Project Highlight

Project Highlight: OpenSpace Capture on a City-Wide Scale by Olsson

Project Highlight: OpenSpace Capture on a City-Wide Scale by Olsson

What?


The city of West Des Moines, Iowa is currently undergoing a massive city-wide project to install a conduit network that will run down every street, and connect to every residential and commercial building in the city. Once complete, Google Fiber will come in and install their fiber-optic cable through the conduit system, providing lightning fast internet to the whole city! This is a complex project, involving many different parties and a large geographic footprint. Olsson, the engineering firm overseeing the project, is using OpenSpace to help document the project and ensure all parties, especially remote team members, are staying up to date on the status of the project.

 

Why is this important? 
 

The footprint of West Des Moines is 48.07 mi², which makes the project size roughly 1,340,114,688 sq. ft.! The project is broken out into 14 phases, and Olsson has the contract for 8/14 of them, covering well over 50% of the city. On any given day, there are 200-300 employees working under Olsson to install this conduit network. This is a lot of area to cover and people to manage, and keeping the project coordinated, as well as providing visibility to all of the project stakeholders is a big challenge. Olsson is using OpenSpace to document pre and post construction progress, giving project team members a historical record of the job, as well as providing remote visibility. It has also been able to save Olsson and the city large amounts of money by being able to use their OpenSpace captures to refute claims of damages caused by construction.

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Upon project completion, the new conduit system is expected to improve the quality of life of all residents of the city by providing more reliable internet. Ryan Meints, the ITS/Telecom Project Manager with Olsson, stated, “By adding Google Fiber to West Des Moines, it’s only going to increase competition, which will drive down prices. It’ll make the incumbent internet providers increase their reliability. Adding Google as another internet provider will improve the quality of life for the residents of West Des Moines.” This is the first conduit system of its kind in the city, with the other providers using utility poles, or their own conduit system. This new city-owned conduit system will hopefully encourage other providers to make use of it.
 

Key Benefits of Using OpenSpace Capture on Large Projects

 

📸  Photo Documented record of the project to verify project status, and refute any scheduling or damage claims

👥  Coordination with various parties and stakeholders to ensure the project is staying on time and under budget

🔎  Remote visibility. With such a large geographic footprint, it is difficult to know the status of the project on a given day. With OpenSpace, users can easily view any part of the project remotely, saving money and time on traveling to the field.

 

Awesome project highlight.  Seems like a project of this scale it’s absolutely critical to the team’s success to have this tech/platform.  


Thanks for sharing @WesleyDuBose this is awesome!


An excellent example on the large scale potential coverage of OpenSpace.