Special Guest at our meeting last week was @Chris Waterman. Advisor- and sometimes thorn in the side- to Government Ministers and MPs, Chris distilled and explained the Fire Safety Act and the Building Safety Act to MPs and even the Levelling Up Department’s Ministers and luminaries. With decades of experience inside the corridors of power, Chris had many helpful insights from the other side of the fence- along with a rapier wit, which livened-up matters considerably!
Ably assisted by @Matt Hodges-Long and @George Stevenson, and chaired by @Richard Freer
We’ll be looking to hold regular meetings with Special Guest spots in the New Year.
See a recording and notes of the meeting here from next week. https://bim4housing.com/fire-safety/
Our most recent Contractual Workstream meeting looked at competence on a 3-dimensional basis.
As defined by and attendee:
‘’1 Organisational competence, which is effectively the quality management environment that you operate in, it’s the compliance environment, it’s what people are aware of. Do people know how to..? Is your organisation communicating effectively and supervising effectively?.
2 Occupational competences, which is the things that basically you’d be expected to do if you’re a surveyor or dry liner etc.
3 Functional competences, which is the nuance of your own particular role, so within every organisation it’s slightly different what that person might be expected to do.’’
The meeting was chaired by @Martin Adie
The subject of this meeting was Electric Strikes and Security Entrance Systems.
A video and High Points of the meeting are available on https://bim4housing.com/iq-contractual/
Just to remind you, our ongoing efforts can be found on https://bim4housing.com/ at the bottom of the Home page.
We worked on an initial 2 phases. Phase 1 defined the over-arching questions that need to be answered, for 12 fire-critical asset types, to deliver the BIM-plus solution necessary to the effective functioning of the Golden Thread in terms of Fire Safety.
The questions defined are:
Phase 2 sought to answer those questions, offering a definitive guide to the delivery of The Golden Thread through the effective management of required information.
The work is ongoing- we’d appreciate your help.
Wednesday’s Advisory Working Group meeting examined the challenges of managing competency. Looking at how aware people are and whether they’ve actually looked at the competence product framework. Setting some context first, the meeting looked at a recently-finished Innovate project on product based building systems.
The meeting was chaired by @Debbie Carlton and @Dave Peacock
The subject of this meeting was Competency Management.
Featuring a presentation from @Debbie Carlton. A video and High Points of the meeting are available on
There’s not long to go before the Construction Industry learns its fate. The Great and the Good have been piling on the pressure, but will any of it help alleviate the outcomes determined by a Chancellor on a mission. See Building’s analysis here.
https://www.building.co.uk/news/autumn-statement-infrastructure-and-net-zero-must-not-be-sacrificed-says-industry/5120471.article
The biggest challenges cannot be solved by technology alone – particularly those posed by Hackitt and the Building Safety Bill. Changes in culture and better processes are also necessary so we have sought to learn from other industries that have had problems with safety – Healthcare and Aviation.
The latter seems to have it cracked, creating a culture and process of reporting mistakes and addressing them, rather than transferring blame.
As Matthew Syed writes Black Box Thinking “When pilots make mistakes, it results in their own deaths. When a doctor makes a mistake, it results in the death of someone else. That is why pilots are better motivated than doctors to reduce mistakes. But this analysis misses the crucial point. Remember that pilots died in large numbers in the early days of aviation. This was not because they lacked the incentive to live, but because the system had so many flaws. Failure is inevitable in a complex world. This is precisely why learning from mistakes is so imperative.”
Construction is also a complex world so failure is inevitable.
We need to establish a similar culture to Aviation and encourage reporting of mistakes – our own as well as those of others – so we can engineer them out of the process.
Bill East (of COBie fame) is a ‘fellow traveller’ and has directed me to a podcast by the BBC’s Tim Harford who gave an example of ‘two pressure relief systems that react in such a way that neither of them work.’
Tim presents evidence that the safety measures introduced to prevent catastrophes can make processes more complex and when systems are both complex and tightly coupled, we should expect catastrophic accidents.
Within BIM4Housing, we are establishing this Black Box culture, inviting people with deep understanding of individual asset types, the systems they form part of and the inter-relationship of systems, to join with other experts to better understand how we can mitigate (not eliminate) risks.
Our most recent Manufacturing Working Group meeting looked at picking typical products and asking ourselves specific questions. What are the critical bits of information that need to be captured in terms of the Golden Thread, specifically looking to pull together lots of good examples of fire safety products and feed that into the wider BIM for housing initiative. The meeting was chaired by @Will Perkins
The subject of this meeting was Electric Strikes and Security Entrance Systems.
Featuring a presentation from @Roy Buckingham, a video and High Points of the meeting are available on https://bim4housing.com/manufacturing/
Below are recommendations that we, as BIM4Housing, are putting forward as the findings of Smoke Control Dampers experts. We do not claim these findings to be definitive, but we would hope that they would provide ‘accountable’ and ‘responsible’ persons with some of the detail they would require to ensure that risks are mitigated.
The structure of this set of information is designed to be consumed in various ways by different stakeholder groups doing different things. Therefore, information mentioned in one section may be repeated in another, so they can be applied to a particular activity.
Also, we have sought to organize the information to make it more machine-readable so, although the lists could be reduced by combining similar items, this would make them less easily used in applications.
Despite the need to edit and contextualise, we have tried to retain the authentic voice of our experts throughout. This is especially so in the Appendices, where no colloquialism is left unturned.
This document is not intended as an end-result, but as a snapshot of a dynamic, on-going piece of work being developed by Subject Matter Experts who represent the different interest groups.
We hope it is helpful but is not definitive because, as we have learned from our collaboration, no one knows everything. It should therefore be used to supplement other sources of information, all of which should be validated by a responsible person applying it to a project.
Comments and additional contributions are welcome and a panel of volunteer experts will review suggestions to assess/validate them and augment the guidance as required.
It will be available for free at www.bim4housing.com but should not be printed and used offline, because the information may be updated and be no longer valid.”
Structure
We have six Working Groups of experts who understand the individual Stakeholder needs of Development, Design, Construction, Manufacturing, Operations, and the specialist Advisors who support the whole process. Each Working Group determines the problems they are experiencing that could be alleviated by better information, often from a different Stakeholder group and they collectively establish Workstreams to collaborate and share knowledge to come up with practical solutions.
They have established Workstreams for MMC, Data Standardisation, Sustainability and Fire Safety and the latter has, in turn, established Round Table workshops that bring together SMEs who really understand specific asset types. Outputs from the workshops will feed into the GTI.
(See Appendix 1 for Structure Diagram)
It was determined to take individual fire-critical assets and examine impacts and influences through their lifecycle. A series of online discussions were held, along with one-on-one calls and an email gathering of views and inputs. This culminated in a series of Roundtable discussions, each with a clear focus and targeted output. BIM4Housing’s expert team was enhanced by guests from the GTI, along with other fire safety specialists throughout.
Phase 1 defined the over-arching questions that need to be answered, for each asset type, to deliver the BIM-plus solution necessary to the effective functioning of the Golden Thread in terms of Fire Safety.
The questions defined are:
Phase 2 sought to answer those questions, offering a definitive guide to the delivery of The Golden Thread through the effective management of required information.
Phase 3 seeks to build on our ongoing learning and experience and include further assets in our process.
The output from a Roundtables (3rd and 13th September 2021) was collated and contextualized and combined with further subject matter expert input. Significant participant engagement was achieved prior to the events. The resulting report was then peer-reviewed.
Fire dampers are passive fire protection products used in heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) ducts to prevent the spread of fire inside the ductwork through fire-resistance rated walls and floors.
A smoke control damper has two functions in smoke control systems. Firstly to allow a free path for extract of smoke and hot gases and a free path for makeup air, it is tested to remain open. Its second function is to close in other areas where compartmentation is to be maintained (branches, other zones etc.) and it is also tested to show this. SCDs have drive open/drive close actuators, as it is not known where a fire will start, and a “cause and effect” schedule is required. They have no fusible links. They cannot be substituted by ES classified smoke control dampers by simple replacement of the spring return actuator with a drive open/drive close actuator and the removal of the fusible link, they have to be tested.
It was determined to look to ‘codify’ risks to enable teams to coalesce around tackling a problem, run scenarios to simulate what might happen and how collaboration can reduce the risk of them happening.
Two other GTI Working Groups, H&S and Standards, have been working with NBS to extend Uniclass to carry a more detailed set of risks and, those identified here, can form part of that.
Clearly, it is not desirable for the ‘Accountable Person’ to be absolved of responsibility for not anticipating a risk, simply because it was not on the list of suggested risks- which should be considered a ‘steer’ not an absolute. However, without that list, it becomes impossible to define and deliver the information needed.
(See Appendix 2 for Additional Participant Input)
Explanation of failed operation and recommended corrective or remedial action.
(It should be a given that any work on fire safety critical assets should always be undertaken by competent people, probably 3rd party accredited. However, that person must be supported with any information that they might need to reduce the risk of an important step being missed and to provide an auditable record of what tasks were completed. This is common practice in M&E maintenance, where the industry has developed a significant library of standard procedures and tasks lists, along with roles/competency required.
An air-conditioning unit is maintained by a qualified air conditioning engineer, but the engineer is also issued with a check list for them to record what was done.
A similar industry-wide check list for installation, commissioning, handover, maintenance, and recycling could be agreed.)
Industry-standard maintenance instructions – extract from BESA’s SFG20.
(Industry training courses are critical, but they must be complemented by additional knowledge-transfer from people with many years real experience.
Individual manufacturers have product-specific training which complements the more general training. Such training resources need to be provided in all cases where a product is used – both for new build but also as part of the long-term H&S/O&M information, ideally held as machine-readable data in the Asset information model to ensure maintenance teams have easy access to critical information.)
– product training
– technical support
– engineering design to overcome non-standard applications.
(See Appendix 4 for Additional Participant Input)
(If information is not updated, it isn’t information anymore. It is misleading and, possibly, down-right dangerous. If the systems and processes to keep information current are not trusted, then the value of even correct information is compromised.
Robust Change Management requires an information baseline against which the different states – current, proposed, final and ongoing change – can be measured and reported.
The baseline information should contain the required performance in a machine-readable/actionable form and the Change Management process should enable that to be compared with:
Robust Change Management requires an information baseline against which the different states – current, proposed, final and ongoing change – can be measured and reported including PIM’s and AIM’s (Project Information Models and Asset Information Models)
The baseline information should contain the required performance in a machine-readable/actionable form and the Change Management process should enable that to be compared with:
This ISO 19650 diagram is informative
(See Appendix 5 for Additional Participant Input)
BIM4Housing Structure
Additional Participant Input Question 1a
The list below is not a complete list and I know some of the later standard numbers have changed i.e., chimneys.
Additional Participant Input Question 3
Industry-standard testing & maintenance instructions – example extract from BESA’s SFG20.
Testing and reporting procedure
Testing should include but is not limited to the following steps:
Reports should include but are not limited to the following items:
