Posted December 10th, 2011
Author:
Brian Beck, Revit Manager
It's super important to understand what your deliverable is at the end of a project. In the past, this was never a huge issue. Our deliverable was a roll of drawings and specifications. These drawings and specifications represented "design intent". It was up to the contractor and construction team to interpret these documents and produce a building. There was, and is, an entire process that our paper deliverable went through, shop drawings, QA, constructability review, etc. by the construction team. With the advent of BIM we can create a much more complex picture of our "design intent".
The danger now becomes what if someone decides your BIM is completely accurate and as such we no longer need to run it past all the checks and balances we've had in place in the past. Can the steel fabricator just grab the structural BIM and go to town without performing his due diligence, shop drawings? Can your BIM really produce quantity take-offs? The answer to these questions is YES. Provided you were paid for that effort and you included it in your BIM.
In my 7 years of dealing with BIM, in my case Revit, I have yet to see a model that doesn't have something "drafted" in to make the paper documents correct. Is that "drafted" item critical to the integrity of the BIM? It depends on what your deliverable is and what the other stakeholders in the project process are expecting.
