BIM Coordination

Admitting you’re having BIM coordination issues is a bit like having and embarrassing family member – a lot of people would rather avoid them and hope that they go away.  

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Only they don’t go away by themselves.

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When working on large projects across external teams and with multiple parties, and despite having Project Plans and BIM Execution Plans in place, they can be a persistent irritant.

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Some issues are procedural.

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We are noticing that others – which often take the form of “clashes” – are embedded in organisational culture, which warrants action by project leaders to win hearts and minds in partner organisations where solutions cannot simply be found by “enforcing the manual”:

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• Arrange regular progress meetings with all the teams
• Arrest the “silo mentality”: encourage teams to consider the project in its entirety, rather than by discipline
• Holistic thinking: empower team members by involving them in higher-level discussions and making them aware of strategies and constraints outside their field or area
• Adopt an “everything on” policy in Revit: require team members to regularly turn everything on, including the work of other disciplines, and only turn it off to speed up modelling – it is amazing how many technicians have never seen the entire project!
• Make clash detection the responsibility of every discipline work group rather than that of a centralised Design Manager
• “BIM Team of the Week”: acknowledge and reward the discipline team with the most proactive approach, aiming always for the holy grail of zero clashes
• Involve the client in process
• Keep the client and consultant teams constantly aware of the effects of change.