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| Framtidens förskola (The pre-school of the future) Source: http://sisab.se/siteassets/informationsmaterial/framtidens_forskola.pdf |
Recently, I have been indulging myself in loads of digital documentations of school facilities of various sizes and complexity. My latest occupation as BIM-specialist at SISAB has provided me an invaluable opportunity for contributing to BIM-development within all the three fields of technology, policy and processes. SISAB is a major client and owner organization and part of Stockholm Municipality. The organization is responsible for planning, design, construction and operation of the majority of school facilities in Stockholm. Its activities span, thereby, the entire lifecycle of facilities. This qualifies SISAB as a leading actor that is eligible for and capable of promoting efficiency in all aspects of construction including information management.
Procuring tens of projects and operating hundreds of facilities annually entails commissioning a host of actors from a wide variety of disciplines ranging from architectural, engineering and project management to maintenance firms. They largely differ in their size, organizational structure and level of expertise; something that has implications for how ambitious SISAB can be with its requirements on the quality of the commissioned work.
A drastic case is setting the requirements on the handover information of facilities. This should be realized through BIM directives and policies that address our requirements on hand-over documents in sufficiently detailed terms. This is though not simply a top-down decision flow. Producing reliable, accurate, non-redundant and complete documentation of building information in forms and formats that enable future use requires a close collaboration among all actors also that everybody is roughly on the same page. Setting the bar too high could deter smaller actors and deprive us of the critical mass of the bidders required for a sufficiently competitive tender process.
A good example of how neglecting this aspect could result in unrealistic expectations is the RIBA Plan of Work. Their initial goal was to implement level-3 BIM (as defined in the Bew-Richards maturity model) in all public sector projects by 2016. Since not all actors possessed the competences required, however, they had to lower their criteria to level-2 BIM after a while.
Our current approach at SISAB for balancing our pace of BIM-implementation against the realities of the market and guaranteeing a soft transition to model-based commissioning is to integrate our BIM ambitions with other flagships initiatives at SISAB namely Framtidens Förskola (The pre-school of the tomorrow). Through this approach, actors who are lagging behind in BIM would be both inspired and informed by the more progressive projects and best practices. BIM-implementation would - in this sense - not be a separate goal by itself rather an indispensable part of the overall vision and mission of the client organization i.e. to provide children with safe and sustainable environment for nurturing and education.
Procuring tens of projects and operating hundreds of facilities annually entails commissioning a host of actors from a wide variety of disciplines ranging from architectural, engineering and project management to maintenance firms. They largely differ in their size, organizational structure and level of expertise; something that has implications for how ambitious SISAB can be with its requirements on the quality of the commissioned work.
A drastic case is setting the requirements on the handover information of facilities. This should be realized through BIM directives and policies that address our requirements on hand-over documents in sufficiently detailed terms. This is though not simply a top-down decision flow. Producing reliable, accurate, non-redundant and complete documentation of building information in forms and formats that enable future use requires a close collaboration among all actors also that everybody is roughly on the same page. Setting the bar too high could deter smaller actors and deprive us of the critical mass of the bidders required for a sufficiently competitive tender process.
A good example of how neglecting this aspect could result in unrealistic expectations is the RIBA Plan of Work. Their initial goal was to implement level-3 BIM (as defined in the Bew-Richards maturity model) in all public sector projects by 2016. Since not all actors possessed the competences required, however, they had to lower their criteria to level-2 BIM after a while.
Our current approach at SISAB for balancing our pace of BIM-implementation against the realities of the market and guaranteeing a soft transition to model-based commissioning is to integrate our BIM ambitions with other flagships initiatives at SISAB namely Framtidens Förskola (The pre-school of the tomorrow). Through this approach, actors who are lagging behind in BIM would be both inspired and informed by the more progressive projects and best practices. BIM-implementation would - in this sense - not be a separate goal by itself rather an indispensable part of the overall vision and mission of the client organization i.e. to provide children with safe and sustainable environment for nurturing and education.