Throughout the last century, the construction industry’s business model reflected the dependency on individual expertise and experience. This cannot be said today.
The post-internet age has brought the creation of experience-sharing platforms and increased well-informed interactivity. With the help of massive information flow through a great number of projects all around the world, we now have access to best practices and lessons learned greater than ever. The whole world turned into a gigantic job site monitored closely and simulated under endless fictional what-if scenarios to optimize the use of resources further and recognize as many risks as possible.
The construction industry has seen an increased shift towards the ability to communicate, access and analyze data rather than relying on an individual experience shaped largely by personal interpretation. Construction Management no longer depends "heavily" on an individual’s skills but looks for a global perspective and well-organized performance records. Not a moment too soon.
The term for “draft design” has nearly become obsolete. Advanced design software improvements allow us to blueprint even the most minuscule details of any complicated project from the get-go. Pencils and ink eraser are irrelevant next to the ergonomic mouse and keyboard which allows you to fine tune design work in a fraction of the time.
In the design software age, it has been a welcome and time-saving solution to be able to design in a broader perspective and subsequently elaborate the design organically as the actual work starts. Thus the only constraint that limits our ability to create precise designs and engineering solutions is that of time. And yet with the advent of time-saving programs, somehow we seem to have even less time than before.