Setting Standards with BIM
In the realm of Building Information Modeling (BIM), the establishment and adherence to standardized processes plays a pivotal role in ensuring consistency, quality, and alignment with stakeholder expectations. By incorporating both guidelines and requirements to meet these needs, standardized BIM processes provide a clear framework for all stakeholders, thereby mitigating inconsistencies, enhancing uniformity, and facilitating effective collaboration across diverse teams and project phases.
Defining Standard
A guideline is a general rule, principle, or a piece of advice. Guidelines can be thought of as general best practices to achieve an end-result, while not necessarily being mandatory to get there. For instance, to best ensure personal safety on a long road trip, a great guideline or best practice while preparing would be to ensure that you have an emergency kit in your vehicle. This is not mandated by law, but it is a good idea to stay prepared for any potentially hazardous situations during the drive.
More concrete than a guideline, a requirement is a condition which must be met; it is compulsory. Using the road trip analogy, requirements could be likened to traffic laws, such as wearing your seatbelt in most states, or stopping at a red light.
Going a step even further, a standard is a measuring stick which determines whether requirements have been met while also providing guidelines to support those desired outcomes. Essentially, a standard is a system that links requirements with their supporting guidelines to produce a consistent, attainable, deliverable. In the effort of reducing the number of traffic accidents on the roads, some insurance companies have enacted safe driving programs which offer participants premium incentives. Participants use an app or an external device that tracks how long it takes to stop at a red light, length of time to merge lanes, how often the driver’s phone is unlocked while the vehicle is in motion, and so much more. In this context, these safe driving programs could be considered as standards. They provide a roadmap to meet all requirements (obeying traffic laws and avoiding accidents) while employing helpful guidelines (like merging lanes carefully) that help drivers commute safely.
With regards to BIM, examples of Guidelines, Requirements, and Standards may take the following form:
Characteristics of Unstandardized BIM Processes
Deliverables produced from an unstandardized BIM process will contain inconsistencies. Without BIM users adhering to the same set of requirements or employing consistent guidelines for their workflows, work will lack uniformity. For example, each operator may use differing line weights, patterns, text styles, etc., creating user-specific signatures of sorts on various elements in the model. As such, completed work does not present itself as the unified product of a collective organization. Ultimately, this affects the legibility of documents and creates searchability issues, among other problems.
Unstandardized BIM processes will also have quality concerns. By nature, best practice guidelines consider the means used to achieve a specific end. If different users follow their own preferred workflows instead of shared best practices, the quality of work will likely vary with respect to the deliverables produced. Numerous methods will be used to arrive at a result, some of which may sacrifice the model's integrity. Some users may merely seek to meet the bare minimum requirements, which could make the end product passable, but probably not of the caliber expected by the client, team, or other stakeholders.
An aspect of creating BIM standards requires a definition of end goal. For the end goal to be properly defined, all stakeholder perspectives must be accounted for. An unstandardized BIM process will not capture all stakeholder perspectives, portraying a lack of understanding of stakeholder needs from the BIM product. Integral aspects of the BIM model may be neglected or left out entirely. Ultimately, this results in a disorganized cycle of revisions, unnecessary back-and-forths between stakeholders, and eventually a frustrated client.
Characteristics of Standardized BIM Processes
A Standardized BIM Process has clear expectations prior to beginning the project. All stakeholders involved in the initial stage of the process, whether from maintenance, capital projects, or space planning, understand what the final product should include along with what benchmarks should be reached along the way. Having a clear set of expectations can include a roadmap or a step-by-step guide on what requirements are necessary and what supporting guidelines to practice within the process's scope.
Defining scope is integral within cross-functional teams, where different teams require different information from the same BIM model. For example, a maintenance team may require that all facilities equipment assets within the model are dimensioned accurately and labeled congruently with their maintenance plans to easily support locating equipment for servicing. However, another team supporting site operations for the campus may have little or no preference for the fidelity of modeled facilities equipment. They may instead require that specific symbols and plan layouts are utilized to plot updated egress routes and wayfinding maps for the campus from the model. A standardized BIM process accounts for the varying needs of both these teams by providing a structured framework to identify all stakeholders and meet their requirements.
A structured BIM process improves consistency, removing the user signature that can occur when expectations are undefined. With a set list of requirements and guidelines, one user can seamlessly pick up a project where another left off because there is a single set of defined standards for the BIM process.
Standardized processes within Building Information Modeling are essential pillars in ensuring consistency, quality, and alignment with stakeholder expectations. By incorporating mandatory requirements and suggested guidelines, these standards establish a cohesive framework that fosters effective collaboration and mitigates inconsistencies across diverse teams and project phases. Unstandardized BIM processes, on the other hand, lead to issues such as varying quality levels, unclear perspectives, and increased revisions, ultimately resulting in dissatisfaction among stakeholders. Embracing standardized BIM processes enhances project outcomes, and also promotes efficiency, clarity, and collective success.