How to plan BIM training & support to gain the benefit

Of course, you could tell easily that the client was furious. Shawn had been the Project manager of a residential building project. Today, they were going to have a joint inspection on the project. Shawn had just rounded up a meeting with the client, top executives from his company and representatives of the new residents of the building. The project meeting had been nothing short of a shouting match due to several quality issues that were spotted by representatives of the client. They had argued that considering the amount of money they had paid for the project, quality control issues should be the least of their problems. Furthermore, to make things worse, the project schedule performance index (SPI), suggests that they are behind schedule.

As an expert in BIM Project Management, Shawn knew this and he had been using the negotiation skills which he learnt from his formal project management training to gain more time for some critical project tasks.

However, the client representatives had argued that there was no more time to be given as the first building residents who had paid down some money had been given move-in dates.

So they had continued the site inspection and by this time the site workers had been working diligently on their tasks. Shawn as a great team manager had been able to manage the project site up to the current level of progress. And most project tasks had been executed according to agreed quality standards, but members of the representative of the client were being finicky. They want every aspect of their sunk investment in the project to come to reality as expected.

The representatives from the client had made up their mind to inspect every aspect of the project work being executed on-site today, at least they have the time for it today, not with the looming deadline for project delivery and move-in dates that have been given to the building residents.

Moving from one location of the site to the next, the clients had picked out material handling as a problem on-site. They had also complained about the quality of the materials being used for the project. Continuing, they had complained that the building had design issues and that agreed quality from the building design blueprint had not been followed. Subsequently, the client reps had also complained about the method of construction used on the project. They had observed that project tasks were being done concurrently rather than serially. While Shawn had explained that this was done to meet up with the deadline, the client had retorted back that it is detrimental and risky to the building project. The client further went on to identify several issues with quality on the site and had told Shawn and members of representatives from his company to fix it.

The next day, management from the construction company and Shawn decided to identify the root cause of these quality issues discovered on site. After a comprehensive analysis of every variable on-site, it was clear that the site workforce needed to be trained on various construction procedures.

Identifying the need for training

Subsequently, Shawn along with the main site foreman was handed the role of identifying specific site employees who require training. Together, they started by identifying workers whose job had the most quality issues for additional training on the project quality. Furthermore, they had studied the age and work experience of site employee and compared these to the work being done on-site. They then discovered that the newer and younger employees were more of a quality and safety risk on the construction site because of their lack of experience.

To increase worker efficiency and ensure good quality on-site, Shawn had recommended that all young and new employees be given additional training on project quality procedures to ensure that quality control is maintained on-site. Furthermore, they had also discovered that the size of their project BIM Construction organization had also been a major influence on their quality training procedures. This is because their company, which was a medium-sized construction company struggle consistently to train their site workers since there are not adequate middle management personnel to manage the training process.

The company has various site workers working on several construction disciplines and needed managers to oversee this process. To fix this, Shawn is going to outsource the training responsibility to an external company even though this could come at a cost, it is always a better option than paying for the cost of not having to train your site workforce.

Training on material handling

Shawn had made up his mind to train the site workers to concentrate more on equality when dealing with construction materials relating to the project. From his project management training, he had known that quality control begins the moment you get your material shipment from the suppliers. He had also planned to develop an efficient procedure for receiving and assessing materials which were shipped to site.

Shawn had also resolved that in terms of material quality, he would use the best quality materials as well as specified products without affecting the profit margin of the project. Furthermore, he had developed an effective storage system which would protect the materials from being stolen or damaged while the project work is in progress.