From the Editor: Acronyms: What PM Means to Me

Karen Hickey, editor

To make comments or suggestions, send e-mail to karen@lionhrtpub.com.

Acronyms are ever-present in our daily lives. Readers of this magazine will be familiar with OSHA, EPA, and associations like ABAA, USGBC and AIA, to name only a few. Having just taken the helm as editor of Masonry Design and this being my first issue, I am thankful I already know what CMU, BIM-M and AEC mean. This got me thinking about the letters PM. While this abbreviation usually means post meridiem — the afternoon and evening of each day — it could also stand for project management or preventive maintenance. Let’s explore these two meanings.

As an editor, I’m essentially a project manager. My sales reps and I take blank pages and gather interesting editorial content and advertisements in each issue of the magazine. I’ve always said that putting a magazine together is like building a puzzle: eventually the pieces all come together. Likewise, with construction projects, all the pieces come together in time. A good project manager sees to it, though I know it’s much more involved than a jigsaw puzzle.

What about preventive maintenance? One might say that preventive maintenance is an essential element of project management, in the sense that if you’re managing the project correctly, you’ll avoid a lot of problems. Good project management would therefore naturally end up being preventive maintenance.

These days, technology plays an extensive role in both project management and preventive maintenance for the AEC environment. This issue of Masonry Design explores some of that technology, including BIM and various software programs that can help prevent problems and finish the project.

At the end of April I attended the AIA Conference in Orlando. There I saw firsthand the excitement surrounding BIM, virtual reality and other technologies for the built world. If you have a masonry building in which technology has played a role in the design/build process, tell me about it at karen@lionhrtpub.com. I’d love to cover more of this technology and these projects in the coming issues.