Paul White- Next steps from DCW roundtables-20220615

Post DCW Feedback

Paul White

PAUL WHITE thinks that, as an exercise, the DCW roundtable went as well as it could have done. They didn’t get through an awful lot of the task. Despite the pre-meeting, many more issues came up during the session. Regarding accountability and responsibility, according to a person on the table from the HSE it depends at which point in time you are judging it. They focused on what is the main core of the development group which is Housing Associations and Local Authorities. Someone from Operations, at Paul’s request, came to sit on the table to debate points. He spoke of the distinction between Development and Operations - it was enough as an exercise to show people what we are doing.

About accountability and responsibility, RICHARD says a lot of people have said there has be some kind of demarcation as to when, because obviously it changes - a constructor can’t be responsible for something that happens at the design stage. He talks about the Construction meeting and how they trimmed it down and made it more granular, but there is more work to be done so it’s an easy tick-box.

RICHARD said the fire door group had 88 questions rather than the 30-odd questions of the other groups, but still they only missed 10 questions. The input is more granularity. The other groups are moving forward post-DCW to finish the job on all of them. Stakeholders and group members have different takes and different opinions. Many people still keep saying ‘we don’t need that much information’ but we’re asking for it is because somebody has said that they want it.

PAUL asks how does he get this across to the development group? RICHARD says he’ll take the learnings from today and be in touch with him about suggestions on how to move forward. PAUL says a lot of the development group are not necessarily tuned up for that, they are different from Operations. PAUL needs to work out how to put it in the right way for the Development group to understand. RICHARD thinks they’ll organise a pre-meet with Paul and David prior to the meeting.

PAUL asks what’s going on with other Workstreams (particularly Sustainability). RICHARD says the Sustainability Workstream hasn’t done anything, they put together the questionnaire. Right now, they’re waiting for some senior people to come on board to run the workstream, that’s in the process of happening. Also, the working groups for DCW have had to be prioritised recently. Tier 1 contractors, who are very active, have split down into 4 workstreams, also the Data workstream is active. MMC has kind of died off.

RICHARD talks about George’s work with the construction industry body Net Zero, so the Sustainability workstream is being wrapped into that.

PAUL says that one of the participants on the Development group, a rep from a local authority, and they asked, ‘has any other local authority been through the process of trying to embed BIM in their organisation?’. Paul told them about his work on that at his LA. he said it would be useful to talk about this with some other local Authorities. There are some LA groups that he could float the idea with. RICHARD says he needs to re-engage with the Housing Forum (who Paul had attempted to work with, but it didn’t work out).

PAUL is getting involved with the Good Homes Alliance vanguard group, specifically for Local Authorities, that’s why he asked about the sustainability group as there is a tie in - maybe we could do something about what BIM4housing is doing with sustainability? Paul will put Richard in touch with them.