OOTB x MiMO
Jan 7/2022
by Michael Copas
Over the past year we have been referring to MiMo and OOTB. These acronyms refer to “minimum input – MAXIMUM OUTPUT” and “Out Of The Box”, two strategies that were applied to a 2021-2022 Sample Project, and now being used as the basis of in our Online Training Modules.
Over the past year we have been referring to MiMO and OOTB. These acronyms refer to “Minimum input—MAXIMUM OUTPUT” and “Out of the Box”, two strategies that were applied to a 2021-2022 Sample Project, and now being used as the basis of in our Online Training Modules.
OOTB is a specific Sample Project that delivers predeveloped logs/reports, templates/forms, and data to demonstrate the features of FIVE by Statslog to a new user. It is also the tool for teaching basic Contract Administration activities and services, in the context of using FIVE by Statslog herein called simply FIVE.
MiMO is the targeted use of the ‘Body text’ of Change, Review, and Submittal Templates/Forms in FIVE, to emulate standard appearance of typed text, but populated by data entry in a standardized Log for separate sorting. The benefit being the elimination of duplicate entry required by a Word/Excel solution, and to facilitate easy retrieval, sorting, and searching of the contents of your project material. This material is generally not easily searchable in separate apps with their different focuses. This is compounded with images, pdf drawings, all with there own function specific workflows and system constraints. FIVE’s sole purpose is to organize, store, publish and distribute contract administration documents of approval, as your practice wants them to flow, and to provide a record of those activities.
Let’s first review the impact of MiMo on changes.
Recent lockdowns made all activities of a practicing office, separated. The communal office base was lost, and and individual staff were left to solve their problems alone. Creating forms and reports in-house was often an on-demand task of receptionists, secretaries, and admin assistants. Now the contract administrator(s) were isolated, with email, Zoom and phone their only contact. Long reports became shorter if not cryptic. Detailed observations became less clear. Statslog reviewed this situation and first started to apply miMO as advice to clients.
As OOTB arrived, advice to clients was becoming more difficult and we needed a vehicle to show how delivery of a new data entry process would work for a typically open-ended typing assignment. Here we encountered and applied a common and widely used principle for recording and reporting a news event. That process was the 5Ws – What, Where, Why, When, and Who. These coincidentally are the question of litigants during the discoveries process, and became the basis of the MiMo for the Change Process in FIVE.
In combination, these strategies provide FIVE an out of the box project with standard FIVE forms and reports that meet all professional practice standards regardless of the source and allow those who apply them in FIVE a quantum leap forward in data quantity and quality experience.
For those who customize, your forms and reports this shift will express your independence: graphically, naming conventions, and approval workflow all your own, yet fully responsive to any external collaborative process the owner or contractor may impose.
OOTB identified two other processes where the problem was less about collection of data but retrieval of data. The first was Field Review Reports whose text were often epic in proportion, and for those so inclined, links to a myriad apps for attachments of image or drawings. For this we developed a Body Text in the Review Tab form that has an embedded Table in a style common for such forms. This table is stored and managed separately in Review Items Tab. In this way the items list, usually unsearchable, is now available to sort and group as needed for review and analysis.
The second was Submittals, which over recent time has migrated to Contractors based apps for issuing documents and demanding timely responses. For this we develop a streamlined receiving, forwarding, and returning process that automatically creates a transmittal for each stage of the cycle for Shop drawings and Sample Reviews. It formalizes the transfer of material and eliminates a forwarded submission that has no response, or returned submission not recorded as such, by the Contractor. This recording can be consistent with and merge with, but independent of, the Contractor’s app.
Michael Copas is a co-founder of Statslog Software Corporation, which has been providing continuing service to contract administrators in the offices of design professionals since 1984.