The new professional roles created by BIM

Part Vɪɪ of UNI 11337 is currently at the final public enquiry stage on the UNI website, and should be published by October. It identifies the key BIM roles and describes their professional characteristics. ANAC (the Italian National Anti-Corruption Authority), in its consultation document entitled “Use of specific electronic methods and tools, such as building and infrastructure modelling tools, in procedures for awarding architecture and engineering services. Fair remuneration”, stressed the need for adequate training of the contracting authorities' in-house staff in electronic methods and tools, and the urgency of specifying the content of the training of all the parties involved in a contract, how their skills could be assessed within technical proposals, and the possible forms of qualification and certification of the professionals involved.

Reading on to point 1 of section 2 “Preliminary activities”, we find:

“All the parties within the contracting authority who are required to interface with the activities connected with the delivery of the public works, from design to construction […] must have adequate skills in electronic methods and tools, acquired also through successful attendance at training courses on the subject.”

Those who want to adopt BIM need to find suitably qualified staff, or to train and upskill their own in-house staff.

What is more, tender notices increasingly include award criteria that reward the presence, in company organisation charts, of professionals qualified to lead the BIM process. One example is the tender for the design of the new Grande Ospedale hospital in Reggio Calabria.

The standard identifies four distinct BIM professional roles as key roles for managing a process:

BIM specialist is an advanced operator of information management and modelling; they produce the information content and can generate three-dimensional graphic models with so-called authoring software;

BIM coordinator is a coordinator of project information flows;

BIM manager is a manager of digitised processes; within a professional practice, a company, a construction firm or any organisation working in construction, they are responsible for implementing, promoting and standardising the use of BIM methods; they direct the production and management of information.

CDE Manager is a manager of the common data environment and therefore of the processes for delivering, transmitting and archiving information content.

For each of these roles the standard describes specific tasks and activities in the information flow and specifies the training content they must have mastered. These training requirements are expressed in terms of knowledge, skills and competence in accordance with the European Qualifications Framework (EQF), and set out in schematic tables:

Knowledge is the outcome of the assimilation of information through learning;

Skill is the ability to apply knowledge to complete tasks and solve problems;

Competence is the proven ability to use knowledge, skills and personal abilities in study and work situations, with a given degree of autonomy and responsibility.

However, the standard does not specify the level of this knowledge, skill and competence, but identifies the subject areas in which these professionals must be able to operate. It concludes by providing some elements useful for assessment, as well as possible assessment methods.

The absence of any reference to the collaborative agreement, and to the new roles it has brought with it that can work alongside professionals already highly qualified in BIM, leaves room for further discussion. Starting from the assumption that performance improves when the various parties involved in delivering a public works project or a private project act within the contractual relationship in a collaborative rather than adversarial way, this multi-party contract model is designed precisely to promote collaboration and the pursuit of shared objectives. It therefore carefully regulates the allocation of responsibilities, payments, the management of risks that may arise in the collaboration, the guarantees provided by each member for the activities within its remit, and the arrangements for the amicable resolution of disputes. It provides for governance bodies for the collaboration to oversee the proper performance of the contract. We are referring to:

The Collaboration Manager, whose task is to monitor and support the pursuit of the Collaboration Objectives, checking that the parties carry them out within the agreed deadlines and timescales;

The Core Group, made up of representatives of all the Collaboration Members, who oversee and support the performance of the contract and meet whenever a dispute arises between the parties;

The Independent Adviser, a single individual or a body made up of several people with expertise in technical and legal matters, whose task is to provide impartial advice to the Collaboration Members, to implement the contract and to prevent or resolve any issues that arise.

Content by: Maria Frattini