Splitting the Room to Work in Parallel

A coordination meeting usually has one person driving and everyone else watching. Splitting the room turns that around: the clashes are dealt out into lanes, everyone works their own lane at the same time, and a coverage board shows how the whole room is doing. When you're done, one click brings everybody back together.

This is the part a screen share cannot do — eight people working at once instead of seven watching one.

Splitting is switched on per organization. If you don't see a Split button, ask an organization admin to turn on Divide-and-conquer rooms on the Organization page. See Sessions Hub and Defaults.

Who can split

Only the person who started the session or whoever currently holds the wheel. Everyone else is dealt in.

Choosing how to divide the work

Click Split in the session bar and pick an axis. The menu is built from the clash set in front of you, so you are only offered ways of dividing it that actually divide it — an axis where every clash has the same value isn't a split, and one the set knows nothing about doesn't appear at all.

Depending on your set, you may see:

Responsible contact — the classic division: everyone takes their own clashes.
Group — the Navisworks groups the set was published with.
Level, Grid, Discipline, Category, Test, Priority, Status, Tag — any property the clashes carry. These are the same properties you can group the clash list by, so you can split along whatever you have been looking at all morning.
The N selected clashes — if you have several clashes multi-selected, deal exactly those out as a single lane.

Each menu entry tells you how many lanes it would produce. If nothing divides the set, the menu says so rather than offering an empty list.

A clash can belong to more than one lane — a duct hitting a beam is genuinely both mechanical and structural work. It shows up in both lanes and is counted once in the room's total.

If the set has no responsible contacts on it, splitting by contact is refused with an explanation; pick another axis.

Taking a lane

Once the room is split, the coverage board lists every lane. Unclaimed lanes show a ? avatar and a Take this lane button. Claim one and it becomes yours; your avatar appears against it for everyone else.

Your own lane is also shown in the YOUR LANE panel at the top-left of the viewer, with its name, a progress bar, and how many of its clashes are done.

Your lane is a filter, not a fence

While you are on a lane the viewer isolates it, so you see your own slice of the model rather than the whole set. The Show everything button in the YOUR LANE panel drops that filter whenever you want the full picture back — nothing stops you looking at, or working on, a clash outside your lane. The lane tells you what you are responsible for; it does not lock you out of anything.

Nobody is driving while the room is split

Splitting ends follow-the-driver, because everyone is looking at their own work. The camera is yours. When the room regroups, following resumes automatically for whoever holds the wheel — which is what makes Regroup a single gesture rather than a checklist.

The coverage board

The board on the right is the thing a meeting normally lacks: one place that says how the whole room is doing.

Coverage — how many of the set's clashes have been covered, out of the total, with a progress bar.
Rate and projection — "N / hour" and "~X left", extrapolated from what this room has actually managed so far. It appears once there is enough throughput to extrapolate from.
In no lane — clashes that landed in nobody's lane. These are the ones that get missed, so they are called out separately.
Per-lane rows — who has it, the lane's name, covered-out-of-total, a progress bar, its flag count, and any drift.
Drift — "+N reassigned in" or "−N moved out" appears when a lane has changed size since the split, because work moved during the meeting. It is information, not an alarm; it is normal.

Your own lane sorts first, and the lane with the most left to do comes next — that's where the room's attention needs to go.

Parking a clash for the group

Some clashes can't be settled alone. In the clash inspector, Flag for discussion parks one for the whole room. Flag counts show against your lane and on the board, so everyone can see the contested pile building up.

This is the single most useful thing to do with a clash you can't resolve on your own — better than sitting on it until the end of the meeting.

Bringing in someone without an account

If a lane belongs to a contact who has no ClashWise account — a subcontractor, a specialist — you can hand them that lane for the length of the meeting with a link. They see their lane, work it like anyone else, and see nothing else in the set. See Inviting a Guest to a Lane.

Regrouping

When the parallel work is done, whoever is leading clicks Regroup. Everyone comes back to a shared view, following the driver again, and the clashes that were flagged become the room's agenda — stepped through one at a time with the person who flagged each one named.

The agenda was written by the room, during the meeting, out of exactly the clashes that needed the group. That is what makes it worth working through.

What is recorded

Splitting changes how the room works, not what the session records. Everything in Running a Live Session still applies: status, priority, contact and due-date edits are recorded automatically with the clash number and who made them, wherever in the room they were made. The minutes and the PDF report are built from that same record.

Tips

Split by whatever suits this meeting. Contact is the obvious axis, but by level or by discipline is often the way the trades are actually working the building.
Flag early. A clash parked in the first ten minutes gets discussed; one parked at the end gets deferred.
Watch the in no lane number. If it is large, the axis you split on doesn't describe this set well — regroup and split a different way.
Regroup before you end the session, so the flagged pile gets worked rather than inherited by the next meeting.

FAQs

Can I work on a clash that isn't in my lane? Yes. The lane filters your view; it doesn't restrict what you can edit. Show everything brings the whole set back.

What if someone doesn't take a lane? Unclaimed lanes stay on the board with a ? avatar and a Take this lane button. Nothing is lost — the clashes are still counted in the room's total, and anyone can pick the lane up at any point.

Can we split twice on the same thing? No. Splitting again on an axis the room already has is refused rather than dealing a second identical set of lanes. Split on a different axis, or regroup first.

Does splitting change who can end the session? No. Ending the session works the same as always, and Regroup is separate from it — you can regroup and carry on meeting.

We split by contact but got one lane. That means the set only has one responsible contact on it, or none. Splitting needs at least two distinct values on the axis; try level or discipline instead.