“We had entire walls just covered in drawings,” recalls Michael Adams, ZGF associate principal and the firm’s BIM coordinator and manager. “You would bring people into the room, talk through a problem and mark it up together.”

But for the Portland airport, the largest design team ever assembled in Oregon history—engineers, architects, consultants, contractors and owners—was scattered to different office sites when the pandemic sent them home in March 2020.

“Skanska, [the part of the Hoffman Skanska Joint Venture contractor responsible for BIM coordination] for this particular project, got files delivered, our contract deliverable at the end was our PDF documents, not the 3D model,” Adams says. “The model was there to help inform [team members[, but our digital release agreement with the team at large, was that everything really lives in the documents and you could cross check it with the model if need be.”

To deal with remote work during the design phase, the entire project team switched from in-office meetings to Bluebeam Studio Sessions—an online collaboration site. ZGF moved its entire workflow to the shared digital environments where stakeholders could mark up the same drawing set simultaneously, regardless of their locations.

Switch to Digital Becomes Standard

Adams says there were more than 780 different design packages that needed to go out while everyone still worked remotely. This encompassed even the smallest deliverable, “even an early procurement package that had minimal Revit documentation [and was] more of a high-level look at what needed to be purchased.” Everything had to be prepared in Bluebeam Studio Sessions to ensure it went through correctly.

ZGF had already been using Studio Sessions, but remote work drove the firm to vastly expand what could be done with it. What was previously a tool used more for communication was now the primary platform for coordination meetings.

“The Studio site works very much like SharePoint, where you go in and check out the file, mark it up and push it back in with your changes,” Adams says. “So we used it as a pseudo-sessions environment, and when there was a large, collaborative effort needed, we would gather the PDFs and push them into a session. That would then act as a typical session with multiple people crawling all over it and making changes, then we would bring it back into the Studio project side.”

Eventually, review cycles that took weeks became just a matter of days to complete. All disciplines and stakeholders were represented, and color-coded mark-up standards gave structural engineers in one time zone and architects in another, a shared visual language with no confusion about who flagged what or whether an issue had been resolved.

Sets linked thousands of documents into a single navigable system and Slip Sheeting kept revisions clean. Because there was a record of who changed what in sessions, tracking made accountability visible to everyone—including airport owner the Port of Portland, Skanska, and its subcontractors.

“All metadata of who did what and when was there,” Adams points out. “The return on investment actually showed up a few years in. I kept beating the drum about having to [use Studio Sessions], and the crystal ball turned out right in the end.”