When Finance Manager met openBIM…

I’ve worked at buildingSMART for 9 years now and can say with some confidence that I’m pretty good at what I do. Don’t get me wrong, there’s always room for improvement, but I love a challenge and financial systems and spreadsheets are my safe place.

Until relatively recently however, ask me anything too in depth about IFC, Data Dictionaries or Level of Development and my eyes would have glazed over. I can safely say that I’m not a technically minded person – my daughter still has to help me with our Smart TV!

Technical Director Léon van Berlo assured me that getting a GitHub account would change all of that, but I wasn’t convinced that was enough, so I enrolled on the Professional Certification Basic Foundation course.

After 2 days of a very accessible and engaging remote learning course with Mark Baldwin and his team at Lucerne University, I sat the exam and passed with 98%. OK – not such a tech dummy after all. The course gave me a brilliant grounding in all of the openBIM® concepts and was peppered with examples of where openBIM is being used on real projects, convincing me that contrary to my previous suspicions, this stuff is not just theory.

I know I’m preaching to the converted in this forum, but I came away wondering why any company in the AECOO industry wouldn’t want their staff to be trained in this area, which enables groundbreaking progress in the built asset industry in terms of sustainability, efficiency and communication, to name but a few benefits.

Spurred on by not being laughed out of the openBIM classroom, I recently volunteered to be a student on the pilot course ‘Leveraging openBIM for Project Management’.

This course was delivered over three 3-hour remote sessions by buildingSMART International member SBI (Strategic Building Innovation) and their amazing team in the US.

Amongst the most highly regarded experts in the industry, these professionals really did give me the feeling that I’d landed an access-all-areas pass to anything one would ever want or need to know about openBIM and its applications for project management.

In many respects, I didn’t have enough practical experience to take full advantage of this treasure trove of knowledge and expertise, but on a non-technical level I came away from each session feeling increasingly well equipped to tackle Project Management for built asset ventures involving openBIM.

The course takes participants through everything from understanding the openBIM acronyms and their applications in Project Management, KPI’s and target setting, quality assurance and control, model checking, and even the science behind effective collaboration for project teams which was fascinating.

The content and delivery is engaging, insightful, and inspiring, and again real life examples are a prominent feature.

Following my adventure into the more technical world of openBIM, I’m now safely ensconced back in the comfort of my budgets and balance sheets.

Doing these courses, however, has given me the confidence to engage more with our community and the ability to get more out of team meetings, conferences and buildingSMART summits.  I no longer run away when colleagues talk in openBIM acronyms and can more fully appreciate just how far reaching the consequences of good education in openBIM and its applications can be.

For ANY professional in the built asset industry, including technical novices like me, I would definitely recommend giving one of these courses a go.

Now, how do I get Netflix on…?

Various Professional Certification courses are available internationally.

‘Leveraging openBIM® for Project Management’ can be taken through buildingSMART USA now, or through other buildingSMART Chapters when it is launched internationally in 2024.

For more information visit https://education.buildingsmart.org/ or email education@buildingsmart.org.