BIM Manager & Production, How Much Do You Take On?
From the spectrum of BIM managers in small startups leading on a team of maybe 1 or 2 drafters to larger corporate BIM managers leading on national teams of design studios, if at all, how much "production" are you involved with? To simplify, I will define "production" as documented work required to achieve project deadlines, more superficially known as "red lines".
With that said, my first question is how much of "production" are you involved with on top of your daily BIM responsibilities?
I am also curious to know, particularly for those in smaller-mid sized firms where you may take on some to a large sum of this type of work, where do you draw the line? And what direction do you take? Do you propose to hire more junior staff to fulfill the work? Do you just take on the work and propose more money? What are some of your long term goals in managing this situation? The common curveball I see that comes up in this situation, is the question of inflow and outflow. Sometimes, the amount of work/money isn't always consistent, there are slow periods and busy periods. Therefore, some companies can't afford the risk of onboarding more staff and become dependent on someone like a BIM manager who in nature is skilled at the workflow and means of getting work done. So in those cases, even when a BIM manager showcases the value of what can be attained when time is put more on developing rather than producing, how would you handle the situation?
"BIM Manager" is disappearing as a stand-alone role for some firms, and just being absorbed into the roles of the regular BIM production staff or job captain type staff. The official AutoDesk trainers have also told everyone that we've sent for training lately that most firms don't need full-time BIM managers. Of course we still need people to put the time into BIM standards and maintenance, and we fully understand the value of that work, but the people doing that are a rotating cast of nearly all the BIM users, who coordinate periodically as a committee, rather than having one or more mostly-unbillable staff who do little besides BIM management. This makes more productive use of all staff's downtime between billable projects, while maintaining better continuity on project teams than we had when we were pulling in BIM managers to pinch-hit as production.
It also seems to get better adherence to standards, as well as better standards, because everybody feels ownership in creating and maintaining them, and everybody has extensive and ongoing experience in how they actually function in production. Everybody has the same common goals and there's less of the adversarial or dictatorial positioning that the BIM managers sometimes took, which in turn led to "BIM rebellion" by some other staff.
We are a big, global firm and have a full design technology department, within which we have BIM specialists and BIM managers. They have a valuable, necessary place in our organization, and we depend on them for a number of important things, not least of which being best practices training, templates, complex family creation, and troubleshooting.
But having said that, I am not a big believer in having BIM managers as full-time project-assigned staff. I need architects who know the tool, not tool specialists. The goal is better designs and better deliverables, not tunnel vision on a particular tool and it's workings or use.
Mid-sized (15-20 people) firm: our goal for technical specialists is a minimum of 65% billable project hours, as opposed to +/-85% for general production staff. Significantly less than that for a sustained period usually leads to re-distribution of duties in order to eliminate one or more positions.
If what you're trying to do is show that it's more beneficial to the firm to have you spending all or most of your time on unbillable BIM management tasks, then you'd need to do the math and convincingly document that the end result of that unbillable work is such an improved efficiency of other staff on a regular, ongoing basis that their resultant increased billable hours more than compensate for your unbillable time. In a large firm this could be fairly easy to justify: saving 30 other staff an hour of time each per week, or improving accuracy to the extent that an entire quality assurance position can be eliminated, would more or less pay for your existence. In a small firm it's likely to be much more difficult to show that dedicating a large chunk of your time to BIM management is going to result in greatly-enough increased efficiency and/or quality of work from a small number of other staff that it's worth the firm carrying you (in other words you're probably dead weight in a small to mid-sized firm, if you're solely a BIM manager.)
Jun 25, 20 7:22 pm ·
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BIM Manager & Production, How Much Do You Take On?
BIM Manager & Production, How Much Do You Take On?
From the spectrum of BIM managers in small startups leading on a team of maybe 1 or 2 drafters to larger corporate BIM managers leading on national teams of design studios, if at all, how much "production" are you involved with? To simplify, I will define "production" as documented work required to achieve project deadlines, more superficially known as "red lines".
With that said, my first question is how much of "production" are you involved with on top of your daily BIM responsibilities?
I am also curious to know, particularly for those in smaller-mid sized firms where you may take on some to a large sum of this type of work, where do you draw the line? And what direction do you take? Do you propose to hire more junior staff to fulfill the work? Do you just take on the work and propose more money? What are some of your long term goals in managing this situation? The common curveball I see that comes up in this situation, is the question of inflow and outflow. Sometimes, the amount of work/money isn't always consistent, there are slow periods and busy periods. Therefore, some companies can't afford the risk of onboarding more staff and become dependent on someone like a BIM manager who in nature is skilled at the workflow and means of getting work done. So in those cases, even when a BIM manager showcases the value of what can be attained when time is put more on developing rather than producing, how would you handle the situation?
"BIM Manager" is disappearing as a stand-alone role for some firms, and just being absorbed into the roles of the regular BIM production staff or job captain type staff. The official AutoDesk trainers have also told everyone that we've sent for training lately that most firms don't need full-time BIM managers. Of course we still need people to put the time into BIM standards and maintenance, and we fully understand the value of that work, but the people doing that are a rotating cast of nearly all the BIM users, who coordinate periodically as a committee, rather than having one or more mostly-unbillable staff who do little besides BIM management. This makes more productive use of all staff's downtime between billable projects, while maintaining better continuity on project teams than we had when we were pulling in BIM managers to pinch-hit as production.
It also seems to get better adherence to standards, as well as better standards, because everybody feels ownership in creating and maintaining them, and everybody has extensive and ongoing experience in how they actually function in production. Everybody has the same common goals and there's less of the adversarial or dictatorial positioning that the BIM managers sometimes took, which in turn led to "BIM rebellion" by some other staff.
We are a big, global firm and have a full design technology department, within which we have BIM specialists and BIM managers. They have a valuable, necessary place in our organization, and we depend on them for a number of important things, not least of which being best practices training, templates, complex family creation, and troubleshooting.
But having said that, I am not a big believer in having BIM managers as full-time project-assigned staff. I need architects who know the tool, not tool specialists. The goal is better designs and better deliverables, not tunnel vision on a particular tool and it's workings or use.
Mid-sized (15-20 people) firm: our goal for technical specialists is a minimum of 65% billable project hours, as opposed to +/-85% for general production staff. Significantly less than that for a sustained period usually leads to re-distribution of duties in order to eliminate one or more positions.
If what you're trying to do is show that it's more beneficial to the firm to have you spending all or most of your time on unbillable BIM management tasks, then you'd need to do the math and convincingly document that the end result of that unbillable work is such an improved efficiency of other staff on a regular, ongoing basis that their resultant increased billable hours more than compensate for your unbillable time. In a large firm this could be fairly easy to justify: saving 30 other staff an hour of time each per week, or improving accuracy to the extent that an entire quality assurance position can be eliminated, would more or less pay for your existence. In a small firm it's likely to be much more difficult to show that dedicating a large chunk of your time to BIM management is going to result in greatly-enough increased efficiency and/or quality of work from a small number of other staff that it's worth the firm carrying you (in other words you're probably dead weight in a small to mid-sized firm, if you're solely a BIM manager.)
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