Want to do well in BIM: run a tight and skinny model.

My daughter asked me yesterday: “At what point are you going to debunk something in your debunkthebim blog?”

Hmmmmm...

A quarter down into my year-long journey and I managed to create one reader that questions the entire endeavour;

At least she is responding...

So let’s put one issue straight today:

You want to get in/thrive in BIM – you need to be thrifty!

You need to run a tight and skinny model.

The overall success of any BIM endeavour will depend majorly on how well the digital model and is management is managed.

In the earlier days of CAD, file size meant everything and ‘purge’ was the mantra.

Nowadays no matter how good hardware/software one has – every element and tool has to be optimised to run at the lowest complexity possible with the smallest size acceptable.

It is a culture that should be introduced early on and everyone trained to respect it.

Often relying on self moderation will not be sufficient and you’ll need to police it.

You only need one person in your team to ‘innovate’ and introduce an object that is not optimised and it will slowly or even rapidly kill your model.

But having a slow (or dead) model is not the only disadvantage of an un-optimised BIM workflow -  the flow-on effects are numerous and they all can damage your bottom line.