BIM adoption by UK project managers -challenges involved and way forward

The UK government announced its BIM strategy with an aim to improve the efficiency, profitability and sustainability of construction projects. Building Information Modeling has the potential to improve project performance and enable effortless flow of communication and data management on construction projects. This research shows the results of an investigation about BIM adoption by project managers in the UK. Although BIM has the potential to revolutionize construction practice, the project managers in the UK are slow in BIM adoption compared to other industry professionals such as architects and engineers. This formed the basis of this research to investigate the attitude of PMs towards BIM and the factors affecting its adoption among them. An online Questionnaire survey was used for this research and the questions were formed in such a way to address each objective of this research. The survey was completed by senior as well as junior projects managers belonging to different organisations in the UK construction industry. The results show that the majority of the respondent PMs are aware about BIM but only a small number are presently working at level 2—the level demanded by the BIM strategy. Although there is a positive attitude towards BIM among the respondent PMs, the technology has not been embraced yet due to various difficulties such as high upfront cost of software and training, lack of proper management support, lack of benchmarking of the BIM benefits and lack of client demand. Taking these barriers into consideration, there is a need to educate the clients and higher management of the construction companies and develop quantitative benchmarking of the BIM benefits through pilot projects in order to overcome these obstacles and promote faster adoption of BIM among PMs.