Change or Be Left Behind: Managing Digital Transformation in Infrastructure

JOE RASMUSSEN: Welcome to this industry talk, Change or be left behind. My name is Joe Rasmussen. I'm a team manager in Copenhagen Metro, and today, we are going to talk about managing digital transformation in infrastructure projects.

And the agenda for today is introducing the Copenhagen Metro, talking about strategies, goals, and development areas, change management, challenges, and opportunities. And in the end, we will start-- in the end, we will have the summary with our lessons learned.

The learning objective for this session is implement strategies, define goals and development areas, implement change management, and identify common challenges and opportunities.

I'll give you a short introduction to the Copenhagen Metro. The Copenhagen Metro lies in Copenhagen, which is the capital of Denmark. And on the right, you can see the white lines, which is our metro system. The other lines is regional trains, light rail, and intercity trains.

We got four metro lines in the Copenhagen Metro. M1 was established in an operation in 2002, M2 was in operation in 2007, M3 in 2019, the northern part of M4 was in 2020.

The last part of the M4 line will be opened in 2023-- or '24. And right now, we have 39 stations, 25 on the grounds, and we have actually had more than 1 billion passengers since we opened in 2002.

We have driverless transport 24 hours a day, departure every second minute, a high operational reliability, and 97% passenger satisfaction rate.

So why should we actually improve in our next projects? Because right now, what we are having is actually working quite well. But we could see in 2019 handing over the largest infrastructure project in Denmark for the last 500 years, our M3 line, that we were actually a bit behind all others.

Because we have stated our requirements in 2007 to 2010 about how should we actually work, and with 2D pen and paper. And we actually had a new project coming up which were the M5 line, and in there, we could actually see that was the similar size as our last project, the M3 line.

Therefore, we could see that we needed to establish a digitalization strategy. And in there, we actually had seven project-- digital case management, geographic information system, building information modeling, digital asset management, data governance, and data lake. And in the end, to combine everything into the organization, we have change management.

This year, we also had a new business strategy, and in the business strategy, we had that created together with our owners, which is the Copenhagen Municipality, the Municipality of Foxborough, and the State of-- the Danish State. And they said that we need to have some new focus areas which we are actually going to have metro of the future.

So that was customers, climate, clients, safety, and our organization. And if you look into the climate area, it says that we need to reduce our climate footprint with 50% of our new project compared to the old ones. We also need to build state of the art, and everyone should be able to work safely every day.

This was the key objectives, but this is not actually setting the goals or development area, so we need to define those. And in our next big project, which is the M5 project, the new metro line, we actually have set the goals that we need to reduce the use of resources, climate impact, we need to improve passenger experience, and operations robustness, improve safety and working environment, and contribute to the city.

Then again, this is high-level goals. We need to actually create the development areas actually to use this in a tactical and operational way. So we created the development areas about the client where Autodesk Construction Cloud is our single source of truth. We based that on the ISO Standard 19650, other standards as well, and especially the open standards from BuildingSmart.

We are using Autodesk Construction Cloud Docs for the documents management part and following the standard from the ISO 19650 for work in progress, share and publish, and archive. We're also using design collaboration model coordination to coordinate all the design together with the consultants and the contractors to make sure, if there is a change in design, everybody could actually see that change and coordinate their models according to that. We also are using the Build module, the Cost module, and Insight to have the dashboards.

Our BIM project actually stated some ambitions, and one of them was working with 3D. And not just 3D as visualization, but 3D as the foundation of our projects. Because it needs to be strong enough so we actually could build on top of it, but all the other dimensions.

We're also looking into the 4D, the time planning. And when we are talking about time planning, it's actually following the rhythm in there, but also actually measuring the progress of a project.

We're also looking into the cost part, and it's not only putting a price tag on an object, it's actually-- is they setting up the federated model so they actually could be the contract in the future, making sure when we are tendering a contract, then all the models in there actually have their own price and we can actually have a follow-up in the end on that as well.

We also focus on the 6D, the asset management, because when we're doing this construction project, we are generating a lot of different data. And some of that data needs to go into an asset management system. So therefore, we need to make sure that this actually also works in there.

You also have a development area where we actually are looking into the sustainability. How can we actually improve the social, the environmental, and the economy? And in the end, we have the eight dimensions. Safety. How can we actually improve the safety area so everybody could work safely every day?

In our development areas, we have a focus on the climate footprint. How can we optimize and reduce waste? We know from our old projects that 70% of our climate footprint actually comes from the construction phase, and out of that is actually 80% concrete and steel.

So we are looking into and see how can we actually optimize on using less concrete, less steel, or choosing other solutions so we can reduce the carbon emission. We are actually doing that looking into and see, if we have an elevated station, could we actually build that in timber instead?

We also are looking into the safety. How could we actually use safety in design to improve our planning? And when we're talking about safety in design, it's actually trying to figure out how to actually do it safe both in the construction and in operation to identify the potential hazards. And we we're using 4D planning for that as well. But also to make sure that we actually could use visualization and simulations in the coordination and the individual sessions.

We also have a development area customers because we have a big customer engagement, and we actually doing that-- when we are setting up the project, we are making sure that everybody actually knows what we are doing, when we are doing it, making sure that if they're neighbors to our construction site, they are aware of what is going to happen and when.

But we also trying to improve the areas around the station by contributing to the city with a better social effects, but also raising the economy and actually providing them with a better transportation system.

Now we have established the strategy, the goals, ambition, development areas, but we need to implement this into our organization. We are doing that with change management, and we are using the ADKAR model-- and ADCOM stands for Awareness, Desire, Knowledge, Ability, and Reinforcement.

And in the awareness phase, we start in 2019 with roadshows, presentations, interviews with our entire organization just to capture all the business needs. And this was also why we actually established a lot of connections inside the organization, because we are going out as a digitization projects. So make sure that we actually are talking in the organizations.

One of the things that we also wanted to create was a desire because we were coming from pen and paper or working in 2D, and now we needed to work with 3D models or pen. Therefore, we started the session called "BIM Zero to Hero" just to let people know what is a 3D model. How could they actually navigate in it?

But also, to try to drive the cultural change about moving from only to look at the drawing, but actually also seeing all the critical parts in a model or the clashes, for instance.

We also had a lot of workshops and did a proof of concepts. And those proof of concept was actually real projects where we actually tried to demystify the concept, but also to collect the lessons learned about how should we actually do this in our next big project.

And we received a lot of what should we actually do and what should we actually not do again. And especially what should we actually not do again was some good elements that we actually could take into the next phase of it because this is where we actually giving people the capability or ability to actually use the system.

Because now we had some lessons learned about how to actually use the system, how can we actually improve our processes and workflows? And in our classroom settings, we actually could give people the capability of handling their task in Autodesk Construction Cloud.

We also had the last phase, which were reinforcement. And one thing we learned from the lessons learned, that we need to have post-training support, we need to have a follow-up strategy, and we also need to have what we call a desk tour. Going from desk to desk just talking with the different users about how they actually using the system or what is the issues, because then we could actually correct some of the things if there were some issues that they couldn't have handled in the end.

Now we have talked about the strategies, the goals, ambitions, and development areas, and how we actually implemented it. Now we're going to talk about the challenges and the opportunities, but I will start with the challenges.

Some of the challenges is actually that. A lot of our co-workers actually have emotions attachment to the old system. And this is quite normal because they're very comfort in the old system because they know how to actually handle their normal task, but some of them also have an identification about they are actually the person they are because they're using this system and they're quite good at it.

And we are not moving that away from them. Teaching them a new system and new workflow and how should they actually do in the future.

We also had some issues or challenges about legislation because when we are making tenders for construction project, we need to be compliant with the European and Danish law. And some of the issues with this is actually when we are thinking about making tenders based on models instead of drawings, there is no experience with that in both in Denmark, but also in Europe.

So one of the things that we actually had done with this is talk with a lot of lawyers about how to actually do this and handle-- and make the mitigation for this as well.

You also have some cultural challenges about-- for instance, we have a generation gap in our organization. We also have a lot of technical challenges. And it's not just because that we are implementing a new system. It's actually because we would like to have a full integration and a seamless integration between the different systems.

And we can see, when we are coming in with new system with open APIs, then our old system is not mature enough for that yet. So we also need to update them to make sure that we actually could have the full integration.

There is also a lot of opportunities in this. For instance, we have the social, the environmental, and economy sustainability that we actually could improve by actually using digital tools. You also have digital solution for safety, data-driven decision-making, virtual design and construction, digital communication and stakeholder management, and smart infrastructure and maintenance in the end.

I'll actually show you a movie about how we actually have used digital sustainability-- digital solution for safety, virtual design and construction, and digital communication, and stakeholder management.

One of the issues that we actually could see when we were planning the safety and design was that some of the areas-- one of our proof of concept was a very difficult area. Here, you're just seeing a 3D model and the steps in the build rhythm where we actually making a site ready, making sure that everything worked with that.

But one of the critical areas is actually, when we're putting in the big machines to make the excavations or making sure that everything's actually following the right rhythm in there, you could see there was a certain area on this project that was a lot of difficulties with because we need to excavate this part just to make sure that we can have the transit underneath the tracks.

But we actually excavating between two tracks that are in full operation. So we need to make sure that we could use-- or could do this in the right way. And what we were talking with the Danish authorities about was actually how can we actually solve this before we actually make the tender for the project.

So we had a lot of conversations with them about how to actually do this, and we actually used this model-- or these models for that just to have the same picture and a clear communication about what is the mitigation for this as well? So this has been very beneficial for that because here, we could actually make the agreements with the Danish authorities, making sure that we actually have made mitigations, but also have talking from the same picture.

So it's not just the 2D drawings that we are looking on and get different pictures or the ideas, we have actually used this and could see the same visualization and make sure that we actually were talking about the same thing. So this was a clear form for communication.

And of course, it also gives us some nice pictures that we could look at in the end. But in the end, I will just give you a short summary about what we actually have learned with this.

We need to make sure that our strategies and goals are aligned. We also need to set ambitious goals. We need to establish development areas, select and create the proof of concept, create an implementation plan, or plan the change. We also need to have a focus on continuous improvement. And last, it's only a crazy ambition until you do it.