What is the biggest problem in the AEC industry?

I give classes about BIM Management, but they are actually classes about Project Management with BIM. The last exercise that brings all the learnings together is the following roleplay:

• One part of the class is the planner team that got the job to bring a multi-family home from preliminary design to a design stage, including element-based cost calculations. The other 2-4 people are neutral observers.
• The client kicked out the architect who did the preliminary design, and the new team got the contract because they promised a quick delivery through their planning methodology.
• Now the new team has only a few days to achieve the goal.

That's the setting, and when asking the team if it's possible to do that - they are all professionals with many years of experience - they say:

• No, it's not possible to do that.
• Usually, you need six months of planning time for a building like that.
• No, we don't know how to approach the task.

In the classes, I introduced some tools to them and encouraged the team to think about how they could apply these tools to the task.

• The first tool is the ICE session - everybody works in parallel on the project, and to cut out latency (waiting time), everybody works in the same location. There is a mediator to keep the information flow running and support the team's commitment for quick decisions.
• The second tool is the morphological box. It is a method to collect different solutions for aspects of the problem and have an excellent foundation to pick the best one.
• The third is a workflow to quickly model and bring quantities into a cost calculation template.

When they pick their role according to their specialty, architect project manager, client, and so on, and start to prepare. Very quickly, the team says:

"When we continue to work like this, we will be kicked out as well!"

The problem most of the time is:

• They start working without understanding the client's needs, and nobody asks the client.
• Nobody is moderating the process - a small group starts to dig into the work, some others wait and don't know where to start.
• When they figure out that they have to talk to the client, they ask very detailed questions. Which kind of floor do you want to have? Do you want a Leed, a Minergy or a Minergy Eco-Certified building? The client does not know the answer. He does not know why he has to answer them and often has to say: "To answer these questions, I hired you as a professional.".

A huge mess! And it reflects well the reality:

Our biggest problem, the root cause for many of the other problems in the AEC industry is that we don't know how to talk to clients and how to enable them to make decisions!

With the emerging BIM, the situation worsens because changing becomes very cumbersome when we start with detailed modeling. (Another way of defining the problem is: "We have a sales problem!" Not only in understanding clients but in selling the benefit/value from our work.)

When we restart the process and change one thing, we add a proper moderator - depending on the members, I pick one out of the class or do it myself.

1. The moderator sets the stage and again explains to everybody what the task and goal are. Moreover, he gives the team a structure to work.
2. Everybody looks at the previous architect's BIM model and analyses the work.
3. Based on this, they developed high-level open-ended questions to understand the client's needs. E.g., What's the business case? Is the building for renting out or for selling? Why did you kick out the previous team? What is essential for you?

Prepared with this, they go again into a meeting with the client and get a better picture of the client's needs, goals, preferences, and the border conditions (timeframe, budget, scope) - everything adequately documented on a flip chart.

Here I noticed another big mistake. The client starts to ask questions, and the team tries to answer them right away in the meeting. They quickly switch from understanding the client to creating solutions. Unfortunately, these freestyle solutions are often just the first one they thought about but not the best one for the problem. Moreover, once they are in the solution mode, they forget to ask the right questions.

After the meeting, the moderator brings the team again together, summarizes the findings, and they split up into work sessions:

• Every trade looks at the design from their's trades point of view. The architect rethinks the organization and the room program. The structural engineer collects different solutions for the structure and materialization. The HVAC planner develops different concepts/solutions for heating, cooling, and ventilation. They all bring these solutions into the morphological box.
• When they come together, they present the solutions to each other and decide on a recommendation for the client. They can easily do this because now they know what's essential for the client.
• Based on these recommendations, they have another meeting with the client, and they can get already some decisions. For some others, additional work is necessary.

With these new decisions, they go back, calculate the costs, and manage to help the client take the necessary decisions to start working in detail.

This is where I stop the exercise most of the time because they are so deep into it and it's just more repetition of the same. When we analyze what we did:

• The observers explain their findings. Interestingly they find all the critical points all by themselves. When you are in the middle of it, you don't realize what you are doing, especially a problem when we are so busy that we don't have time for self-reflection!
• The client explains how they felt - why they could make decisions and why not.
• The class discusses and looks at their way of working - their patterns and has a lot of fun doing it.

Learnings from the expieremnt

And when comes the big questions. Is it possible to do the same in reality? How long would it take? What is the secret to success?

The answers are always:

• It would be possible to do the same between three weeks and three months - so enormous time savings!
• It's crucial to have a mediator who gives the structure, summarizes, and keeps everybody focused on the client's needs.?
• Alternating between well-structured and tightly led sections and more creative and chaotic sessions helps. There has to be the proper rhythm. But it always starts with a well-structured one!
• Visualizing is key! It's effective when the team brings concrete solutions to paper instead of long discussions. Seeing solutions helps to enable the client to make decisions. For this, the visualization does not have to be pretty and fancy!
• It helps to have tools and templates to quickly do the cost calculations without much modeling effort.

I was able to try some of these concepts in real-world projects in my career, but I always enjoy bringing it all together in this exercise. To see this fantastic mindset shift! Hopefully, my pupils go back in the market and improve on this.

So the critical factor for successful projects - especially when working with BIM is this:

You need to help the client to make decisions! That's one of the three jobs you have as a planning professional. (The other two are developing great concepts and serving the construction company to work frictionless.) To do this brush up on your moderation and facilitation skills.

Technology as a second-order enabler

BIM as a technology is only an enabler for this early decision-making, but only when used correctly / effectively.

Based on these experiences, I like to introduce you to the next steps at abstract and the development of the abstractBIM. This next step will help enable better decision-making in the early stages. (Do you remember the Mcleamy curve, the one you learned about in every project management class and never follow in real life?)

With the abstraction, we developed the core technology that harmonized architectural BIM models based on a minimal input - just the IfcSpace element. With this, we can calculate a new BIM that always follows the same structural logic and is consistent. So far, this is used for thermal and cost simulations - but it has so much more potential.?

Now we work on expanding the functionality and creating a marketplace for building design templates. Solving the prototype problem!

The technology behind it, is the same as in word styles. With a button click, your document gets a different look and feel. Just because you assign the "property" "header to a line, the document knows following the header is a text. We do the same to your building designs.

?You choose a design template and apply it to the content of your building design. The template holds the information about:

• Spaces - the emptiness that makes buildings usable.
• Connections - Windows and doors that connect different spaces and allow for the flow of the user.
• Separations - Walls, slabs, and roofs that divide the spaces from their surroundings.
• Relationships - the logical rules between the spaces, connections and separations.

The content contains information about spacial relationships. Both give an accurate representation of a building design - with a level of detail usually only seen after a long design process - and, therefore:

• For client's, this means?a safe project and precise cost estimations for different design options. Starting from the first functional design sketches you know what you get.
• For architect's, this means enabling the client to make good decisions early on - before you start with your detailed time-consuming BIM modeling.
• For construction companies, system providers and full-service general contractors this means early involvement and an additional channel to get new projects -?all this with minimal effort.

We started doing the first client projects with this, and the results are encouraging. Once the template is defined, a quantity takeoff for a cost calculation only takes some calculation time!

So when you are a developer, a wood construction company, a system builder, or a forward-thinking architect who

• Want to pioneer a new way of doing designs by enabling client decisions early on.
• Has a dwelling or office project in the pipeline.
• Has a basic IFC model, preferable with IfcSpaces.

Please get in touch with me, and we can support you in the current project with the quantity takeoff - that's the easy win. Or - the long time advantage - bring your design solution to our marketplace, either:

• as a template for internal application on your projects only
• Or as an additional sales channel to reach more prospects, get projects earlier so that you can influence the detailed design according to your production needs.

I'm looking forward to hearing from you at [email protected] or directly on LinkedIn.