BIM Busters - A BIM coordinator coordinates the project

Many people I meet share this false belief that a BIM coordinator coordinates projects. Read more about why this isn't so, why it's harmful to the performance of the project and how to do better.

When I give classes, participants tell me about their experience in "BIM projects" and how coordination meetings often happen:

One guy sits in front of the computer and all the other planners. This guy goes from one clash to the other, completes the BCF, and starts the next one. This is what they call an "Integrated Concurrent Engineering" (ICE) session and should promote interdisciplinary solution-finding. What happens is that most participants do something else on their computer and are bored.

It's a misuse of the great concept of ICE, and I even recommend the participants of my classes to leave a "BIM coordination" meeting like that or take over the moderation. Nobody should support a waste of time!

Originally, ICE was a method to reduce latency by bringing everybody together at a shared location to work and setting up some rules for collaboration (e.g., decisions need to be taken in 30 minutes).

What happens by calling coordination meetings ICE sessions and, in general, with these "bad" coordination meetings is a misunderstanding on several levels.

1. There are no BIM Projects. There are only projects with BIM. BIM is a method to deliver projects and not a means to itself. Consequently, there are / should not be BIM coordination meetings, just meetings that utilize models to support the team’s work - whether these are client-, planner- or construction meetings.

2. The BIM coordinator has a quality control job, not a coordination job! The job of the BIM coordinator is to make sure that coordination happens, not to coordinate. Coordination is still the job of every trade and the project manager's responsibility. Outsourcing coordination to an often young, inexperienced, "nerdy" BIM coordinator who happens to know the tools but does not understand construction is a terrible practice and will lead to a waste of time and mistakes.

3. Coordination should mostly happen conceptually first, and when BIM can be used to find a few mistakes. To do so, you need a lot of experience. The general rule should be:

It's better to avoid mistakes than to find them. It's better to find mistakes early than late (e.g. on site).

If not followed, the result is projects with 10k clashes or more. Now imagine 10 minutes on average to solve a clash. We have 100k minutes, which already equals one work year. Most of the time, there is more than just one person involved...

Best practice for coordination

As mentioned, coordination begins conceptually and is often best done collaboratively with pen and paper. Instead of having every trade model its pipes, sit together and sketch different concepts and when select the best fitting ones. E.g., the ventilation ducts are o the right side of the corridor, the electrical to the left, and the water for cooling below. All the heating is next to the facade.

So first, solve the horizontal distribution conceptually in sections.

When consider the best options for positioning the technic rooms. Where do we place them in the building? What's the impact on the useable areas, shaft size, and positioning costs?

With these two concepts, you are well-equipped to start modeling the specialists' models and coordinating on a federated model.

Best practice in coordination meetings

A coordination meeting needs preparation, and one with BIM even more. The moment the meeting lead starts to click around in the model and starts looking for a mistake or a better view, he loses control over the meeting and can't moderate anymore.

So, a BIM coordination meeting needs to be prepared very well. Choose 5–10 topics relevant to the current stage and relevant for the involved people. Prepare the appropriate views and think about a narrative for the coordination.

The golden rule for coordination meetings is, If

• Only two people are involved, so solve it directly. Often, even a phone call is better than an email, as in email communication, a lot of between-the-line communication gets lost.

• Three or more people need to give their input, or a chain-email communication starts, STOP, and solve it in a quick meeting (virtually or in person).

There are no recipes for picking the coordination topics, but I found these heuristics useful:

1. Focus on interdisciplinary coordination and pay special attention to the interfaces that nobody feels responsible for. For example, the piping inside and outside the house is a common place for mistakes.

2. Architecture is the fight against water, so follow the water. For example, start in coordination with the roof drainage system and examine how the water gets down and leaves the building. Contrary to the general belief in starting a detailed design from bottom to top, you need to plan the roof first before thinking about the foundation.

3. Pay special attention to coordinating elements that are NOT modeled. E.g., piping inside of slabs and the reinforcement, foundation for traffic signs, and modeled piping.

4. The aforementioned conceptual coordination before any clash detection is an all-time classic; I'm not tired of reminding people to.

5. There is geometric clash detection and metadata coordination. Most people only consider geometric coordination when discussing BIM coordination, but information/concept coordination is essential for overall project success. For this I think metadata visualization is extremely helpful.

Why is inadequate BIM coordination over project coordination harmful?

I see different behaviors that do not help the project and hurt the involved people.

1. The project managers delegate BIM coordination and do not coordinate and work on the concept. The result is that everybody is working correctly, but the overall result is still faulty. Designing a building is a complex endeavor and needs many balancing contradictions. Without coordination, this balancing can't happen.

2. The BIM coordinator pulls coordination work to themself; therefore, all other trades feel like they don't need to coordinate anymore. The result often is burnout for the BIM coordinator and suboptimal projects.

BIM coordination tools

Now that we have established the importance of coordination, we can look at different tools.

For me, there are two different categories of coordinator tools. The ones for everybody and the specialist tools.

Solibri, Desite, and SimpleBIM are specialist tools that are very powerful but sometimes overkill for the topic specialists to use. I recommend using them to prepare the model and set up special quality assurance checks.

The tools for everybody in the project are the viewers in most Common Data Environments (CDE), BIMcollab ZOOM, a well-set-up Revisto, and other free viewers.

These tools lower the entry barrier so everybody can look at the project in the context of other trades and coordinate their work. So, we need less specialization and more democratization of BIM tools for better buildings. The barrier to looking at the project must be as low as possible!

Therefore, this defines the BIM coordinator scope:

• educate and support people doing their work.

• work in the background to set up workflows.

• do only quality control so that you know when somebody is not coordinating their work. When intervene and support them.

Don't coordinate and do the job of others!

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I know I touched on some sensitive topics you might disagree with; please share your point of view, and let’s learn together!