Monday, 25 May 2015

Measuring BIM IQ


Assessing BIM IQ across the organization has utmost importance before going forward. It gives very clear picture (quantitatively and qualitatively). But how to measure it? A simplest method will be carrying out organizational level survey like employee engagement survey or HR surveys where you rate everything on the scale 1 to 5.



An organizational level survey will have many aspects to consider and it should cover all areas right from Upper management for strategic part to ground level staff for implementation purpose. To make things easy let’s classify BIM Planning and Implementation elements in to following categories:

1.      Strategy Aspect: It covers the Mission, Vision, Goals and objectives of the organization related to BIM. It also covers extent of Management support for the BIM, existence of BIM Champion and BIM Planning Committee.

2.      BIM Uses: Its highlights specific methods of implementing BIM and covers areas like Project Specific methods and BIM uses along with Operational Uses of BIM

3.      Process: This aspects highlights the type of processes are being used to accomplish BIM Uses. The processes can be Project specific and Organization Specific.

4.      Information: This aspects covers information needs for BIM and refers to areas like Model Level Development (LOD), Facility Data requirements etc.,

5.      Infrastructure: This aspects checks the technological and physical systems needed for the operations of BIM with the organization. It covers hardware, software and physical space available.

6.      Personnel: This is last and most important aspect to evaluate. Its assessed roles and responsibility of every employee along with need of further training and willingness to change.

All this aspects can be further divided and each division can be presented as questions and can be asked to rate form scale 0 to 5. But what this scale will signify? Let’s just assign qualitative value to each number.

Number 0 – signifies Non Existent

Number 1 – signifies Initial Stage

Number 2 – signifies Managed stage

Number 3 – signifies define Stage

Number 4 – signifies Quantitatively Managed

Number 5 – signifies Optimizing   

Let’s what it means:

0 – Non Existent:

It means the process or methods has not been developed or incorporated in current business. There is no defined goals or objective and process is simply does not exist.

1- Initial Stage:

This means the process is in initial stage and it has produce results for some specific goals and objectives. But those processes are usually ad hoc and chaotic. There is no stable environment to support and there is possibility of abandoning it in the time of crisis.

2- Manages stage:

This means the related process or methods are planned and executed in accordance with policy, employs skilled people having adequate resources to produce controlled outputs and those are monitored, controlled and reviewed and evaluated for future use.

3-Defined:

This means related process or methods are tailored to suit organizations standards. A guidelines and process are developed and included in asset matrix of the organization.

4-Quatitatively Managed:

This means statistical and other quantitative techniques are developed to measure the performance of related method. The process gates asses on the basis of quantitative data and are compared with previous results.

5-Optimizing:

This means process is continually improved through incremental and innovative processes and technological improvements based on quantitative data.

By using this as a guidelines we can assess the organization BIM IQ.

We will evaluate each aspect in further details along with related areas and probable questioner’s in coming blogs.

P.S. The scale is not necessarily form 0 to 5 and can be any scale like 0 to 10. The each scale can be defined differently based on organization requirement.

Monday, 11 May 2015

BIM - It's time to reality check...


 
 
Before we dig deeper into Level 2 BIM and BIM standards (UK based) I really like to share some of my observations of recent time. There are lots of noise about BIM all over the world, loads of seminars happening every now and then, people of talking about BIM and predicting, how this is going to change/transform AEC industry. But the real question worth asking here “Is ground reality changing?” How much your staff, who actually delivers those projects, aware of this BIM thing. Is your Project Manager/Project Engineer enthusiastic about this or just ignoring it as some kind of new fashion fad, which will disappear eventually?

Do you want to get to the reality, look at the advertisement details related to the BIM (Job Title and Job Description)? Majority of those start with fancy title with BIM word in it and all job responsibilities are focused on drafting, modelling, and 3D software. Even most of the corporation who claims to have expertise in BIM treated it as new modelling, rendering and visualization tool and nothing more. Organizations around the world are focusing more on buying advanced design software and focusing less on key factors of BIM – Information and People.

Out of this two major factors, People is most ignored factor. BIM is not a new or improved way of doing existing things, it’s an entire new way of working and here People plays a key role. No matter how powerful is your IT system, how advanced is your software, if people are not excited and educated about it, it’s all just a dead cost to the organizations. Look at the NBS BIM survey of 2015, there is only slight increase in BIM confident Users (1%) compared to last year. There is major percentage, who don’t know who to turn to, when they require more information about BIM and it’s working. Only 48% are aware of the BIM and using its (there is actually as drop of 6% from last year) and another 48% (which have improved just 7% from last year) are just aware of it. BIM is fast becoming a movie who earns all the major awards on film festivals, lots of praise and articles about it pouring in, but when you ask for how many people have actually went to theatre to see it and understood it, the number is very low.

Let’s take the real word example, I work in world’s renowned AEC consultant and my organization is actively pushing forward in BIM through seminars, presentations, talks, forming a BIM group and lots of meetings. In last month, I carried out an informal survey about how much people know about BIM as I am hearing about it for more than two years. To my shock, most of our Project Technical leads strongly believes that BIM is related to 3D CAD and noting more. Almost all of colleagues have the same beliefs and our in-house BIM group is consist if only CAD Technicians and Designers.

All this things highlights the importance of making people aware at all level of the organizations. Carrying out organizations level BIM IQ or Awareness can be starting point of that. Assessing BIM IQ across all the organization will give a very clear picture of the ground reality of BIM status.

Next time we will explore more in ‘How to measure Organization's BIM IQ”

P.S. – I am not part of any BIM Group in my organization and carried out this survey by asking questions to many of my colleagues during our informal discussions.