BIM Champions: why do we need them?
31 March 2017
Arup:
Building Information Modelling
(BIM) Champion is a buzzword that is increasingly heard amongst the BIM
community and my research indicates that this may be because BIM
projects do better with a BIM Champion. But who are the BIM Champions
and why are they needed?
A BIM Champion is the person who has the technical skills, theoretical
knowledge and the motivation to lead and guide teams improving their BIM
implementation. The levels of BIM Champion's involvement within the BIM
utilisation process differs across companies and varies sometimes within
the same company across different projects.
The UK's BIM Task Group has appointed a number of BIM Champions to
support the BIM utilisation across different regions. Many national and
international companies have also relied on BIM Champions to drive the
cultural BIM change within their businesses and influence the success of
the projects.
Yet, despite the recognition of the BIM Champion’s role, there is still
a lack of a quantifiable and objective way to investigate their impact
on the implementation of BIM. To address this gap, Arup has interrogated
its in-house BIM Maturity Measure (BIM-MM) which it uses globally to
assess project maturity. The primary purpose of the BIM-MM is not to
investigate the impact of the BIM Champion – this is just one of the
questions that the tool allows us to investigate.
The BIM-MM is a tool that evaluates BIM in projects, it combines a set
of critical BIM criteria including the BIM Champion. Each of the
evaluated criteria has six evolving maturity levels. For instance, for
the BIM Champion criteria these levels range from 0. ‘Non-Existent’ –
‘No BIM Champion/Leader’ to 5. ‘Optimising’ – ‘Leadership level BIM
Champion working closely with BIM regional champion’.
The positive impact of the BIM Champion has been acknowledged by project
managers at Arup. Sean McGinn, manager of a project with a high level of
BIM maturity, notes:
“Both the initial set up and the early assistance [of the BIM Champion
and manager] proved invaluable to the client to get the project
organised the right way from the outset. For such a large and
fast-tracked project, this was essential for the success of delivery,
and much appreciated by the client.”
Arup has a policy of regularly measuring its BIM projects, analysing the
results and sharing lessons to its teams. It shared the data of 213
assessed projects with researchers at the University of Bath, UK to
support the academics researching the future of construction and to get
some independent feedback on the tool. The findings show that the BIM
projects do better with a BIM Champion. And it can be seen that the
average score of projects with BIM Champion Level 5 ‘Optimising’ is much
more significant than the average score of projects with no BIM
Champion.
Currently, with the lack of studies on evaluating BIM, Professionals are
using the BIM-MM as a tool to answer different questions on the BIM
agenda. How is BIM being used across project teams and regions? And how
to drive change and recognise benefits through BIM performance
measurement? These answers will help to diminish the uncertainty
surrounding BIM culture and assist academics, policy makers and
professionals to better understand what 'good' looks like. In order to
help the industry investigate these questions Arup has made the BIM-MM
available on Arup.com for anyone to use.
So how would you measure BIM?
--ENDS--
Source: ARUP - www.arup.com
Contact: Therese Raft | T+61 (0) 2 9320 9320
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