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.

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.