Making the most of soft skills

The increase in BIM projects and implementation ahead of government mandates or commercial drivers means a BIM skills shortage in a number of countries. The skills shortage involves some technical knowledge and core technology skills, from detailing built connections to embedding models with property data. You may have heard politicians describe them as hard skills, things that are academic or reflected in qualifications, because you can teach and develop these kind of aspects on the job.

It’s far harder to teach the other half of the skills problem, the soft skills. Soft skills are abilities like

• Problem-solving
• Initiative
• Creativity
• Time management

These soft skills are the core talents that determine the behaviors, atmosphere, and success of groups in an office or on-site environment. Another way to describe them may be work ethic.

What is it that makes you tick? Why do you work the way you do? We go into these questions in a lot more detail later in the chapter. Think in this way:

• People interacting with technology: cool.
• People interacting with people, supported by technology: really cool!

Leading BIM implementation

One of the key skills necessary for successful BIM processes is leadership. BIM is always a collaborative effort, but especially in the early days of implementing new procedures and protocols, a clear and decisive leader is invaluable. If your role is leadership, you need be a point of contact, a role model to lead by example, and a motivational figurehead when challenges occur. Here are some essential leader’s soft skills:

• Effective communication: Making your points heard and understood clearly is critical. Sometimes you have to communicate difficult or sensitive things in a calm manner, or be firm with people without getting angry or flustered. More than anything, you need to be honest and clear. That combination can make you a very persuasive presenter.

  People don’t have time to read long reports any more. Communicating something like a business case is no longer about 400-page papers or death by slideshow. You need to produce key summaries, short visual representations, and clear infographics that get to the point and provide the facts.

• Listening: Hand-in-hand with communication is the ability to listen. If you’re a leader or key advocate for BIM then people will want to talk to you, and you need to understand their point and respond to it. One great technique is to clearly repeat back what you’ve heard in order to confirm your understanding.
• Management: More than likely as a leader you have management responsibility — perhaps for BIM teams or for people with their own line reports. Only by spending regular time with your staff can you ensure that BIM implementation is going well on the ground. Also, by coaching those reports and developing their skills, you can embed your vision for BIM.
• Availability: This skill can be a challenge. We know that you’re probably busy, and if you’re in a leadership role, you’ll know all about being busy. However, being available and active to people who need your help, opinion, or advice to move the game on is vital. If people see that you’re committed to BIM and dependable in a tough situation, you can instill those same traits in them. Basically, lead by example. The best examples are being first to arrive on-site in the morning or the last to leave the office at night.

Although you want to develop hard skills like IT and technical construction ability, because hard skills are essential, successful implementation of BIM relies on better soft skills across all sectors of the industry.

Recently, McDonald’s conducted some research in the UK that found that soft skills contribute £88 billion to the UK economy, and with an increased reliance on service industries the value they add is set to increase to more than £120 billion.

The research also found that without more investment in soft skills, in 2020 more than half a million workers will be held back by a lack of them. Education can often put a focus on you achieving a specific qualification or getting the best exam results. Employers globally are demonstrating that you really need a combination of hard and soft skills. The classic wisdom is that exam results get you the interview, but soft skills get you the job.

Aiming for the ideal team

Many great methods and approaches define the perfect team. If you’ve been in business or office environments much, then you’ve more than likely heard a lot of theory about team building and personality types. The business world and manufacturing industry have learned quickly that a combination of diverse and complementary skills make for the best outcomes. However, if you have any experience of working in teams, you know that a mix of opinions and characters can also lead to conflict and clashes.

In terms of the ideal BIM team, here are some key features to look for:

• Teamwork: Pretty obvious, right? A good team needs teamwork skills. No kidding… . In reality, the ability to fairly and cooperatively work in a team is a real soft skill. Certain people are natural team players; others are leaders and some like to work alone. In BIM, everyone needs to pull together to achieve a common goal and form a true team.
• Interrogative and critical skills: BIM produces a lot of data, and sometimes all you need is the facts. How do you ensure you’re getting the relevant information and asking the right questions of the model? Having a team that has the skills to contribute key facts and to analyze and critique the data without bias is a recipe for quality information outputs.
• Risk management: Understanding risk is such a core skill in BIM. From identifying safety issues to consider in the design phase to avoiding construction risk or digital security management with sensitive project data, you need a team that can mitigate risk and consider alternative approaches.
• Cooperation: This skill is probably the softest skill of all, but no less important. Do your people get along with other people? Do they get along with each other? You need to make sure that your team members have attitudes that foster great relationships. A lot of great ways exist to break the ice between people, and no one knows your team better than you to work out whether a game of football, a fun evening out, or a boardroom meeting to thrash out issues is going to have the biggest impact.

How big should your team be? That’s one of those impossible questions because the answer depends on so many other factors like project scale and value. One of our favorite stories about the search for the ideal team size is about Jeff Bezos, the founder and CEO of Amazon. He has a “two pizza rule”; teams should always be small enough that two pizzas would be enough to feed everyone. He suggests that having more people in the room actually has a negative effect on communication. These teams may be part of bigger departments or management structures, but they’re small enough to get things done quickly.

You may be fortunate enough to have all the skills you need in-house. For most people, to build the ideal BIM team you need to think about recruitment. You may be at a managerial level or involved in HR processes and have a direct influence on this. If not, be brave. Talk to your managers or HR directors about what skills (hard and soft) you think the business needs to move forward with BIM.

Reflecting on the right experience

Say that you’ve been given a task that you don’t know how to approach, and you need some good advice about how to break it down. We’re going to hazard a guess that you can quickly think of someone you can ask about the task; for example, a mentor or manager you really look up to and regularly gain insight from. What sets that person apart? Your BIM champions will be able to use their experience and apply it to day-to-day BIM implementation:

• Problem solving: Every day will bring challenges, and you need team members who can solve these problems. BIM champions should be able to apply logical thinking to a problem and make contributions to your BIM teams that lead to practical solutions by taking the lessons learned from past projects.
• Autonomy: This just means working independently. Your BIM champions should be able to take full responsibility for their work, including any mistakes. BIM champions need to have confidence in their growing ability and BIM methods to achieve the results required without asking questions all the time.
• Lifelong learning: BIM champions not only need to learn from previous experience, but they also keep researching, reading, and attending events to increase their knowledge, so that they stay passionate about personal growth. You may also hear people call this continuing professional development (CPD). This is something you should keep doing too.
• Prioritization and planning: Something that only comes with experience is realizing how much time some tasks take. Being overly ambitious with deadlines and overpromising things is easy. Handling lots of projects or tasks at the same time and working out the priorities is a real skill, and one that BIM champions should demonstrate.

BIM advocates can come from any discipline in the construction industry, but don’t forget about the transferable skills people bring from alternative sectors. Some join the construction industry with varied backgrounds like IT, accounting, or academia, but you still can find great team workers, trouble-shooters, or project managers in those environments.

Watching for the right personality types

Say that you have an urgent task and you simply can’t achieve it in time. You need to delegate it because you have equally urgent but more important priorities. Quickly, think of team members you work with whom you can approach with that request. Perhaps you approach someone who just gets things done or is incredibly good at organizing her time. Here are some additional BIM champion skills that are about people’s personalities:

• Self-motivation: If you’re in a managerial position, how do you feel about people taking the initiative to make decisions and move things on? Workers who are self-motivated and passionate can make your life much easier. Of course, a balance exists, but BIM champions should know when to ask and when to make progress with their work.
• Time management: Of all the soft skills we discuss in this chapter, people who can manage their time are perfect for BIM processes. Construction has always required submission delivery under pressured deadlines in the middle of the night, so composure in the face of daunting timescales is ideal.
• Productivity: BIM champions need to balance time management with productivity. This just means how much gets done because of people’s effort. How quickly can you get that model completed? What is the client expecting in the presentation; can you pull that together today? The perfect BIM team needs lots of people who can produce great work on demand.
• Respect: You’d be amazed by how many rude people are in business and industry. You probably have stories of being open-mouthed by things people have done and said. A fundamental rule is that everyone is polite with co-workers, especially clients. Respect is something all BIM champions should have.

Equally, you can probably think of someone you’d never approach with these kinds of tasks. Why is that? Is she disorganized? Disrespectful? Dismissive? Disruptive?

Making the early adopters effective

When you first heard about BIM, perhaps you just got it straight away. Many other people have done the same thing, which is great, but watching the slow rate of change in your offices, sites, and the wider industry can be frustrating. “Why can’t we be more like [insert more advanced industry here — aeronautics, technology manufacturing, automotive design]?” Being ahead of the curve like this can actually have a negative effect on people’s attitudes, sometimes making them hasty or reckless in changing things or, worst of all, making them think of leaving your business to find BIM opportunities elsewhere.

If you have team members who are keen to race ahead, how can you make the most of that? Perhaps this is a good way to describe you too. The key thing here is to make these individuals feel valued and that they’re having a direct impact on process and procedure. For example, you could

• Give them responsibility for a discrete aspect of the implementation.
• Let them document the processes in their own way.
• Ask them to communicate the benefits to other staff.

Probably the best advice is to use the early advocates to promote and embed the new processes and to encourage everyone else, rather than having to do it all yourself.

Pushing the late bloomers

You encounter team members who take a bit of time to get their head around BIM and your plans to change existing processes. Perhaps you know someone who still thinks BIM is just 3D CAD and doesn’t really understand the data and embedded properties. Maybe some people recognize what BIM is trying to do as a process, but they just like using paper drawings or using their own file-naming system.

We’re guilty of this too. The digital realm sometimes doesn’t feel as if it has fully solved the way people interact with physical materials quite yet. Maybe you’re reading this as an e-book or online, but we know that many people still prefer a paper copy.

The following methods can help you to encourage adoption of BIM concepts in the late bloomers:

• Understand the impact. Sometimes grasping the effect on the team can mean realizing that because of an old process a co-worker has extra work to do. Think carefully about the people you’re trying to help and what’s important to them. For example, if they’re keen on sustainability, point out the environmental benefits of BIM.
• Connect people. Nothing beats a friendly colleague helping you with something you don’t understand. When instructions and mandates come from management or leadership, they can seem daunting — or, worse, you can feel that the manager hasn’t considered the day-to-day realities of work. Having a peer-level co-worker as a BIM champion can really improve acceptance.
• Plug the gaps. Often, people stick with processes they hate because doing so is easier than learning something new or having to start again. Offering a training course instead of asking people to self-teach can make a big impact. We discuss more on training in the later “Training and Supporting Everyone” section in this chapter.

Motivating the cynics

You probably know some people who think BIM is just a load of hype and they’ve heard it all before. How can you motivate the people who just don’t seem to want to hear about BIM? Here are some skills you can apply to help you in this situation:

• Make it real. You can demonstrate the cost implications of not implementing BIM. As harsh as it sounds, business is most often about profit, and the bottom line and people’s jobs are part of that equation. Showing that BIM improves business processes and design/construction outputs can reveal what it takes to make a more stable or profitable business, and that can result in increased job security.
• Explain the benefits. You can start to discuss the simple benefits of BIM, which we discuss in Chapter 13. However, explaining isn’t the same as displaying them on the ground. For example, if you can show how the properties in BIM objects make information retrieval easier, you can compare the speed of that process to finding data in vendor catalogues or stacks of paper drawings.
• Respect experience and tradition. Sometimes, change is the scariest thing. People can easily let their minds run away and think that because of BIM their skills are irrelevant or that they simply can’t learn the new technology quickly enough. This is especially true for older staff. Demonstrate your respect for their experience and involve them in critiquing and informing your BIM strategies. See which traditions you can adapt, rather than remove. Change roles to make people educators, not dinosaurs.

You never want to think about it, but despite your best efforts, sometimes some people won’t fit into your new collaborative BIM culture. They may not want to join your team environment or they may lack the respect of clients, co-workers, or customers. Don’t let one person’s disruption derail the success of your BIM strategy. We’re firm believers that everyone has a role somewhere, but you also need to know when to draw the line.

Jumping the barriers

What are the obstacles and barriers that you need to overcome to implement BIM? A few soft skills are fundamental to BIM, such as the ability to share and collaborate, and your team needs to have that mind-set. You’ve probably encountered processes that amaze you because they’re inefficient or outdated, but they’re “the way we’ve always done things.” This section helps you to overcome those hurdles and assist people to change the way they work. We also show you how the way that people work is transforming.

More than anything, BIM moves a lot of detailed work to the front-end of the project. Instead of a design team handing over its information to contractors at tender and the contractors continuing to develop design and construction strategies, the entire project team needs to work together from the early stages to ensure that they produce and collate as much information as possible to solve problems in the digital world before encountering them in the real world.

Sadly, moving more work to the front-end can result in conflict and confusion if you don’t manage it correctly. We cover a lot of the legal and commercial issues BIM creates in Chapter 14, but in terms of day-to-day management you may need to use and develop your conflict-resolution and negotiation skills. Most of the time, people want fair treatment.

Here’s a great story, attributed to Mary Parker Follett, about resolving conflict that shows sometimes a 50/50 split isn’t what people really need. A mother finds her two children fighting over a single orange. To resolve the argument, the mother cuts the orange in half and sends the children away. Later, she finds them both still unhappy. It turns out that one child wanted all the peel to flavor a cake and the other wanted to squeeze the pulp to make orange juice. The mother’s solution wasn’t a suitable one, but both children could have had what they wanted if they’d explained their needs.

Transforming the workplace

BIM can be transformative in the built environment industries. We can’t really emphasize the power of BIM enough. It’s not just hype and concept. By increasing access to information at the point where project teams most need it, you can make major changes to the way people work:

• Flexible working hours in global collaboration
• Remote working online, in the cloud and via virtual private networks
• Trust and confidence in shared data and its security

As an industry, construction engineering is still uncomfortably imbalanced in terms of gender and minority representation, and getting rid of discrimination needs to be everyone’s priority. You can make the construction industry more diverse and equal than it’s ever been! A successful BIM team needs to be diverse.

The built environment isn’t unappealing to any group; you know well that it’s full of varied and different roles that need skills in art, math, communication, science, engineering, creativity, technology, craft, manufacturing, and design. But still something hinders everyone feeling like they have an equal opportunity to succeed. If you’re in management or recruitment, you have the power to change an industry, one new hire at a time. If you’re not at that level, you can just make sites and offices friendlier places to be for an individual, whatever that means for someone. You can make construction the world’s model for equality and diversity, not an embarrassing relic of the past.

Training at every level

From the ground up, every single person involved in your BIM processes needs some form of training. Some of this training is in the hard skills and technical knowledge, such as mastering a new version of a software platform or understanding the core BIM protocols and your particular government’s documentation on construction strategy. Sometimes you can deliver internal training that meets the needs by drawing on internal expertise. Other times you need to look to external providers.

A critical need is to get people up to speed quickly. That could be as a result of new software or hardware implementation, a new process, or perhaps because the staff member is new to your existing BIM systems. Always make training specific to your operation and ask providers how they can adapt their offerings to tailor content to your business. If you just receive basic and generic training, you may not be getting to the heart of how a particular platform or protocol can generate new efficiencies in your projects.

You don’t need a qualification to become a BIM user, a BIM advocate, or even an expert in BIM. Nothing beats real-life experience to understand what a change BIM makes and how to generate these new efficiencies. We can sum up this life experience with the phrase “human teams, paper reams, rainy sites, and late nights.”

Emerging into new job roles

One of the major changes that results from BIM is the development of new and unfamiliar responsibilities, many of which we cover individually in Chapter 17. Some familiar themes run across all of the roles and responsibilities, however. Your team needs these skills to take on roles like BIM management, BIM coordination, and data analysis:

• Sharing data: Your BIM teams may need to move from a traditional responsibility for a discrete piece of work, to a collaborative and open environment where issues are discussed publicly in the context of other people’s work. This is integral to resolving errors and clashes between different parties on the project team as early as possible. The environment should never be embarrassing, shaming, or scary. Everyone should feel confident to input, speak up, and contribute.
• Staying up to date with industry news: BIM teams need to be informed about where the industry is heading and what impact technology innovation or legal changes can have on their work. Because many BIM projects span multiple years, keeping current with a changing industry is vital. Your teams should look to reliable newsfeeds, social media, blogs, and industry publications for the latest updates.
• Being self-motivated and keeping a positive outlook: Whatever roles your project team members have, they should all be self-driven and prepared to work hard. BIM isn’t a magic bullet that makes built environment projects easy. Just like they have for hundreds of years, construction projects can get tough. Your team must be able to maintain positivity, no matter what state the project is in, or what the weather is like on-site. Everything will be worthwhile when the project is successfully delivered.

Maintaining new activities

BIM implementation can take a long time. As technology and documentation improves, making BIM a success in your business is easier, because there’s more support out there for you — and it’s going to continue getting easier over time. But don’t underestimate that some processes and people will take longer to embrace change.

Then, after you have BIM processes, platforms, and roles that you’re happy with, you need to maintain the activities and work flows that you’ve put in place. You want to keep morale high among your colleagues. Think of how differently your team might feel in their first BIM meeting compared to when they’re in the depths of a project six months later:

• Day 1: BIM is going to change everything! Yes! Let’s do this!
• Day 200: Is BIM changing everything yet? Is everyone still up for this! No?

Wait, what happened? Those initial meetings may have been great and everyone was keen to understand their role in the process. However, after a year of trying to change existing procedures, document protocols, and rename thousands of files or BIM objects, your early enthusiasm can start to fade. This is totally normal.

Staying committed to BIM is important. Think of it like exercise. In the same way that you need to commit to an exercise and nutrition regimen, even during the tough bits of the diet or the hardest workout, you can appreciate that the benefits far outweigh the temporary pain. Consider that your business or project probably needs to lose a bit of weight it’s carried around for a while that doesn’t restrict it completely but makes it sluggish and slow. When things get busy and the business needs to run at peak capacity, it gets tired quickly. BIM isn’t a quick fix; it’s a lifestyle.

What is the exercise regimen for your processes? Just like human health, when your business is super-fit, you reap the benefits in the long term.

The more creativity you have around you, the more likely you are to keep finding new ways to do things better. Try to surround yourself with innovative thinkers who like brainstorming and can apply those ideas in practice. Experience tells us that creative people have a direct link to effecting change in the workplace and implanting new processes.

You can always find someone to help you. In Chapter 22, we show you lots of great resources to support you in your BIM implementation and delivery. In particular, a great community of BIM professionals, advocates, and users exists online. You’re not alone in the experiences you encounter while working with BIM. We can’t emphasize this enough.