BIM Opportunities Abound – The Design Lead
The Design Lead has one of (if not the) most important roles to play in the successful completion of a BIM project. It is the Design Lead’s responsibility to set up both the pre-and-post-contract BIM Execution Plan in response to the Employers Information Request. This has far-reaching implications down the supply chain, as well as in timeline of the project as the Lead Contractor has to work with the models that are eventually provided by the Supply chain under the direction of the Design Lead. If the Design Lead and their supply chain don’t perform, the Lead Contractor is not going to be able to provide the service to the client that they should.
Regular BIM meetings and a willingness to accept that they are part of a process involving many disciplines that each have their own expertise and role to play. If they do not have the expertise to integrate the entire supply chain to feed the Lead Contractor then they need to consider employing someone who does, or they need to contact a company like Micrographics to help lead the way. Internationally, the prestige of simply calling oneself the Lead Architect is accompanied by the responsibility of tackling more than only the design (the entire process needs to be managed). But the good news is that, once the process has been learned and applied successfully, it is repeatable and reproducible. The faster we all learn to work together with the better for the entire industry.
Consider the following figure taken from the British Standard: BSI_PAS_1192_2_2013, Specification for Information Management for the Capital/Delivery Phase of Construction Projects using Building Information Modelling
The following figure is taken from: BSI_PAS_1192_2_2013, Specification for Information Management for the Capital/Delivery Phase of Construction Projects using Building Information Modelling and it shows a schematic of the interplay between the different actors.