Rethinking Chaos in the Deliverable Environment

By Jocelyn Sarrantonio, PE | Technical Director at MeyerFire

In my previous role at a design consulting firm, I managed a team of 10-15 engineers who all worked on mission-critical facilities (hi, y’all!) One day, I overheard a project manager arguing with someone on my team about the way things were “supposed to be.” I think their specific argument was about how or when drawings were getting uploaded to a folder, but it just as easily could have been about a long list of items like titleblocks, who uploaded what deliverables, sharing Revit models, specifications: you name it.

If you’ve ever been a design consultant or really been a part of any deliverable, you know there’s a whole host of items that are due and set to be completed in a particular way, all at the last minute. In theory, these things should be simple, handled with checklists, calendar invites, reminders, emails, and Teams messages. But in the rush to complete a project, they always cause chaos. And really, they shouldn’t be that hard, but they always become such a time suck on deliverable day. I’m sure we’ve all been a part of, probably on both sides, of conversations like that.

​A perfect example of this is with titleblocks. 

If you learned drafting in the AutoCAD days, title blocks were so easy: double-click, change text, and you’re done. In Revit…not so simple. The process is more complicated, because Revit is a more powerful tool. But that also means it requires communication and coordination, and it can be frustrating.

Regardless of the CAD program, there always seems to be last minute decisions or miscommunications.

Are we putting dots or slashes in the date?

What is the submission called? Issue for Construction? No, Issued for Construction.

Stamps or no stamps?

What should the filename be called?

What’s the correct titleblock?

Oh, it should be V2_final, not V3.

​​I started telling people, because I was of course so wise (sarcasm), that the chaos was part of the job. It did allow me to reach kind of a zen state in my own work, to not save too much actual design work for the last minute, because there are always these chaotic requests or last-minute changes, and the reason they get missed is because engineers are still designing up until the very last minute. Sorry to reveal what’s behind the curtain, but it’s true! [Editor's Note: It happens everywhere, too!]

And because I’m a millennial, I even had a go-to meme that helped me not get so frustrated during the chaotic last-minute deliverable days. 

For design consultants, it’s title blocks, but I’m sure for every other sector there’s a similar atrociously inefficient process that we all just kind of accept because….well either because it seems like a problem that’s too big to fix or feels like Mount Everest.

But basically, by telling people that the chaos was part of it, I was telling people to accept the crummy parts of their job, parts of the job that were really just paperwork, they weren’t even engineering. We all just accept some level of chaos or friction as a normal part of the job. And I was even counseling my team to just suck it up because we lowly fire protection engineers were not about to reinvent the wheel. That’s middle management for ya!

Only now that I’ve stepped away from the day-to-day grind of drawing delivery do I realize that is so not true. It doesn’t have to be this way.

Surprise! This blog post isn’t even about titleblocks. It’s about AI.

PIVOT TO AI
I was a slow adopter of AI, I really only started using it after starting this job.

I’d been a skeptic, thinking of myself as a purist. But AI is here, and it’s another tool in our belt. Like any tool, you can learn how to use it and reap the benefits, or you can ignore it and miss out.

At first I was a little insecure because I thought using AI would remove the expertise that I was supposed to be providing. But just like the example of the titleblocks, there’s a fair amount to any job that’s just drudgery and unrelated to the job at all. And AI is really good at doing the drudgery, the keeping track of things, weeding through lots of information.

It’s also fast, great at proofreading, letting you know if you’ve missed something, and continuing to learn and improve.

It should be obvious, though I will say it, AI is not the replacement for good and responsible engineering. Think of it like a conversation with your (smart) colleague. Even if they give you great advice, you are still responsible for your own work.

But also, just like your colleague, AI might be wrong! ChatGPT has been known to hallucinate or complete change its mind when challenged.

RETHINKING THE CHAOS
What if we thought a little bit differently, and instead of accepting our fates of chaos on submission day, what if there was something that could be done to improve our processes?

If you work with a team that’s open to new things, there might be some room for AI to take a bit of the drudgery out of our processes. Let it do some of the tedious processes, the research, transcriptions, poring through files to find answers, so that you can actually do the engineering and the creative stuff.

What are the most stressful or monotonous parts of your job or processes that could use an AI assistant?

Maybe it’s getting a summary of the 13 back-and-forth emails about what should be in the title block, so you don’t have to dig through each one to get your answer.

Or maybe you’re designing a high-rise or a parking garage for the first time, and you use it as an assistant to help perform code research, to make sure you’ve captured all of the requirements.

You could feed a meeting transcript from a page turn into AI and get your to-do list in bullet points.

If you write a lot of technical documents and emails, AI is a thorough and fast proofreader, that doesn’t get put to sleep by the content. And it’ll probably give you suggestions for things you could include to better make your point. If you can do all that, the quality of your work is improved, and the outcome is better. 

Those examples are just the tip of the iceberg. I’m sure if you thought about it with your team, your peers, and your company’s management, there’s room for process improvements all over. You just have to start looking and find some folks willing to challenge the chaos. And right now, I would advise the people on my team that instead of accepting that the chaos is part of the job, to see if they can find some opportunity for change. We may not be able to change processes for people at other companies or things that are outside of our control, but maybe we can improve our parts of them. 
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BOTTOM LINE
AI is already being used by your peers, competitors, and likely your new hires. The more you understand about how the tool can be used, the better it will be for you. As engineers we are ultimately responsible for our work output, so that both imparts some responsibility on us to be the decision makers, but also should provide some level of comfort that at the end of the day, that we are still responsible for public safety in the built environment.  

With the introduction of any new tool, the industry has to shape-shift to accommodate it. We don’t really do hand drafting or calculations on paper forms anymore, so we value skills in CAD and the ability to use hydraulic calculation programs. In a similar way, the introduction of AI is pushing the need for different skills. In the coming weeks Joe will share some trends we're seeing with AI pushing the need for different skillsets - that while our professional obligation and responsibility is still the same - we're already seeing a need for different skills than we had before. 

Thanks for reading and always remember to keep learning, keep improving, and you don't always have to accept the chaos. And if you like Patrick memes, come follow us on Instagram!