Your parents probably told you. Your mentor probably told you. You make choices in your life and then you live with the consequences.
Choosing to use BIM is a lot like that – there are consequences you will have to live with, changes you will need to make. When you start using BIM you find out that, unlike CADD, the best person to operate it is not the most junior, computer savvy person on your staff. BIM is virtual building, and you need someone that understands buildings to make the virtual model useful.
BIM also means working more in teams – teams of consultants and contractors. You’ll work more with contractors than ever before, simply because the value of BIM lies more with owners and contractors than it does with architects and engineers. (This isn’t bad if you can get in the middle of things and lead the team!) Integrated Project Delivery is a means of getting everyone on the same team for everyone’s mutual benefit.
While you’re there with all those contractors you’ll notice that they are typically a very organized group. If you had to sit down and schedule concrete pours and all that attendant stuff – formwork, rebar, finishing – you’d tend to want to organize a lot more things. Architects are not organized that way – we tend to work more holistically, first on the plan, then on the elevation, then over to the section, then back to the plans until the whole design is done. This will likely annoy the contractors, but this is how design is developed, and they’ll have to get used to it.
But having a project management plan is not a bad idea either. Plan on how the scope of the work gets defined, and how that work gets broken down into smaller components. Plan on how you’ll communicate with each other, especially how the model gets shared and how changes/updates are issued. Plan on how the estimates, the cost structure will be developed. Plan on when the model is issued, to whom it is issued, which subcontractors have input to it, and when the design is done.
Plan on how quality becomes a part of the process, using the experience of the team members and the clash detection features software can provide. And especially, plan on how changes to the model are proposed, discussed, approved and implemented.
Plan too, how you will start with BIM if you haven’t already. I recall that when we made the leap to CADD, the firm I was with at the time did so at the insistence of a client that wanted his new 1,000 key hotel documented in CADD. Take some of the pressure off by not using new technology on the largest, most critical project in the office unless there is no other choice.
This is shared from my blog BIMplementation, at http://bimplementation.wordpress.com