And my journey into BLM (Building Lifecycle Management) begins. I think I might have found my own little geeky slice of BIM heaven.
This new chapter in my BIM career is at a huge Engineering firm. I am pretty excited to learn about the other side of building design, and am now a BIM Manager for Infrastructure. Although BIM is transferable to all disciplines and all aspects of projects I still feel a bit of a fish out of water. My mandate is to understand and setup a process for the Vancouver Complex Building department on Building Lifecycle Management using BIM. This is a mandate from the top!
I’m also looking forward to sharing my journey as I create processes and pipelines for a division that is a blank slate. Imagine my giddiness: I am responsible for setting up BIM standards from scratch!
Engineers approach software from a completely different perspective than architects, but I found that my traditional start-up process only needed tweaks to transfer to this new discipline. I started by trying to understand what the engineers need in their Revit setup.
My first impression is that Engineers don’t care much about how drawings look and feel. This means there are less endless meetings on line weights, symbols, and sheet layouts, and more about how to streamline our process. I was a little taken aback when the response to my questions about standard symbols, text, and line weights was “we will do whatever you setup”. My new coworkers focus on a simple and straightforward drawing process that provides essential information in the model for the Building Operations team.
While I was directed to start a BIM execution plan I found it more pertinent at this stage to create a Revit Execution Plan. This document is more about how Revit is setup and focuses on:
- Revit Model names
- Worksets
- Text and Dimensions styles
- Content location
- Model Configuration
The BIM execution plan will contain:
- Project Information and Team
- BIM Goals
- Scope of modeling
- Level of Development
- Design coordination
- Collaboration protocols
- Facilities Management usage
- Model uploads and shared information
I felt the BIM Execution plan can be developed at a later date since the only consultant on the team is the Architect. We shall see if that bites me in the arse.
BIMFreak 