shelidonAugust 23, 2018Leave a Comment

Post originally authored for the blog of Strategie Digitali, on August 23rd, 2018.

We’ve all heard the story and this is how often goes: you’re the brightest guy in the office, a really nice pal, you were the first one to learn Revit, all of a sudden your boss comes in the office, gives you a pat on the back and tells a client “Sure, he’s our BIM Manager”. Now, you might be the boss or you might be that guy. Either way, don’t worry. It’s fine. It’s going to be ok. As long as both of you understand that a BIM Manager is a manager and there’s so much more to management than knowing how to model an X-wing, right?

Now, you know we’ve always been peckish about courses for “BIM Managers”. We don’t believe you can really become a BIM Manager with a course, just as much you can’t become a Project Manager. Sure, training can give you the basic concepts, but you should approach that kind of training with an already developed working experience.

What we do believe is that, in order to be a BIM Manager, you need many more skills than being able to draw a clash detection matrix (although, sometimes, that would be a start). You need to be able to organize teams and listen to them, to foster an atmosphere where knowledge is spread, to include both upper management and designers in the change you’re implementing, to take what’s best from projects and redesign it in such a way that’s beneficial for the whole Company. Just remember that what we call BIM Manager doesn’t work on projects, but acts at a Corporate level for the efficiency of processes. The course we designed is to take professionals to this level, provided they already know what BIM is. That’s right. It’s a master for BIM Management that has BIM as a center focus but will not teach you what BIM is: we talk about processes, norms and instruments assuming you already know them. Come “BIM prepared” and you’ll receive the push you need to be an even more efficient manager.

The master is called Boost for this reason, it’s a project we developed with AM4, I have the privilege of being in the teaching team alongside Simone Pozzoli, leading instructor of AM4, and Emiliano Segatto, the ringmaster himself, and it’s a full month in which we teach:

1. the usage of Mind Maps;
2. Project Management;
3. the usage of Process Maps;
4. Problem Solving;
5. Teaching techniques;
6. a focus on what we call Liquid Teams and Generative Teams.

Are you curious? Have a chat with us!

1. Mind Maps

It’s a tool Simone Pozzoli is very fond of, and a great way to start bringing order to your thoughts. For further readings, you can browse the website of their inventor, Tony Buzan. Or you might watch this very clear TED talk by Hazel Wagner.

2. Project Management

This year we decided to focus on PRINCE2, as an introduction to the basic concepts and “traditional” project management, Lean as a connection to something new, AGILE (and Scrum in particular), Kanban and Six Sigma. It’s quite a ride and there’s no way you can cover them extensively in few days, of course, but we spread a lot of seeds and I hope attendees were able to take some of them home and make them flourish.

2.1 Tools

I’m very grateful to the developers of the main tools I used to design activities for this part of the course, mainly the the coaching cards by Inspect and Adapt.

You have four decks of them: the Scrum Master, the retrospective, the product owner and a generic one. I used three of them. Just don’t call them “gamification”.

2.2 Activities

It would be impossible to summarize all the activities we juggled around during these days. Suffice it to say, the guys came up with this idea of developing a Role-Playing Game for Team Building and stick with that for the whole course. We broke it down in features, put it under the lenses of Agile and Six Sigma, organized Scrum sprints. One of the main tools we used is the 75 Tools for Creative Thinking. If you don’t know it, I seriously suggest you check it out.

Also, since it was a pathway for managers, we took some time to analyze the role and responsibilities of a Scrum Master and everyone came up with different ideas on how to face the many challenges of that crucial role. We had someone organizing the participation to quizzes in pubs in order to foster decision-making skills, while other people decided that Trello was the answer. We had daring ideas of organizing long trips into the mountains, or kin ball tournaments. You don’t know what kin ball is? Neither did I. Google it. There are championships.
For some people, a session of cheese making in the office was going to solve teamwork, while some other reminded us of a good moral compass to evaluate decisions. Other people remarked that employees get grumpy if they don’t have good food to eat, and other people developed a card game of Truth or Dare based on team-building principles.

3. Process Maps

How is it that our industry hates them so much? Simone Pozzoli tries to solve the mystery and gives tips on how to tame them. If you don’t know what process maps are, try and play around with Lucidchart: they have decent templates and an intuitive enough user interface.

4. Problem Solving

Creating problems is an art users are adept in. Solving them is often one the BIM manager’s duties. There are specific techniques and methods for the inception, analysis and action on problems. What constitutes a problem? How to solve a huge problem into smaller ones? There are different approaches, both intuitive and scientific. If you’re curious to dive deeper into the issue, you can start from Gaetano Kanizsa, a guy you might be familiar with for his famous triangle.

5. Teaching Techniques

It’s a topic we are obviously very passionate about. Knowing something is a thing, but are you really able to communicate it to your peers in the industry? As a BIM manager we believe it’s a duty. We talk about the difference between teaching kids and adults, the L-D-A cycle (Lecture, Demo, Activity), the importance of engagement. And we have an exercise to put all these skills into immediate practice.

. .
Someone decided to teach a lesson about Ladybug. Others went general BIM, management and origami.

6. Liquid Teams and Generative Teams

If you remember (and if you’re Italian, that is), Simone Pozzoli spoke about this topic last year at Digital&BIM in Bologna. The article he wrote has been taken down from the website, but you can still find his slides on the wrap-up article we published here. There’s also an article on his blog, you find it here.

7. Final Workshop

Of course we also have a LEGO SERIOUS PLAY workshop and how couldn’t we? Emiliano Segatto is the leading facilitator in a final session through which we’ll define your core identity, the aspiration of what you wish to do with that project of yours and how all this creates a shared vision and a network of positive and negative agents.