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.
Only they don’t go away by themselves.
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.
Some issues are procedural.
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”:
- 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.
