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.