BIM 4 Housing 4 Change

I took over as Chair of BIM 4 Housing, from Andrew Carpenter, in April of this year. Andrew had been extremely successful in organizing well-attended events that ran the gamut of the Housing sector. Of course, in April, the country had just entered lock-down and a new buzz word had entered the lexicon…Zoom! Traditional meet-up events were firmly off the agenda.

I wanted to move the direction of BIM 4 Housing towards a focus on residential developments. To this end, I pulled together a number of my contacts who I know are passionate to see improvements and we pulled together a number of their contacts, creating an impressive team of experts.

Collaborative Working is at the heart of BIM so, to overcome these silos, we established six Working Groups: Operations, Construction, Advisory, Design, Development and Manufacturing – who could identify the challenges they encounter and suggest how Better Information Management could resolve them.

We put the word out and within a couple of months we were ready to launch. We had representatives from companies right across the field.

Composition

Activity

We held our first meeting in June and our virtual community was full-steam-ahead by July. All groups are meeting every month and some more frequently, so we have already had 28 meetings.

Our aims are clear.

‘’ To focus on the Information element of BIM i.e. how can better information address the challenges we are all experiencing each day - quality, cost, programme and safety. 3D is valuable, but we need to engage with colleagues and stakeholders who have other perspectives.’’

We are looking to identify what the barriers are to BIM adoption, come-up with examples of BIM benefits, identify things that need to be done and to agree a plan of action as to how these things can be done.

What we were, and are, doing has never really been done before.  So, it has been very much a learn-as-you-go experience.

It was not just about identifying issues but putting together a series of ‘How To’ guides to help the industry, as a whole, adopt BIM.

In most topic areas, those who are passionate about change know what needs to be done to improve things.  However, this can’t be achieved within a bunch of disparate ‘silos’.  There needs to be an environment that allows experts to share their ideas with other experts. These initial ideas can then be challenged and developed.  I believe we are well on the way to achieving this.

In addition to the Working Groups, we have added Workstreams.

 

These cover problems that are common to all Working Groups and have representation across the industry.  Each Workstream is fed ‘issues’ by the Working Groups.  They will then hold discussion groups among themselves and host issue-specific experts at round table sessions. Initial outputs will then be fed back to the Working Groups to ensure that each output is challenged and finally robust.

We are also very actively involved in the Housing Data Standards Group, pooling our experience, knowledge and ongoing learnings from our BIM4Housing initiative.

 

We have a long journey ahead of us, with ongoing legislation and ever-moving goal posts, but the structures are developing that will help manage and define our industry’s future. I am proud to be a small part of that and would welcome any of you to join our Team.

Andrew Carpenter and his son James have helped us produce some very professional podcasts which you can find on Spotify under BIM4Housing or on our dedicated web site https://bim4housing.com/