Influence of collaboration on the management of BIM-based construction projects

Abstract

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.