The Battle for BIM

BIM is a tool and it's only as good as the hands that are using it. The people who can make the most impact with BIM during construction are the field personnel (superintendent, project manager, project engineer, and so forth). These are the individuals who are on the front lines every day, interacting with the owner and dedicated to the quality of their work and the safety of their employees. They are the ones with mud on their boots, who are at the job before the sun comes up and who are the last ones to leave. They have a passion for what they do and enjoy the euphoric smell of freshly poured concrete and mud on the walls. It’s these individuals who come together as a team to execute the dream of the design, and it’s these teams that must have the tools they need to execute the dreams of the future. The “battle for BIM” is the internal conflict construction companies are facing with getting the tools in the right hands.

The book Relentless Innovation: What Works, What Doesn’t—And What That Means for Your Business (McGraw-Hill, 2011) by Jeffrey Phillips does a great job of explaining the challenge construction companies have to confront in order to contend in the new market. In summary, whenever an innovation threatens a company’s foundational practices, it will be met with resistance. Construction companies are not built on innovation; they’re built on operations. For some construction companies, BIM is still viewed as an innovation and not an operational practice required for administering construction.

BIM-enabled individuals make up a minority of the operational workforce, and their contribution to the bottom line is still being evaluated by the majority who are generating most of the income for the company. The majority work under a policy and procedures manual that has been formulated over the years by the brightest minds in the company. Construction companies invest thousands or millions of dollars into training the majority on ways to execute these procedures. This manual is the benchmark for evaluating performance against your peers and ultimately determines promotions, salaries, and bonuses. It is performance based, clearly defined, and a measurable standard to work toward—if you want to become a superintendent complete steps 1, 2, 3…. If you want to be a project manager, complete steps 4, 5, 6….

BIM can be perceived as relatively new compared to traditional methods, isn’t universally accepted, has uncertainty to its value (especially when the tool is in the wrong hands), requires assumptions, isn’t quite measurable, and doesn’t necessarily determine the majority’s promotions or bonuses. These perceptions make it difficult for the majority to understand the promise of BIM and sacrifice time away from executing the day-to-day operations known to determine promotions and bonuses. Given these circumstances, can you blame the majority for not adopting BIM? No.

The BIM minority, on the other hand, dwells in the promise of BIM. They use the software every day and see all the benefits and efficiencies that it can bring to the industry. In their minds, BIM is not necessarily a new tool, because they recognize we’re in the early to late majority phase and not the early adopter phase, so BIM has proven to be the new “business as usual.” With that understanding, they become easily frustrated and deflated when the value they feel they’re contributing isn’t recognized by the traditional majority. These internal divided visions from the traditional majority and the BIM minority have created a battle for BIM and inconsistency in executing BIM effectively.

We’ve seen large contractors that we thought were going to do very well, not do very well. We’ve seen small to medium size…just kill it on the BIM side.

Phone conversation with Craig Dubler, virtual facilities engineer at Penn State University and project manager for the Penn State BIM Execution Planning Guide

This inconsistency creates a tremendous threat to companies unwilling to disrupt the traditional process, because though the internal value is being argued about, the external value is being revealed. Owners and subcontractors are starting to develop matrices based on contractor BIM performance, which means the value of BIM is starting to be quantified. Since 2007, the people who were most affected by a contractor’s careless distribution of BIM tools to inexperienced professionals were these two groups. Now both “clients” are analyzing the results and finding ways to deal with these issues:

Owners

Owners have started using standards to weed out the “Hollywood BIM” and the teams that oversell and underdeliver. The implementation of these standards will continue to grow and become more robust as owners analyze the successes and failures of projects that have used BIM.

Subcontractors

Subcontractors have a different media to sort out the “Hollywood BIM.” It’s called “fee.” They are starting to raise or lower their pricing depending on how well contractors administer BIM, because they lose money on detailing, material, and field labor when coordination is done poorly. What this means is that contractors might not even be able to compete for work, based solely on qualifications from the owner. It also means that if they make it through the qualifications, they may not be able to compete due to estimates from the subcontractors. Executing BIM effectively is no longer an option—it’s a necessity.

The challenge is that as long as companies reward the traditional practices and fail to get BIM tools in the right hands, they will not be able to develop the skills necessary to execute effectively. This support has to come from the leaders evaluating the field personnel. A common misconception is the “top-down philosophy,” which implies that companywide adoption is dependent on the CEO. Although their buy-in is important, it is not the bottleneck. The majority of construction company CEOs recognize the need to adopt BIM. Their job is to see what’s coming on the horizon, which is why they’re CEOs. The bottleneck is in the mid-level management and executives.

The problem with executive sponsorship is that often it only travels one level. Even though the executives are advocating innovation, people still need budgets and resources for innovation and the existing teams have specific targets to achieve. Unless the executive team gets involved and changes the way people work on a day to day basis, and encourages risk taking, all the executive sponsorship is just a communication strategy.

Jeffrey Phillips, “The Innovation Paradox,” http://innovateonpurpose.blogspot.com/2008/10/innovation-paradox.html

Even if the field staff acknowledge the need and promise of BIM, they’re often too busy “checking the boxes” on their performance plans and/or lack the allowances necessary to develop the means to see it. If leaders continue to use the existing procedures to track their staff’s performance against their peers, it will be difficult for the majority to believe they should be transitioning to this new process. Field personnel must be given the resources to bridge the knowledge gap, but also have a willingness to learn how to get across it. A great interdependent relationship can be created between the BIM minority and the traditional majority, because the minority will struggle without the majority’s support. At the same time, the majority needs the BIM minority so they can synthesize their practical knowledge with innovative technology in order to leverage it and adapt to this new industry.

The first, and most important, ability you can develop in a flat world is the ability to “learn how to learn”—to constantly absorb, and teach yourself, new ways of doing old things or new ways of doing new things. That is an ability every worker should cultivate in an age when parts or all of many jobs are constantly going to be exposed to digitization, automation, and outsourcing, and where new jobs, and whole new industries, will be churned up faster and faster.

Thomas L. Friedman, The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005, 2006, 2007) Release 3.0

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