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What's the BIM Deal? Part 3

Managing expectations and planning ahead will help minimize stress and ensure a successful BIM implementation.

In the past two issues of the CAD Manager's Newsletter, I explained what BIM (building information modeling) is, deciphered its key terms, and outlined what you should prepare for. In this continuation of the series, I'll address the critical concept of positioning your BIM implementation for success — both your personal success as a CAD manager and your company's success with BIM.

So if BIM's in your future and management seems to be on board, what must you do next? Here goes.

Managing Expectations

Everyone in your company already has expectations about the BIM transition. Some users are dreading a negative experience that will require a lot of change and effort on their part. Management teams often expect implementation to be easier, faster, and cheaper than it really will be. And in some cases IT departments underestimate how taxing BIM applications can be on hardware and network infrastructures.

If you combine all these expectations and misconceptions, you can see that nobody is going to be happy when the reality of BIM implementation sets in. And if nobody's expectations are met, then you, the CAD manager, will suffer.

Expectation Checklist

How do you manage all those expectations? Let's look at a checklist that helps me achieve control:

Talk to management first. Even though BIM implementation affects users more than management, managers will be the ones to back you up, fund your budget, and provide the authority for you to proceed with implementation. Therefore, having management buy into your plan for BIM is critical and must happen first. You can achieve management buy-in by explaining the costs, benefits, and difficulties you anticipate during implementation, so be honest and open when speaking to your managers about BIM.

Conduct user acceptance testing. To make sure you'll have a critical base of users who actually want to learn the new BIM tools, you'll need to expose them to the benefits of the new software and invite their feedback ahead of time. Take your trusted power users to a vendor seminar, or load new software onto some laptops and head into a conference room for a quick training session. By taking these actions your users will see BIM up close, won't feel as threatened, and will feel as if they’re part of the process instead of being bystanders. The point is to get users enthused about learning BIM — and get their honest feedback — before the implementation occurs.

Be prepared for unhappy campers. As you gauge user acceptance, you'll undoubtedly encounter those who don't like the new software or the idea of change. Note their reasons and identify who has the most negative attitudes. Then you can modify your implementation plan to avoid problems and tailor your training to deal with unhappy campers. I’ll talk about this topic a lot more in the next installment, which will focus on training.

This multi-step process has really helped me to build trust with users, IT departments, and senior management staffs alike. As you work through the process, you force all parties to confront reality and adjust their expectations accordingly. Try it — it really does work!

Managing the Timeline

Even if you execute the previous tasks perfectly, you’ll still risk disappointing management and users if your BIM implementation seems too slow or costly. Therefore, you must establish a reasonable timeline for the rollout. (And only then can you start to build a picture of realistic costs.)

Here are a few truisms I've discovered regarding BIM implementation timelines:

• Users generally think that BIM will be faster than previous implementations because they assume the software will be easy to learn and that they'll have all the time in the world to learn it.
• BIM software is very different than 2D. The learning process isn't nearly as easy as users think it will be, so they spend more time on the learning curve than forecasted.
• Management sees the extended time spent learning BIM software as something that slows down projects — and this is frequently true.
• As training timeframes extend and projects slow down, management becomes increasingly anxious about the problem. Only then do senior managers start to understand how tricky BIM implementation actually is.

How do you deal with these attitudes and misconceptions? Training.

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