Throughout our BIM Booster Guide, we have provided our recommendations for evaluating the core components of your BIM kit, focusing on the long-term continuity and interoperability of these tools to help you better manage the flow of information.
This latest installment focuses on the need to redefine your strategy, cultural mindset, and understanding of where your organization or your project is within its BIM adaption maturity model.
Successful BIM adaption cannot be achieved with technology alone. When considering BIM adaption at a project or organization level, it is essential to reflect on these three significant factors: people, process, and technology.
Here are five recommendations to consider:
1. Visualize and Document Your Processes
Visual representation of processes makes it easier to identify ‘who’ does ‘what’ and ‘when’, while also identifying gaps and opportunities for improvement.
With the abundance of technical information involved in BIM adaption, areas for misunderstanding are rife. However, by describing strategies and methodology and increasing the level of planning, the number of uncertainties in the implementation process is reduced.
Creating a coherent and concise document that communicates your agreed processes and procedures to your project team or your organization can help to eliminate ambiguity. This document could be in the form of a project, BIM execution, or quality management plan.
One way to aid understanding is by adopting a standardized approach for creating diagrams, such as Business Process Management Notation standards (BPMN) – the de-facto standard for business processes diagrams.
BPMN allows organizations to understand their internal business procedures in a graphical notation while providing them with the ability to communicate these procedures in a standard way. These diagrams can also be translated into software process components, enabling organizations to adjust to new circumstances quickly.
2. Engage Early with End Users
Onboarding operations and facilities management teams early in the process will enable a smooth transition from construction to operation.
For successful BIM adaption across your team and organization, all asset users need to be involved in the process, with sufficient consideration given to how the asset may change or need to be adapted over its lifetime. Costly consequences can occur if assumptions are not adequately tested early on.
To facilitate this smooth transition, you should adopt a Soft Landings framework. This strategy runs throughout the project lifecycle, ensuring all project decisions are based on improving the asset’s operational performance and meet client expectations.1
The framework sets out best practices at all project stages and helps to ensure the way assets are used, managed, and maintained is integrated into the design process.
3. Assess Your Team’s Skillset
BIM transformation requires new skills and new ways of working, so you need a clear understanding of your team’s current skill set and the skills your organization may need in the future.
Assessing the BIM maturity level of your team will help with this understanding. Ask yourself the following questions of your team:
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- Do they currently possess the proper experience and knowledge to execute and deliver projects in alignment with BIM process requirements?
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- Do they need more training?
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- Can they be trained?
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- Should new personnel be brought in to achieve the set goals?
BIM transformation requires an understanding of sometimes new and misunderstood concepts. Training and education are necessary to support the adaption of BIM into daily work projects. These programs will help you achieve BIM adaption while also driving and motivating practitioners, building up valuable intellectual capital in your organization.
4. Upgrade your Contracts and Legal Considerations
BIM drives change and will impact standing relationships and agreements between stakeholders; therefore, you need to update your contractual and legal considerations to ensure a smooth BIM transformation.
BIM-enabled collaboration marks a significant shift change from traditional processes. While there is great potential for you to improve working relationships with your team and other stakeholders, it can also generate new challenges that need to be resolved.
Roles, responsibilities, risks, and liability should be clearly outlined, allowing all stakeholders to share in the benefits of BIM transformation.
For BIM to not be blocked by issues arising from contract or legal conventions, you need to consider how to manage this change.
5. Measure and Monitor Cultural Evolution
To ensure successful adaption and reduce risk, your transformation needs to be monitored closely and occur over time.
Transforming the way your organization works or how your project operates is no small task. It takes organizational and process improvement, technology adaption, and alignment with overarching strategies and goals.
By closely measuring the process, you can identify backtracking, correct issues, highlight improvement, and help to boost momentum.
Effective risk management is necessary to prevent failures. Establishing a culture risk management program is one way to aid this process. This program will help your organization understand how employees are finding the transformation process and may include behavioral monitoring or regular check-ins in the form of meetings or surveys.
Identify issues that have occurred and document, analyze, and store them. Ensure this data is retrievable and the knowledge gathered is shared with other teams and regions for use on future projects. By monitoring how the transformation has been received and undertaken, you can learn lessons for the future.
Final Thoughts
Alongside technological considerations, for true change to happen, company-wide, project-wide, and employee-wide buy-in is essential.
For a BIM business transformation to deliver real benefits, projects and organizations need to evolve their current beliefs, culture, technology, and standards. A clear vision and strategy, with accompanying goals, will help you to realize change and put your organization on the right course to achieve new levels of excellence and resilience in your BIM adaption journeys.
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