2 Identify Project Goals and BIM Uses
The first step in developing a BIM Project Execution Plan is to identify the appropriate BIM Uses based on project and team goals. A current challenge and opportunity faced by the early project planning team is to identify the most appropriate uses for BIM on a project given the project characteristics, participants’ goals and capabilities, and the desired risk allocations. There are many different tasks which can benefit from the incorporation of BIM. These benefits are documented as BIM Uses, and this guide includes twenty-five uses for consideration on a project (see Figure 2-1). The goal of this chapter is to provide a method for identifying appropriate BIM Uses for project implementation.
1. Defining the BIM Goals for the Project
Prior to identifying BIM Uses, the project team should outline project goals along with their potential relationship to BIM implementation. These project goals should be specific to the project at hand, measurable, and strive to improve success in the planning, design, construction, and operations of the facility. One category of goals may relate to general project performance including reducing the project schedule duration, reducing the project cost, or increasing the overall quality of the project. Examples of quality goals include the development of a more energy efficient design through the rapid iteration of energy modeling, creating higher quality installed designs through detailed 3D coordination of systems, or developing more accurate record models to improve the quality of performance modeling and commissioning.
Other goals may target the efficiency of specific tasks to allow for overall time or cost savings by the project participants. These goals include the use of modeling applications to create design documentation more efficiently, to develop estimates through automated takeoffs, or to reduce the time to enter data into the maintenance system. These items are only suggestions of potential goals that the project team may have when beginning to decide how to implement BIM on a project. It is by no means a comprehensive list and it is essential to identify the specific goals that will provide an incentive for implementing BIM on the project.
A hypothetical new Laboratory Building constructed on a university campus will be used throughout the following three chapters to illustrate the steps in this guide. Sample project goals from this example project are shown in Table 2-1. Additionally, a blank Project Goals Worksheet can be found in Appendix A.
Table 2.1 – Sample Project Goals for a Laboratory Building Project with Potential BIM Uses
It is important to understand that some goals may relate to specific uses while other goals may not. For example, if there is a project goal to increase field labor productivity and quality through large amounts of prefabrication, then the team can consider the ‘3D Design Coordination’ BIM Use which will allow the team to identify and