Project Four Safety Solutions

Mo Shana’a: We’re now going to have Allan Binns share his perspective on building safety and how the platform can be used for that. He had actually spoken in our Community Day two or three years ago and he’s giving us an updated talk on his journey. So I’m really, really looking forward to it.

Thank you so much for joining us, and always thank you. Awesome.

Allan Binns: Hi. Amazing. Yeah, we’re good. Okay, perfect. Thank you so much.

Yes. Well, just to introduce myself, I’m Allan Binns, National Director for Project Four. So P4, we provide statutory and advisory safety services across CDM and the Building Safety Act.

I’ve been, as Mo says, using Morta for about two or three years now. And a big part of me looking at Morta in the first place was the advent of the Building Safety Act. And not so much wrestling with the question of “to Morta or not to Morta.” I think it is Morta.

But it was just finding my way. So I kind of wanted to share my journey with you guys on this to date. So not to make this too much of a Building Safety Act CPD, but to give you some background.

Because of the Building Safety Act, there have been changes to building regulations, which now means for all building work in England, clients must appoint a principal designer. Completely separate to CDM. A new principal designer role that’s very objectively focused on building regulation compliance, very much replacing the advice designers used to get from building control professionals.

But this principal designer must take all reasonable steps to ensure that designers and the other parties are cooperating with each other with regards to the design and having that overarching responsibility to ensure that designers are coordinated and the designers are working to the relevant requirements of the building regs.

Because that’s now a statutory set of duties for an organisation to hold, it becomes very evidence based. And I think that’s an important point in all of this. It is about evidence, it’s about creating structured arguments. And that certainly follows through to when you get to the end of a building project.

Now, because as building regulations principal designer, you’ll have to sign a notice of completion, a declaration to say that you’ve fulfilled your duties under Part 2A of the building regs. The client also has to sign as well to say to the best of their knowledge that the building complies as well.

So again, they’re probably going to want to see evidence. You want to see evidence to be satisfied that you’ve done everything you can as well. So what does that look like?

Thinking back two, three years ago when I started on this journey and looked at the draft version of the regs, I went straight to a responsibility matrix. But instead of aligning design packages with the relevant disciplines, it was about aligning the relevant requirements with disciplines as well. So working out which relevant requirements under the building regs are going to be applicable, and then assigning responsibility.

Maybe primary and secondary to different duty holders to provide you with that information. Fairly crude way of approaching it, but that was certainly the early thoughts.

And then from that responsibility matrix, it kind of followed through that you produce something akin to a building control tracker, where you’d have the section, subsection of the building regs, whether it was applicable or not. And then we’d probably provide a list of suggested evidence, the stage we were expecting to see it at. And then ultimately, those responsible would provide evidence in turn.

Now this was problematic straightaway. This is something that we were looking at on Excel. We could review that design information and then start to validate it or not and provide comments and feedback to the design team.

I think the alarm bells were going straight away there. From my experience with CDM and having large design risk registers, those things are very arbitrary. They don’t really have a very visual impact. It’s really difficult to understand what’s going on there as well.

I think the main issue though was going to be around the number of drawings and reports that we would probably be reviewing, particularly on complex projects, which can be around 2,000. So you can imagine the process of writing down those 2,000 drawings and reports into that evidence section, maintaining version control, the opportunity that exists there for human error as well.

And also the wider piece that a plan check will probably take around two plus weeks to carry out when we’re reviewing all of that design work. And by the time we’ve done that, the information on the CDE has probably advanced beyond what we’ve done. So making our contribution fairly mute at that point.

I also think that this kind of tracker promotes this idea that it’s the building regulations principal designer’s responsibility. Foremost, making sure that design complies is on the designers. So this idea that because we own the tracker makes it our problem.

And I think it needs to be more of a collaborative effort. Certainly, that early iteration of things wasn’t particularly successful.

But then, conversations with Mo, the eureka moment of what Morta could actually do for us. And this fairly simple approach to having an API link to a common data environment. There are other ones available, not just Viewpoint. And then pulling all of those design files into there, having that tracker hosted on Morta and then being able to produce outputs from there.

So whether that be benchmark exports like CSV files or PDFs that we can share at certain points in time with the design team, or pushing it out via another API to Power BI as a live dashboard. To give a greater visibility and a strong visual for people to engage with.

So that was where we went to start with. And as I said, we replicated the tracker. That tracker was again, section, subsection, the functional requirement. Was it applicable? Who’s the owner? And then getting through to the end columns there where we’re providing evidence against suggested evidence.

And that started to feel like we were going down the right direction. And particularly when we started looking at pulling the metadata through as well. And I got particularly excited about this idea that if we started to use Uniclass classifications, then this could actually be a way of automating the evidence as well.

So an example I would give, I think it’s A2, Ground Conditions under the relevant requirements. We know that we’re always going to expect to see something like a site investigation report, phase two, that will have a set Uniclass classification.

So the idea of being able to automate that into a set location for review every single time was something that we thought had real mileage, yet to be fully explored. But yeah, there’s certainly some thinking there.

But then thinking about the outputs as well in this process. So we could produce a PDF, there could be links on there to Viewpoint as well, so we could start to engage with the design. And you could see at any point in time there might be the principal designer’s comments on this tracker, and then you’d be able to click into it and understand what they were talking about. So that could be helpful.

And then this is a bit of a game changer for us, to be honest, being able to produce a Power BI dashboard instead of that very arbitrary spreadsheet that we just share with clients and the rest of the design team. Being able to give everyone a link to a live dashboard that they could go on, that they could interact with.

So having percentage counts about how compliant we are, how many items need more information, how many are not accepted, and then being able to filter by slicers on the status, who the primary owners are, et cetera as well. So this was really starting to pick up a bit of steam.

And that really celebrates probably some of the best bits of Morta for me. So, for us, we can’t dictate what common data environment we’re going to be working on from project to project as a safety consultant. So we need an agnostic system that we can go to, that we can plug into anything.

And we have worked with various common data environments with this approach. And with that, we know that we are linking to that single source of truth. We haven’t got the version control issues that we saw before. We’re always linked into the most up-to-date information.

We’ve got away from this copying, pasting file names into single Excel cells and taken out human error as well. And really promoted confidence on the progress being made on the project with clients as well. So some really big wins in all of that.

But if I’m being critical of all of that, it is not the perfect process and it’s actually a process that was born out of theory rather than practicality.

The reality on the projects that we work on is that design does not stop. If you’ve got a link to the common data environment, the files are always updating. And with that, we’ve got this inability to turn off the tap. Carry out a plan check and we end up being stuck on the hamster wheel or in potential of doing abortive works because we could be in the middle of reviewing a particular file and by the time we’ve reviewed it, someone’s updated it.

So there needs to be a distance created between the way that information is provided and information is reviewed. And I think probably up until about six months ago, we weren’t on that path, but that’s been the eureka moment over the last six months.

But it also does something else and it actually gets designers to start thinking about responsibility as well. I think one of the things that if we were to give designers access to a common data environment, and then we introduce Morta into the mix as well, we’re starting to split their attention across two softwares.

And I think there’s probably something to be said for leaving everything in the common data environment and using Morta in a slightly different way. And that’s kind of, very jokingly, version 30.4, top left.

But that’s where we’ve gone to now, we’ve kind of split how we use it. So part of Morta on the hub we focus on the design input idea. So just getting the information from the common data environment, filtering it accordingly as you’ll see, and getting whatever benchmark exports we want to see out of that.

And then the next part of it is having a separate area for the principal designer to carry out their review on a set bit of information, but then linking through and maintaining that Power BI as well.

What is key to that is the creation of dynamic folders on the common data environment. If you’ve got, say, information in an architectural folder and you’ve just uploaded some general arrangement drawings, you want them to then link dynamically into, it’s a Gateway Two folder here, but it could be any building control folder, into Part M.

Because that’s where we want to see them. So they can be in two places at once, and that really helps as well when we’re starting to filter the information through Morta.

So as you’ll see with the quick demo I do, and then we can communicate to the design team using the latest CLC guidance on Gateway Two deliverables. Equally applicable for non-HRBs for aligning them with the relevant requirements, telling them what design information we expect to see in what folder.

And I think this is quite an important point as well about putting responsibility back on designers for providing that evidence. Rather than it be a case of principal designer goes on the common data environment and tries to find the information, it’s really putting ownership back on them and saying, look, you are the designers. You tell us what would demonstrate compliance with a particular relevant requirement.

So I’m just going to stop sharing there for a sec and I’m going to share a different element of what we’re doing.

Okay. So this is Morta, this is just a test hub that we’ve set up here. So we’ve got a page that we’ve created, a table, which is an integration linking to a common data environment. We’ve created a new column here, which is concatenated, the name and the revision. And we’ve also created various filters as well, different views that separate all of the different parts of the building regulations out based upon the file path.

The file path would be the enterprise, the project name, the building control file. Then it would be Part A folder, Part B folder. So we can use that as a filter to get all the different views that we want. And going through all the different regulations there.

And then this will create a document that we can readily export. So we’ll have a link to all the different folders of information that we want to see. And this can be exported as a document that our plan checker can use for reference when carrying out that plan check on the common data environment.

And ultimately they will be able to complete their building regulations compliance tracker, providing notes and updating. First of all, understanding what’s applicable and then being able to change different status to whether they accept, reject, or want to see further information and be able to provide further comments as well.

That twins with just a very basic project details board explaining what the building is, so we can now produce a very concise but ultimately fairly impactful document which can give an update on building regulation compliance on the scheme.

So let me just jump back onto another screen.

So, yeah, I mean, just to summarise that as an approach, and they might thank me for giving them a bit of time back here. We have some questions, but yeah, getting designers to put dynamic evidence in those dynamic folders, it’s about empowering them to have ownership over regulatory compliance on the scheme.

Then being able to filter that through Morta to produce an evidence report, which the principal designer can use to carry out their plan check and update the compliance tracker. And then from that compliance tracker, we’ve got two options: creating a PDF, which is static, as a benchmark, or pushing that out to Power BI as well.

So yeah, I mean that’s kind of where we’ve got to as a process at the moment. Although that feels quite simplistic and it’s almost like we’ve stripped back some of the functionality of what we were originally trying to do with Morta, it does feel more suited to the working processes that we have on projects.

But with that, I think we’ve got to a base level point now, which gives us a blueprint for how we might approach other ideas and other ways of working for the processes and deliverables.

Certainly what we’ve produced there is a foundation for creating a building regulation compliance statement, housing all of the relevant files for each of the relevant requirements into a report.

The next step there would be to follow those CLC guidance for identify, clarify, and justify, explaining what standards we’re working to and why they’re applicable.

But equally with that as well, we are the building regulations principal designer. We take the ball, we run with it, and then we hand it over to the principal contractor to build on, not just evidence for why a design is compliant, but also why building work is compliant.

So building in their tracker into this system would probably be one of the next steps that we look at. So we can dovetail those two processes as a bigger picture working towards completion, Gateway Three kind of thing.

And then outside of this building regs piece, the same processes that we’ve done there are definitely applicable to creating a pre-construction information pack under CDM. And also, if you’re structuring your folders correctly as well, safety case reports.

So yeah, there are definitely other applications that we’re starting to look at. And yeah, although it’s taken a fair few goes at trying to work out how we approach this, I think we’ve started to settle on a way of working that can open up different avenues as well.

Yeah. There you go, mate.

Mo Shana’a: Amazing. Sorry, I think my computer is just freezing. Can you see me?

Allan Binns: You’re frozen, but I can hear you.

Mo Shana’a: Okay. Sorry, everyone, just one second.

Awesome. First I just wanted to say thank you so much for sharing that and thanks for sharing your insights and coming back to do that. I think some people would go, “I’ve taken these lessons and I don’t want to share them with people.”

The whole point of this, I think this talk is actually a perfect example of why this community exists. I don’t think there is anyone in the whole Morta community who has spent as much time thinking around specifically the Building Safety Act and how Morta can play a role within that. And you’ve evolved the approach over time.

And a lot of people who are within the community now are looking at the same topic, and they’ll benefit massively from you sharing your insights over what worked and what didn’t work in the realities of projects and how to actually make it work, make it genuinely useful and make it fit with the ways the project works.

So I just really, really appreciate you sharing that with us. I really appreciate you reflecting and sharing your insights with the wider community. Thank you so much.

Allan Binns: Well, great. Is there any questions for me to take or have I just got you back on track enough?

Mo Shana’a: We are 15 minutes off track, so yeah. Happy to pick up anything over emails or anything else like that as well, so yeah.

No, thank you so much. Thank you so much, Allan, for joining us. Thanks for being such an active member of the community and we really, really appreciate you being with us. See you again. Thank you so much. Have a really good one.