Voyansi Voices Blog

Today, we will talk about everything. Everything in the context of the Highgate Elementary School in California. We’ll start with some basic statistics. This Elementary School is made up of 6 buildings, a total of 58,335 square feet. Maybe that sounds small, maybe it sounds large. It’s all relative afterall. There is more to it than that. If I asked you to picture a school in your mind, it’s not just the buildings, it’s experiential. The laughter, recess, warm afternoons in the sun swinging carefree on a swingset with your friends. No cares in the world, other than how soon recess is ending.

Every week, new platforms emerge to help manage every aspect of the business. There never seems like the right time to hop into something new. However, this week we'll discuss the other side. Understanding where your current software ecosystem is hurting your business. These areas can be hard to detect, especially when you've been running the same systems for years. Technical debt builds up beneath the surface, and before you know it, more agile competitors are producing things at a pace that seems like magic.

We love doing our job but we get an extra reward when you help the community. The Center of Hope project consisted of making a series of renderings that allow the client to give life to the project and have precise material to show to future investors. These agents are a key part of the project, their resources are needed to make this project happen.

Why? It’s a fundamental question we all learn at a young age. The drive to understand why we do what we do is as human as eating or breathing. Why do we work? Putting deep philosophy aside, most of us work to pay our bills. At work, there are different levels of participation. We all have additional drivers, various day-to-day responsibilities, and differing needs for our software, tools, and interaction levels with other employees.

Last we got a call from one of our long time customers. He had finally quit the grind of his corporate job after 20 years. After knowing them for several years both as one of Voyansi's production team members, then later in a commercial role, I knew this would not be retirement! There is an allure to architects to be able to pick and choose what you work on. As an architect myself, I know this feeling, it's experiential and almost indescribable. However, tempering that, the ability to pick and choose comes with the need for industry standard tools and workflows. 

Imagine for a minute, you're doing laundry. Everything is dry, in a basket and ready to put away. Where do you start? In my case, following the Pareto Principle, I dump the basket on the bed and head for the towels first. Once the towels are finished, I typically start with pants, then shirts, finally folding up small things such as socks, underwear, or other accessories. 

Especially in the last year, there seems to be no shortage of issues to solve in any organization. While we grapple with our internal challenges, we are also helping our customers transform their businesses. In all these experiences, a constant that we always return to is the problem definition. Understanding what we're trying to solve before we tackle it helps us prioritize and efficiently implement.

In recent years we have assimilated a lot of new ideas. Imagine yourself as a drafter in the 1950s, and how mind-blowing printing technology is today. How about a lot of the tedious calculation-based work that has been replaced with software tools: quantity take-offs, spatially organizing office space in a building, or even in creating models themselves. We work in an industry that is constantly evolving and changing. BIM, our chart and compass guiding us in the right direction. 

Today is the first day in over a year that I will be working from somewhere other than my office. It's Monday, which means of course things are slower than normal and the urgency of a Tuesday or Wednesday has not arrived yet. Complicating matters is the fact that I haven’t had to fully dress myself in over a year. 

Imagine for a minute that you’re a plumber working on a building back in the paper age, maybe right around 1956. You have three, 12” storm pipes that need to run through an entire 30.000 sq.ft floor. To complicate matters, these pipes are going inside a Lab. They are sloped, and the piping needs to be as continuous and straight as possible along the way. Oh yea, remember, it’s a lab, so there is a ton of MEP equipment, and there are a handful of beams that you absolutely cannot clash with because they are structural.