Dee Davis (00:00)
Welcome to the Management Under Construction podcast.
We got a piece of fan mail from George in California. George says, love listening to your podcast. I'm in the horizontal infrastructure industry as an owner's representative. The whole industry is going through a paradigm shift to digital construction management. We're implementing BIM for infrastructure, BIM 4I and looking at the vertical infrastructure industry for the lessons learned in implementing BIM.
We are looking at the big picture and seeing the benefits and challenges of implementing these concepts of big BIM and little BIM. We have several pilot projects to highlight BIM in order to start getting our people and our contractors on board for project delivery and attempting to get our maintenance forces and asset managers to see the big picture. All of which is a huge challenge right now. Do you have any advice for an owner and implementing
BIM system-wide. I'd love to talk to you both. Brad, what's your response to George?
Brad Wyant (01:01)
Well, thank you for your question, George. While I was getting my masters at Stanford, another student and I implemented an artificial learning construction software called Alice on a grade separation project for Caltrain that involved a bunch of bridges. They were separating the roadway from the grade where the train was going to go. Our implementation revealed that there were some efficiencies to be gained with the bridges, but that the more linear parts of the work, raising the tracks with gravel and dirt, laying the tracks and so on,
did not gain any great advantages by our work.
Not overselling the benefits of BIM-4I is certainly something that you should be conscious of, but there are instances where it's going to be helpful. What you're really up against is change management here. You're trying to convince a large group of people to change the way they've always done things. And they're hesitant to change, not just because they're scared to change in this particular instance, because all people are always scared to change. It's built into our DNA.
There are lots of frameworks for how to implement change in a large organization, but at the beginning it's important to create urgency. With your particular cause, the implementation of BIM is an inevitability, as you said, but it's going to be hard to get people to acknowledge that eventually needs to start now, otherwise we're going to be behind. So call attention to the success of your small implementations and be transparent about the challenges while explaining how you will seek to overcome them.
Ask questions about what people's pain points are. Find ways to address them in your rollout. Map out your organization. Find the people who have influence, regardless of their title and position, and draw them into the inner circle of your rollout plan. Gain their buy-in and make them advocates for your mission. Constantly seek and act on feedback as you roll out BIM4I.
Dee Davis (02:41)
You've got a challenge ahead of you, George. From my point of view, one of the biggest flaws I've seen in change implementation is the announcement of change and just simply walking away. That is not change implementation. That leaves people hanging. It leaves them feeling anxious, lots and lots of questions. And then they'll just start finding workarounds to get around whatever it is that you're trying to change because they don't want to do it.
It's too hard, they feel abandoned. They may even actively fight against it. As humans, we tend to avoid change rather than embrace it. So expect a lot of handholding and patience to be required. The company that I worked for that I mentioned was an early adopter of BIM in the podcast took a solid decade to become really literate at it.
Granted, this was in the early days of BIM, I think we have a lot more tools available and people are much more tech savvy, but I still think I would expect your progress to be measured in years, not days or weeks or even months. Regularly talk with the people that are not your early adopters. Find out what their problems are. What is it that they don't like about it? What is it that makes them nervous or scared about?
adopting new technology, and then sit with them and work on those different things. Sometimes just talking about the pain points will help people work through them and help them work with you instead of against you. We did respond to you, George, via email. I hope you got our message. And I sent you some BIM implementation specific things around civil
projects specifically that I think will help you. Don't be afraid to lean on your younger team members They're tech savvy. They're into it. These kids have had a cell phone, a computer, a laptop, whatever at their disposal since birth, basically. So to them, it's second nature. Lean on those folks to help you.
As we've said in the cast, BIM is an awesome tool when it's used properly and appropriately. It's not gonna be the right solution for every single project because it is an investment. It takes time to do it right.
be very careful about how you are choosing to use it early on. Straight adoption may not be the right choice for you. We wish you the best of luck in your change management journey and feel free to reach out to us if you need any more guidance.
Brad Wyant (05:05)
Good luck, George.
Dee Davis (05:06)
To all of our listeners, send us your questions. We would love to hear from you about topics that you wanna hear if you're interested in being a guest or if you have questions that we can help you with. Thanks everybody.
