Construction Gatekeeping Services: All You Need to Know

Construction gatekeeping services help projects eliminate data inconsistencies between design team deliverables and agreed project requirements. It involves setting out detailed parameters for every deliverable and checking the submissions against those, before it can be used for execution.

Gatekeeping services in construction also refer to measures that determine who or what can get access to a construction site. This blog is not about site access control, it is about information gatekeeping and how it enables it.

What Gatekeeping is and Isn’t

A construction gatekeeper is the professional who decides whether a shared deliverable meets agreed requirements. Construction management firms help project teams to list out those in a written document such as a BIM execution plan (BEP). This role works best results when the gatekeeper is independent of the model team in controlling access to what enters the shared environment.

General contractors may confuse the service with BIM coordination, clash detection or general QA/QC checks. However, gatekeeping sits right at the entry point, validating every piece of information before it reaches the BIM environment. The information can include design models, drawings, schedules and even revisions.

When a project is signed, there are set rules for naming and file conventions, level of detail, units coordinate systems and file formats. Gatekeeper ensures that the information coming in at each project stage for BIM coordination follows these conventions. Hence, teams with critical roles can perform coordination and construction work from trusted and consistent project information.

What a Gatekeeping Check Covers?

A gatekeeping check covers all the critical aspects of a construction data that directly or indirectly cause issues in the design process. Below are the checks that every gatekeeping service should provide you regardless of the project scale.

The Gatekeeping Process

In the construction industry, every project will have different kinds of gatekeeping needs. However, these are the basic steps that every submission must go through for maximum benefit from this service.

Data comes into the CDE: Relevant project teams complete coordination form their side and upload the deliverable to the common data environment with metadata and transmittal.

Automated rule checks: As most BIM software applications with modern technology have automated checks, it will test the submissions against agreed conventions. It flags and returns anything that does not fulfill the requirements.

Manual expert review: This is the part where experts regularly review what software often cannot check, These include checking if the level of detail is optimal for a particular stage or find any inconsistencies between model, shop drawings and as-built drawings. While professionals duly update everything, they might miss a last minute model update, that goes unreflected in the shop drawings.

Issue report: Experts log each issue with its location, the convention it mismatches, and the team that needs to take action for resolution.

Accept or reject: Submissions that pass both the software and manual checks are accepted and failures are returned with a report for resubmission.

Publish with an audit trail: Professionals publish the information to the shared environment with guaranteed smooth coordination.

Common Mistakes in Construction Gatekeeping

Gatekeeping involves checking multiple deliverables at each construction phase. The first set of checks happens in the software but manual expert reviews require time and diligence. This is because there are naming conventions, file formats, model placements and more. With large-scale construction projects the list increases and hence mistakes are bound to occur. Here are the common but costly mistakes to avoid:

Rubber-stamp approvals: Under deadline pressure, it often happens that reviewers approve submissions without real scrutiny. The manual review should not become a formality just because there is a green tick from the software. When teams completely rely on the software judgement it compromises worker safety.

No acceptance criteria in the BEP: The BIM execution plan holds key information on what should be accepted and what not. It gives the standard, measurable criteria for review and prevents every review from applying their own. If these are not mentioned beforehand, gatekeeping would add problems rather than eliminate them.

Same executive for authoring and checking: When both the responsibilities come on one end, several details get missed out. It is because the person who delivered the submission will most likely check the areas where it took greater effort. However, an independent checker will verify it from a broader perspective and catch missed errors.

Gatekeeping at the final handover: Firms can provide construction gatekeeping services only at the final stages disregarding the fact that all the inconsistencies have stacked up. And, by now, fixing these mistakes means extensive reworking and project delays.

How Gatekeeping Supports On-site Safety

The modeling team may consider incorrect dimensions and misplaced elements in the model as coordination problems.

However, construction companies do not understand that these often become safety problems in the field. For example a duct route through the workzone, miscalculated crane paths or wrongly sequenced construction can damage safety protocols.

Most of these can go unnoticed in the design phase because the fault was in the data received. Gatekeeping services sit right at the entry point of this information, checking every piece of it against the set standards during project sign.

The BIM model is the single source of truth of modern construction projects and every team, including the construction crews indirectly rely on it. Gating checks if there are unresolved clashes that can cause potential safety hazards and downgrade efficiency. These are the same pre-construction checks that support the safety measures in a site safety plan.

Poorly sequenced construction activities also hinder safety regulations and give rise to workplace accidents or liability issues. However, a BIM model that has been gated with accountability will provide safe lift paths, lay down areas and equipment use and movement routes.

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) governs the on-site worker safety under their general safety provision 29 CFR 1926.20(b). Any construction project in the U.S. has to identify and control construction site safety hazards and correct unsafe conditions as per OSHA’s construction standards. Gatekeeping services do not replace the site safety program that projects conduct separately for this. When project managers integrate it across the project lifecycle, it identifies data inconsistencies that should not reach the site.

Final Thoughts

Gatekeeping checks project data before it enters the shared environment for coordination or construction work. One consideration to get the most benefits of this is that the process should not be treated as a formality after the automated checks. There should be pre-defined gatekeeping standards in the BIM execution plan for the experts to carry. That will combine software checks with informed human review for handling quality risks and provide peace to construction managers. If you want to integrate this in your current project, a reliable partner can handle all the legwork required.

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