Tuesday 3 December 2013

BIM - Administration and Software.

I've just started working as a BIM  developer for Colour Urban Design and Teesside University. This is my personal blog post that I started writing before entering the role 

This post should serve to give the background to those who come into contact with me later in the process towards the creation of a landscape and site BIM system an understanding of where I'm coming from and my direction.

First of all, what is BIM. To those that know and those that think they know, this is a simple and obvious question. A simple and obvious question that I have put to several different, highly experienced people and received wildly varying answers. Which is interesting, because the entire point of BIM is predictability.

So, here I am going not to write not so much what BIM 'is', because what it 'is' depends upon your experience and your perspective. Instead, I'm going to write about what my perspective is, and perhaps bring some insights from an unusual perspective. I was a mature Landscape Architecture student, I have done some programming, and have through nearly a decade of administrative jobs been subjected to a variety of 'labour saving' administrative and I.T. systems. So I understand not only how systems are designed, but how they work in practice (which is rarely the same thing).

For me, BIM is an administrative and I.T. set of systems used in built environment projects to facilitate greater project cohesiveness, coherence and clarity.

There are many optimistically penned treatises upon BIM and its advantages. I fully subscribe to their intentions and to their desired outcomes. However, my experience on the front line of administration urges caution.

If you accept my premise that BIM is an administrative and I.T. set of systems, then it is rational, to suppose that the rules governing the design and implementation of I.T. and Administrative systems also applies to BIM. In further posts I will continue to expand upon BIM and its implications, as well as getting into what it means for those industries who lag behind others and the ground that needs to be made up, specifically for Landscape Architecture.

For now however, enjoy a bit of classic administration theory.

By far my favorite 'laws' of anything are Parkinsons Law(s) and so I'm going to dedicate the rest of this first post to one of them:

"The time spent on any item of the agenda will be in inverse proportion to the sum [of money] involved."

The usual concept rolled out to explain this law is that signing off on a nuclear reactor takes less time than a bike shed. The reason being that anyone assigned to approve the expenditure of a nuclear reactor assumes that Nuclear Physicists know all there is to know about building a nuclear reactor, indeed far more than any mere mortal who is assigned to approve the expenditure and so the experts are left to make their own decisions, whereas the bike shed is in the minds of the same people believed to be understood  regardless of expertise, so a merry old time is had weighing in on the subject.

An individual's role and expertise is laid bare by BIM, exposed to all far beyond their immediate consultants and stakeholders. So suddenly, illusion removed, far more jiggery pokery by well meaning stakeholders in all aspects of the design is invited.

Conversely, BIM, which as I have said is just a set of administrative and IT systems, is very much the 'Nuclear Physics' of the construction industry, so rather than weighing in on shaky knowledge, whole swathes of the industry are staying out of it completely, wilfully! So the systems that are supposed to be enhancing efficiency and transparency remain opaque!

The question that keeps bubbling up into my mind is, will all this extra efficiency and transparency slow down projects?

The answer is of course, that depends. If you can make a minor change to the construction of a material and happily watch that change cascade through the rest of your model, or your project team is so well structured that all design roles are clearly defined and responsibilities understood, then you're in luck. You can produce a higher quality, lower cost product for your client despite the extra work created by informing all the stakeholders. If not? Well, good luck.

-Henry Fenby-Taylor