“Do you want CAD Manager on your business card? No? Good. That’s all Jared ever wanted.”
-former boss to the architect who took over my BIM Manager duties when I quit.

I’m going to ignore for now the irony that I never even had BIM Manager on a business card. That’s beside the point. I love this quote. It reveals a huge misconception about why so many of us love BIM, not to mention a gross ignorance about the value of a BIM Manager.

Why did I want to be the BIM Manager at my old firm? Why was I excited to have BIM Manager as my title?  Well first of all, my other option at the time was intern. Being the BIM Manager meant I took on a leadership role. I wasn’t always respected or listened to, but I attended many meaningful meetings. People were aware of when I wasn’t invited, and why that wasn’t such a wise move. My opinions were solicited and instead of being just a lowly intern, I was someone who was known to have an eye on the future. Sitting in strategy meetings with partners, my voice carried weight.

But the central reason why I wanted to be the BIM Manager was that it meant I got to help my coworkers. I had the opportunity to improve the quality of all the projects in the office; I had the potential to elevate the output of the entire firm. As the BIM Manager I could affect positive change and help the firm provide better service and design to all its clients. How great is that? To me being a BIM Manager meant I got to think about and focus on making my coworkers better architects. Sure I got to explore programs, problem solve, teach, and research. But at the core of the role was the Endless Path of Improvement. It always amazes me when people don’t get this. Being the BIM Manager is one of the most fulfilling and fun roles within a firm. Sure sometimes it sucks: some students make you want to tear your eyes out and bosses don’t always want to hear about the change that needs to happen. But as a whole, it’s awesome.

BIM Managers, Future BIM Managers, Principals, and the rest of you

The attitude of the former coworker referenced above is one of the reasons why I quit my job. It raises tough questions about the role of a BIM Manager in a small firm. How do small firms manage BIM? At what size does a BIM Manager become a role a firm can afford? A non-technologically savvy firm with less than five or ten people that switches to BIM…how do they succeed unless one of their members takes it upon themselves to be the defacto-BIM Manager? Is this a given? Is this something small firms, or all firms need to accept? That once they go from CAD to BIM it has to be someone’s job to care about all the minutiae that I and so many others write about? That someone has to shift their role a bit from whatever they were to also be BIM-centric? Can this just be outsourced?

Maybe this is a temporary problem. Perhaps at some point BIM for the AEC industry will be like water to a fish or a pencil to an architect in the pre-computer age. Maybe.

Career Path or Current Responsibility?

Whatever size of firm, the leadership needs to look at the person in charge of BIM and ask this question: is BIM Manager their career path or their current responsibility? Both are valid answers, but each leads to very different outcomes for a firm’s future. Firms and their BIM Managers that don’t understand whether the role is temporary, permanent, or part of a larger whole are heading towards cataclysm, towards rupture and the loss of value when misalignment of goals leads to key team members leaving or giving up.

The Professional BIM Manager

There is a segment of BIM Managers who are happy and excited to make a career out of this role. This is awesome. These are the BIM Managers who drift away from their former roles of architect, engineer, drafter, or whatever they were. PE, AIA, LEED, and all the other acronyms of the traditional AEC world decrease in value to the Professional BIM Manager, as those designations aren’t central to their work. They become something distinctly different. They focus on the Four Flavors of BIM, and are always dedicated to advancing each one of those quadrants. They have the potential to become firm leaders with an eye on efficiency, collaboration, the expansion into new services, and integration with other disciplines. To over-simplify, these BIM Managers care more about the ‘how’ of the practice of architecture than the ‘what’ that the firm is producing. Design may still matter, but the process is more intriguing. The pinnacle of this role is Chief Technology Officer: someone who transcends day to day BIM and focuses on how technology affects, shapes, and improves the firm.

The Transient BIM Manager

Not everyone who goes down the path of BIM Manager is satisfied with staying in that role. A focus on BIM and BIM Management teaches you a lot about construction, design, organization, and the practice of architecture. A BIM Manager gets to see a lot of the underbelly of the firm. A BIM Manager is going to have discussions with firm leaders about hours worked, efficiency, expenses, priorities, the strengths of their coworkers, etc. These experiences lead many of us to return to the traditional path, as BIM becomes the foil for understanding how to become a better architect. Many of us see BIM as the route to leadership & project ownership where once it was primarily via design excellence. With a transient BIM Manager (BIMwizard, guru, or whatever the exact role is that overshadows non-BIM responsibilities), there needs to be an understanding of what comes next. Do these people stay in the role until they get fed up and switch companies? Are they just then replaced by other transients? Or are they groomed to leave the role. Is there an understanding that instead of going intern, junior designer, lead designer, project manager, principal that there’s a path that goes something like intern, BIMsorceror, BIM Manager, project manager, principal.

I have this vision of a firm that sees the role of BIM Manager as a requirement for firm leadership. Every future leader takes a turn. For a year or two or whatever the appropriate length of time. Like required military service in some countries. The requirement to forward BIM is seen as a bulwark of holistic capabilities.

At the very end of my last job I had a frank conversation about this divide with another one of my bosses. I said I was the latter type of BIM Manager, but that if the firm didn’t see me that way, that was okay. If my career path went the way of the Professional BIM Manager, I would be happy with that. As long as it was deliberate and with an eye on the larger implications of that decision. My long term goals were firm leadership and helping the industry. I said if I could achieve that route through a non-design role, I wouldn’t care; as much as I enjoy design, that too is a stepping stone to something bigger. But this post isn’t about me and what happened next. Maybe someday I’ll have enough distance to share more of that story. But you know the ending, don’t you? A month after that frank conversation I was writing a life changing blog post.

What do you think? If you are a BIM Manager, do you see yourself as a Professional BIM Manager or a Transient BIM Manager? How does that affect the perception of your role? And now for the question the question that might sting the most:

Do you think the conversation about BIM is overly dominated by the Professional BIM Manager rather than the Transient BIM Manager? And is this dominance hurting our joint cause of improving the profession through the use of technology? I worry that it does by making BIM seem like something that takes up too much time. That it’s not for dabblers or people who put design or other interests first.

Did you notice the transposition of BIM and CAD in the quote and my subsequent text? I’m not even going to touch that topic today. Subscribe to my blog to read more about the future of BIM and the tricky world of being an Architect in the 21st century: Shoegnome on Facebook, Twitter, and RSS feed. And now you can join the LinkedIN group too!

Why this post today? I decided to finish this post because of some intriguing questions posed over on this post about Revit, ArchiCAD, and a video you will have opinions on.