Northbank Office Fit-Out

The commission was a Category B fit-out of two trading floors in a Manchester office block, delivered for an operator who needed the space handed over in two phases so the first floor could be tenanted while the second was still under construction. The architectural scope — demountable glazed partitions, acoustic ceilings, a new reception core — was the easy part. The difficult part was the services: eleven consultants, all modelling in their own software, all with opinions about where the first-fix runs belonged.

As BIM Coordinator I owned the federated model. Every consultant exported to a single naming convention (Northbank-MEC_ES-SO-002_Sheet-Desc), and each model came with a level of detail schedule so we knew what geometry we were actually reviewing. The federated Navisworks file was rebuilt nightly; clashes were run to a 50 mm hard tolerance for services-to-services and 100 mm soft tolerance for services-to-structure, so we were flagging real collisions rather than contact between a duct flange and its own support bracket.

Weekly clash reviews

Each Friday the federated model went on the big screen and the lead consultant from every discipline walked their zones. I kept the run order tight: structure first, then HVAC, then plumbing, then electrical, then ceiling, so that the services were forced to resolve their own overlaps before blaming the architecture. Every clash became a numbered issue in Autodesk Construction Cloud, assigned to a discipline with a due date and a screenshot attached. The approval loop was equally disciplined — nothing was closed until the model was re-issued and re-checked, and the coordinator of the week had the final sign-off.

Over the programme we logged and closed 340+ clashes. The last four weeks produced exactly zero that involved a ceiling height.

Documentation for tender

The documentation set was generated straight from the coordinated model: reflected ceiling plans for every zone, first-fix layout drawings for each discipline, and a colour-coded services zone plan so the mechanical subcontractor knew exactly which ceiling void was theirs. Because the model was clean, the tender pack was issued two weeks ahead of the client’s deadline, and the contractor priced the job with a single clarification query — about the IT floor-box pattern, which no model was ever going to answer.

---

The fit-out handed over on programme, with the second floor following the first by the agreed margin. The quietest compliment came at snagging: the building surveyor reported that not a single ceiling had to be opened up to fix a services clash. That was the whole point of the exercise.