The AEC industry has shown a slower development when compared to other industries, this has aroused interest among researchers to help the industry achieve its objectives. As a result, one important contribution to the industry has been proven to be the encouragement of effective collaboration among project team members, which in fact, is considered as a central element of success in construction projects. Additionally, the birth of new technologies like BIM has facilitated these collaborative practices among team members. Researchers have focused on the technical aspects of BIM itself, and not enough attention has been given to the collaborative aspects of its use. Consequently, this research has focused on studying the collaborative aspects of the use of BIM in construction projects, with the objective of enriching current literature about the topic. More specifically, on the identification of perspectives that members of project teams have on the most important features of BIM collaboration, with the intention of understanding the feeling of members in order to approach to them in a more accurate way, which will more likely engage members in a collaborative environment. In order to identify the perspectives, Q-methodology has been used. A list of 29 statements were sorted by 15 selected participants from different organizations in The Netherlands, which are currently involved in the execution of construction projects. The analysis of the collected data was performed, which gave sufficient information to identify the existence of three perspectives among fourteen participants, while one participant was considered as a non-loader since his perspective did not show any link to the other perspectives. The identified perspectives were named as follows: Protocol Sticklers, Team-Oriented and Task-Oriented. The analysis of each perspective led to propose a framework that consists of: first, the performance of a thorough analysis to identify the perspectives of each member of a project team. Secondly, the strategy adopted to engage team members in a collaborative environment, should consider a combination of the suggested actions in order to guarantee the existence of the necessary antecedents for effective collaboration in BIM-based projects. However, the use of the framework will depend on the perspective that each member has, trying to make use of their perceived importance of a certain aspect of collaboration to share with the rest of the team, as well as working on the aspects they believe to be of less importance, in order to highlight the benefits of its implementation and engage them to promote a collaborative environment.

Despite the mission of universities to help engineering students develop leadership, many engineers perceive that this ambition is not being met in practise, but often later in engineers’ professional careers. This work on engineering education explores how educational organisations can support engineering student’s leadership development using experiential learning. A constructivist grounded theory methodology was used to explore the topic through 25 interviews with engineering student leaders, professionals, and educators in TU Delft and Engineers Without Borders USA. The experiential methods explored included Project Based Learning, Project Based Service Learning, and Internships. Perceptions of students, educators, and engineering professionals alike confirmed that engineering leadership is a complex notion. While viewed by some as being an individual responsibility, it is viewed by others as being a more abstract group process. Leadership development is part of a dynamic process, one that is rarely explicitly strived for by students or course designers. While students indicated that they believed experiential learning helped support their leadership development, they rarely joined those contexts with that goal in mind. Additionally, the experiential contexts explored weren’t usually designed with leadership development as an explicit outcome. This may be because leadership is a difficult outcome to measure. It is also possible that a focus by universities on technical qualification has led to a trade off in the subjectification and socialisation of students as socially responsible leaders. All of this considered, engineering leadership development will likely continue to remain an elusive to measure goal. However, this research contributes to the larger field by presenting a set of factors of experiential methods that organisations can use to support leadership development. They can do this by structuring experiential learning methods in ways that promote a feeling of psychological safety within student engineering teams.

The Architecture, Engineering, Construction and Operations (AECO) industry is in constant need of processes and standards that allow it to deliver projects within budget, time, and quality. A strategy that has helped to get closer to this goal is the implementation of Building Information Modelling (BIM). Adoption of BIM-related technologies is mostly limited to architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) actors, who handover the collection of design and construction data for the client but retrieving data from BIM models for operations and maintenance (O&M) activities is not as common as desired but it offers great potential to perform and support activities such as Assessment and Monitoring, Documentation, Emergency Management, Energy and Space Management, and Maintenance of Service Information. Processes, standards, and formats for integrating information about Operations and Maintenance in the design phase have been conceptually developed with a technical dimension approach toward activities, information, and solutions. Given that BIM is a socio-technical system, solutions must also consider a social perspective. For this reason, Activity Theory is used to analyse maintenance activities, their origin, elements related, and processes involved in their performance and, more specifically, their definition. The established theoretical lens considers information as the main product to deliver instead of a by-product of the models’ deliverables. Thus, it was determined, through a literature review, exploratory interviews, semi-structured interviews and the aforementioned analysis, that the integration of O&M personnel is not only usually late along the information lifecycle of an asset’s life, but that the required attributes that provide the necessary information to asset managers to perform their tasks are not even considered early enough in the project, commonly when it is already handed over. Integration of these actors along the already established processes is encouraged to ensure the information will not only be produced and transferred as required, but it will also be useful for other purposes that are included in the documentation of the project.