Innovative digital delivery leaders

by Will Joske, Director (ANZ), BIM Academy
July 14, 2020 |  2 min read

Innovative digital delivery leaders
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There are a number of platitudes that come with being part of the BIM brigade. Have you heard these?

“Start with the end in mind”
“It’s the I in BIM that’s most important”
“There needs to be a Single Source of Truth”
“I have no idea why, Revit just does that for some reason”
“BIM is more than a software upgrade”

They ring true, but think about them some more…

Putting Revit problems aside for the moment, there is a great deal of complexity needed for these simplistic statements to have real meaning in the way we work individually and as teams in our industry. Let’s explore the concept of digital skills and that last statement about software.

Indeed, there was a software upgrade for many of us to learn and master. As someone who has come from the architecture side of the equation, I can’t help but feel that everything simply got harder to do. We can train our people from a low skill level because they are easy to identify, but how do we identify and lift up those people who are skilled enough but could work smarter and more efficiently? This is a very real challenge for those who are accountable for their organisation’s capability.

Consider next that our technical skills can’t exist without a context in which to apply them. To be competent we need to have at least a foundation of knowledge in our chosen profession to best apply our technical skills. The cleverest of technician can still be a frustration to work with because he or she doesn’t understand the broader needs and objectives of the work. Our imperative is to deliver to requirements; design, analyse, engineer, construct. Therefore everything we do must serve an immediate purpose or return a benefit to enhance that process. How many people can you count on who have both the technical skills and professional knowledge blended effectively?

What is most interesting to me is the complex nature of what can accelerate the development of a more engaged and blended organisation. An organisation that can call itself a leader in innovative digital delivery and demonstrate it to project partners and clients. Here’s my top five:

  1. The barriers of technical language and jargon, not just for BIM but the semantics involved in explaining concepts from different professional and academic contexts.
  2. The challenges of managers, leaders and decision makers within organisations who don’t possess the necessary digital literacy.
  3. The lack of opportunities in project procurement to deliver greater BIM objectives than the usual suspects that design and construct teams can implement for their own benefit.
  4. The isolation of those individuals, who have the responsibility to manage and improve organisational capability, from broader industry knowledge, trends, and best practice.
  5. The nature of our service industry that measures performance on project utilisation and struggles to do more than to finish one project before starting the next.