail mail, photographs, which are still common. In some places, we were driving from place to place to see the person eyeball to eyeball to have the conversation, which can be very expensive to do. The paper process is considered slow these days, so I don't think we really want to go back to that if we can avoid it. What do you think the main reason for developing a software type of this nature, what do you think triggered the need for that the most?

Is it a cost? Do you think it was a cost issue, a time issue? What do you think it was? I think it had to do with quality issue. The quality of a deliverable as well as the cost, particularly in construction, is best solved early in the project.

So in pre-construction, in design, in constructability reviews, it's those types of things that pay huge dividends so that there doesn't have to be rework, change orders, addendums that always drive costs up and unfortunately delay deliverables. So the earlier an owner can get into their building and start making money for what their real business is, the better off we all are. The lean movement, the lean construction really drives that home because they're trying to eliminate any kind of waste. Well the biggest waste is to not have planned.

So this industry, when they say that they want to be more innovative and what returns the best results, it always comes down to planning and planning well and planning clearly that everyone understands the communications. So I want to hear from your perspective how the critical path method kind of integrates with that because we can say that one has not planned, but at the same time, they can choose to disagree with that. How would you respond to that? We know that the critical path typically starts at the end and moves backwards to come up with, you know, we have to start by this day if you want to finish by that day.

When I see that fall apart, it is typically that someone has not really bought into the plan to begin with and that they have moving parts that were not discovered in the pre-construction process. So having to work with a firm that is familiar with the projects that you want built as an owner is paramount to the success simply because many of the project owners themselves have never built a project and they are counting on the construction management expertise of whomever they hire, whether it is a general contractor or construction management firm or they are leaning on an architect because that is who they know and the more communication that happens early on will always drive whether you can finish on time and deliver to the expectations of that owner.

So it is important for them to understand the processes that you go through and how they will impact the project before you start building. The owners that do not understand that think that you can change everything at any time because, oh, you know, I do not like the way that looks. They should have been using some of these more advanced technologies to see what they were going to get before they looked at it for real and of course the general contractor should be delivering as many of those things as possible prior to entering into a contract with them or the actual build, you know, go through the pre-construction process and be clear on expectations.

I think that is a great point. I realize that owners do have a hard time with understanding the requirements of a project for it to go smoothly. What I have noticed is that they depend on the fact that they have seen projects being executed and they see that projects, they have turned out just perfectly fine in the eyes of them because they have seen it, they have seen the end product and it looks great. But all of the ins and outs of it they may not have ever experienced before or they do not understand the impacts of it and it is very hard to tell just because they have not gone through it either before or they do not know how much leg work really is done behind the scenes.

Right. And the more complex the project, the more likely it is that the project owner is going to do their homework. You do not see hospitals not having interviews from at least a handful of possible contractors or construction managers, but yet for a home or a small office building or even a strip mall it just might be, well, you know, you built the one over in my hometown and I would like you to do one over here for me. Those are always going to happen and it is relationships and maybe I knew the guy that owned that other strip mall, but the hospitals and anything that has got, I will say, more stuff in the walls and floors and ceilings than are visible to the people who actually the facility.

They also look at things from a completely different perspective. They look at it from who is going to be using the building, not who is employed in the building all the time. They are looking at it from a patient perspective or maybe from the nurse's perspective, how many steps does it take to get from here to there and make the wall thicker if it does not fit. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, I agree with you that the complexity of the design can definitely impact the owner's perspective, especially depending on what their involvement is with the end product. If they have to manage some heavy piece of equipment or they have to have a certain electrical capacity that can run so many machines and have multiple backups, I can see them being very attuned to what they need and how it could potentially impact a project. I have definitely seen some very competent owners just from my experience. So now that we have established what kinds of projects could potentially need lots of collaborations like hospitals or heavy complex design projects, let's talk a little bit more about how we can introduce a software.

You are officially a trainer for Blue Veeam Review. I hope you guys enjoyed the first half of this interview as much as I did. You can find the second half of the interview with Carol Hagen in episode number six. I look forward to catching up with you guys there. Thanks.