What Is Agile BIM?
The construction industry is many things, but for many years, no one would describe it as agile or nimble.
Most construction project management professionals and organisations favoured a regimented planning methodology, most often Waterfall, which, while very good at creating detailed, predictable project plans, also suffers from longer decision and change-making processes. Agile BIM seeks to change that by making construction project plans more flexible and adaptable and shortening the time required to pivot or adopt necessary changes.
What Is Agile?
Agile is a project management approach that is favoured in the software and tech industries.
While Agile still breaks projects into phases for the purpose of project management, it’s a much less rigid system that favours constant collaboration and continuous testing, iteration, and adjustment of the project plan.
Project and team managers are still involved in the overall direction of the project, but teams also have more leeway to make certain essential changes as they become aware of them, thereby shortening the decision-making process significantly.
BIM & Agile
Because Agile was originally developed for software and tech, it makes a lot of sense that it’s so well suited to use in building information modeling (BIM).
BIM is a tech-heavy approach to construction project management, and the technology itself lends itself to identifying issues much earlier, which allows agile teams to create solutions and mitigate their impact much earlier. Sometimes, teams can even avoid issues altogether, developing new plans and solutions before they ever come up on-site.
What Are the Benefits of Agile BIM?
If there is one thing that is true for every level, sector, and type of construction, it is that time truly is money.
The longer a project takes to complete, the more it will cost. The longer it takes to identify a problem with the design or construction of a building, the more it will cost to fix it. Every day, every tick of the clock in the construction world is more dollars being spent.
So, the simple answer to the question of what the benefits of Agile BIM are is that it saves time, cuts costs, and allows teams to find and solve problems earlier.
As BIM and technologies like it continue to evolve, the tools we have at our disposal will only grow, too, and it’s the agile teams that are ready to embrace change and pivot quickly that will have the most to gain.