Improving Stakeholder Communication with TraceAir

Communication Across Multiple Stakeholders at Brookfield Properties' Pier 70 Development

Challenge

Communication between owners, contractors, city officials, land use attorneys, and other local agencies can be a difficult process when there are many stakeholders on a project team. Decision making requires a lot of coordination between several entities, which can result in hours spent in meetings and copious amounts of back-and-forth communication.

The TraceAir Solution‍

TraceAir helps project teams collaborate virtually to review construction progress, discuss issues, and develop creative solutions to challenges, then easily explain these highly technical concepts to a non-technical audience. TraceAir helps developers, contractors, and public officials use visual communication to make the right decisions quickly.

On the Pier 70 development in San Francisco, Sr. Project Manager, David Greenstein and Josh Bardet, Interagency Project Coordinator representing the Port of San Francisco, use TraceAir to facilitate decision making with the dozens of stakeholders on the project.

Before TraceAir, the team explained complex construction challenges using CAD files of construction plans, which can be cumbersome and difficult to understand for non-technical professionals. To better communicate with stakeholders using visuals, David implemented TraceAir to capture current project images.

TraceAir makes it easy to explain difficult concepts using aerial images overlaid with construction documents and CAD files. Using TraceAir, David is able to present accurate, easy-to-understand visuals to his audience. Meetings run much more quickly, and TraceAir minimizes the amount of back and forth between the developer, contractor, and other project stakeholders.‍

“TraceAir is important for making decisions quickly and getting everyone on board. We get there a lot faster, and it saves us a lot of time solving problems, because we don't want to have eight hours of meetings every day. We'd like to have a lot more one hour meetings that actually get us to the next critical path action item," David stated.

In essence, TraceAir is an effective communication tool for developers, general contractors, and the entire project team.

— David Greenstein, Sr. Project Manager, Brookfield Properties

Josh Bardet's role on the project involves coordinating with multiple local agencies, responding to RFI's, and helping resolve issues between multiple stakeholders. A major challenge in his role is ensure information is communicated between the correct agencies, and that information is reviewed and responded to efficiently.

Getting things done quickly is another challenge. He began using TraceAir on this project to visually communicate between agencies and resolve conflict, improving the timeliness of reviews and responses.

We can overlay things on TraceAir and share those with the acquiring agencies. It's just an efficient way to communicate. A picture paints 1,000 words, right? For example, if I can visually show a conflict between agencies on the site, it can help them understand and balance their respective priorities without going into CAD. It's super helpful for us.

—Josh Bardet, Interagency Project Coordinator, Hollins Consulting