Adopting BIM is not just about technology and data, it’s also about culture and behaviours. A new group, Behaviours4Collaboration is focusing on this aspect.
The longest chapter in my book on construction collaboration technologies was devoted to human aspects of collaboration, underlining a common industry maxim that successful collaboration is only 20% technology and 80% people and process (some occasionally suggest the balance is more like 10:90). This view persists today and is being repeated in relation to building information modelling (BIM).
Since the early 2000s, Constructing Excellence has been almost the only organisation consistently advocating the need for more collaborative approaches to project delivery (I am on its steering group and have been a member of its collaborative working champions ‘think-tank’ for around 10 years). It recognised the opportunity that BIM presented to provide new thinking on collaboration, and its BIM Task Group (chaired by former Manchester City Council executive John Lorimer) has been looking at how CE can help the industry embrace collaborative structures and procedures, and promote the right cultures and behaviours to deliver the step change required by the UK Government. It is clear from the Construction 2025 industrial strategy that BIM is just part of the transformation needed, and several additional progressive measures have been proposed, including three new models of procurement.
Earlier this year, through CE, I was asked to join a recently formed group looking at behaviours for collaboration. Initially located at the University of West of England, the group sprang out of the south-west BIM Hub and, dubbed Behaviours4Collaboration, is now an official CIC “BIM4” community, with participants from consultants, contractors and clients, plus academics (its principal convenor is Elizabeth Kavanagh from Bristol architect Stride Treglown; read her CIC blog post). I have been helping spread the word about the group, doing presentations at a recent Bentley Technology Day at the Crossrail academy in London and at Leeds Beckett University’s ThinkBIM event held last week at WSP in Leeds – below is the presentation and a video of me delivering this Pecha-Kucha style (20 slides in 20 seconds).
If you are interested in this initiative, a stakeholders meeting is being held at Bath University on 28 January 2015 (4pm to about 7pm). There is also a Behaviours4Collaboration Linkedin group.
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[…] about collaborative behaviours. I talked to the group about the Behaviours4Collaboration group (see my December 2014 post), updating my presentation a bit to include an example page from the prototype profession map […]
[…] collaborative behaviours. I talked to the group about the Behaviours4Collaboration group (see my December 2014 post), updating my presentation a bit to include an example page from the prototype profession map […]