RLB Digital wins Information Management Best Practice at the Digital Construction Awards

RLB Digital’s Project Colin addresses the elephant in the room when adopting a data-driven approach: documents.

Traditionally, documents are created as large, disconnected files, O&M manuals, health and safety files, fire and emergency files (FEF), each authored by different people, in different formats, often with overlapping or conflicting content. This fragmented method leads to duplication, inconsistency and information that’s hard to find, trust, or maintain. Editing one part without affecting others becomes nearly impossible.

Project Colin proposes a shift: instead of starting with whole documents, the process starts with individual pieces of information. These are combined to produce O&M, health and safety and FEF outputs. Each piece of information exists only once, but is reused many times. This eliminates duplication across structured and unstructured formats and clarifies what the information is, so it’s not provided twice (eg asset register vs COBie).

The process separates purposes, information requirements, task/master information delivery plans (TIDPs/MIDP) and CDE metadata. These connect directly to the project’s information standard, where all pick lists are documented. This ensures consistent values across the workflow and aligns the CDE setup with the structure of the requirements and delivery plans, creating a unified data environment.

A key challenge was transferring data from information delivery plans to the CDE. While multi-select lists worked well for building requirements, they complicated data exchange via CSV/XLSX.