David Van Wyk, vice president of project management for Walt Disney Imagineering is known for lean project management. He is the keynote speaker here at Siemens Automation Summit.
"I'm here to talk about technology and I went to the hall next door and saw all the technology," he said, "and I thought that I was going to have to talk to all of you engineers who do this stuff every day."
"We are in the midst of taking a long look at the way we do technology at Imagineering."
"We have somewhere between 140 and 150 different skill sets in Imagineering--it is a diverse group that produces diverse products," Van Wyk said.
Van Wyk said that his issue is how Imagineering can continue to deliver the "wow!" in a changing world. "We could be the next Olivetti typewriter if we can't change with our chang8ing audience. We have a culture of interdisciplinary coordination so we can get around the table and collaborate. We have developed and keep working on a culture of collaboration. We have established a culture of innovation, and that means prototyping. We are a culture of renewal and reinvention. We do not have an NIH (not invented here) culture.
He showed a venn diagram of the Disney Imagineering strategy, including people, process and product. "At the heart of this is really the people, the people, the people," Van Wyk said.
our product is increasing in complexity and the world's changing-- and the expectations of visitors are changing and becoming much more significant.
Key design and construction process has remained unchanged since the 20th century, yet projects have become increasingly complex. Productivity in the construction industry has actually decreased over the past 50 years.
Van Wyk posited a case for change. The challenges are increasing complexity, which requires a higher level of resources, a significant change from poor coordination, while project costs outpaced inflation. "That means that we might not be able to afford to create the products!"
We are evolving a BIM enabled integrated project delivery methodology, embracing partners, and their expertise in costructability, design/documentation skill and risk management, he said.
Our objectives, he said, include predictability, collaboration, impeccable coordination, reducing decision latency, collective quality and doing it all "just in time."
van Wyk said that they are using Integrated Concurrent Engineering to reduce decision latency and shorten stages "from months to weeks."
"We find ourselves thinking about quality when we look at a project that is horribly wrong." We need to assure ourselves of quality from the design to production.
He showed the MacLeamy Curve...cost increases while the ability to change decreases over the life of the project.
He said, "IPD requires us to cultivate reliable and effective partners, select partners on the basis of total value, invest early in our vendors and constructors, earlier finalization of design, and encourage early contribution by key participants."
"Learning from our partners...ideally contracts should be based on trust and colla boratin and transparent development of project scope, cost and schedule. We spend 18 months doing the design, and then we give our vendors 6 weeks to respond to our bid documents. This is not working-- it causes strife."
Van Wyk talked about the collaborative project management tools, with multiple trades as an effective management system.
The engine that drives us, he went on, is BIM (Building Information Management). We are moving from local efficiencies to more global efficiencies. We need to do real-time collaboration through pre-visualization. We model only what is needed. We build virtually. We model with the intent to prefabricate.
He said the challenges of migrating to BIM include the pace of advancement of digital tools, the number of design stakeholders and how do we effectively distribute the information. We need to take into account the strong preferences on the part of numerous stakeholders regarding software platform and the varied needs and capabilities of our outside design, fabrication and construction partners.
"The technology is here, it just isn't evenly distributed," he said.
Van Wyk showed several BIM-enabled projects including Ariel's Undersea Adventure. He noted that some of the hardest things we do is to get kitchens right. They have started to use virtualization to pre-test the workability and design.
Our key learnings: champion innovation of our discipline to continuously improve ourselves and our efficiency. Utilize our partners talent and expertise earlier--leverage their learnings. And we need to keep working to get the best out of the tools, leveraging BIM to get the most out of the process.
At the end of the day, it is about creating marvelous experiences.
