New Wave of BIM Modeling

Challenges Ahead for BIM

Greg F. Starzyk, assistant professor at Cal Poly, did a follow-up discussion on the inter-university team panel titled, “Orchestrating the Knowledge Suite.”

He explained the use of “organizational behavior” of the student teams was critical to achieving project success. He and the faculty staff took 60 students, divided them into eight partnerships, and combined the two of the partnerships into four joint ventures.

“What we learned were heterogeneous teams outperformed homogeneous teams. We made sure that each 7-8 persons team had one of the five traits in terms of personality:
Analytical, relational, reflective, proactive, and prescriptive,” Starzyk explained.

“We learned quickly the need to accelerate the process,” he said. “So we divided the various global task responsibilities into a series of micro-projects. With a collaborative sense gained at the assignment level for the students, the complex problem (the project), had to have single solution.”

In a follow-up e-mail, Starzyk responded to the challenges facing BIM in the AEC industry. “BIM certainly invites the transformation of the AEC industry. Yet not enough is said about the soft side of BIM: transforming professionals and the AEC industry from an adversarial culture into a collaborative culture. Without a collaboratively transformed culture, BIM will lose its traction.”

That industry warning in today’s jobless recovery, where profit margins have eroded for all stakeholders, reverberates from the inter-university project and its peer-reviewed conference paper: “BIM for Virtual Construction: A Collaboration of Three Universities” (written by T. McCuen, E. Speidel, and Junshan Liu).

“The instructors hope this project and team assignment will influence other universities to incorporate similar exercises into their curriculum. The instructors’ mission were to provide a learning experience for students and a demonstration project for industry as a means to highlight areas that need improvement if BIM is to be widely adopted within the AEC industry.”

Trust between the stakeholders will be as important as the advances made by BIM and other software over the next few years.

James O. Grundvig is a writer based in New York City.