Teaching construction project management with BIM support: Experience and lessons learned
Research Highlights
► BIM allows using holistic real-world cases that better simulate project conditions. ► BIM allowed learning three project planning methods in an integrated way. ► BIM allows the incorporation of change management in assignments. ► BIM allows learning project plan local optimizations. ► We recommend construction engineer programs adopt BIM to develop practical skills.
Introduction
Knowledge of project management theory is important to participate on a project. While mistakes in the classroom result in lower marks, mistakes in the field can affect morale, waste resources, and in the worst-case scenario cost someone's life. Academics universally agree that practically applicable knowledge about construction management tools and methods is difficult to learn. This is mainly because explicit understanding about how to apply formal methods and tools within the unique situations encountered on most construction projects is hard to gain. The application of most formal tools and methods requires project managers to have an in-depth understanding of project-specific information. For example, if a critical equipment or subcontractor fails to perform as anticipated what impacts will this have on time and cost and what impact will potential alternative operation methods have. Answers to such questions cannot be generalized and trivialized; they cannot be developed through the formulaic application of the necessary project management concepts, but depend greatly on project-specific information. This provides a problematic situation that universities face during the development of construction management curricula. In the past, students had to learn practical application of methods on very simple abstract examples because of the limited time available. This approach did not allow students to learn how to adjust the application of project management methods to specific real-world project contexts. To overcome this shortcoming, educators complemented their formal illustration of the method through abstract examples with stories of how project managers applied the methods successfully on past projects. While this learning approach is an improvement to only learning the formal working of the method, the retrospective character of storytelling does little to help students to build up an understanding about how to apply a certain method to solve a practical problem. In hindsight, a story of a successful application of a method to a project management problem, in particular, if told well, sounds obvious, while applying a method to solve a problem that one faces is not so easy. To overcome this dilemma a combination of the two learning methods is necessary, during which students apply formal methods within simulated contexts of real-world construction projects. The design of such projects within the tight boundaries of construction management classes is not easily possible because it simply takes too much time for students to understand the method and all the project-specific information to apply the method. Due to this problem, construction professionals still acquire much knowledge through learning-by-doing [1] with on-the-job training activities, and it is not surprising that many criticize construction management university programs as ineffective [2].
In this paper, we argue and provide first illustrative evidence that the integration of project management tools based on Building Information Models (BIM) can help educators to develop project management class projects that simulate realistic practical situations, such as the generation of a complete bid package based on a complete set of bid documents. In particular, we show that BIM supports project management learning activities with two distinctive features. First, BIM allows the storage and generation of project-specific information in a structured way. This structured way of working allows students to understand the in-depth information of a specific project's context relatively quickly. Additionally, BIM allows the storage of project-related information in a central database. This central storage allows for the automation of many tedious work tasks that are required during the execution of formal project management methods and the reduction in repetitive tasks that students traditionally had to do redundantly. These two advantages allow educators to design class project assignments that simulate real project conditions more realistically than before.
The structure of this paper is as follows: First, we elaborate theoretically on the earlier-described practical dilemma that construction management educators face today using education theories and develop a theoretical hypothesis of how BIM can overcome this dilemma. After briefly discussing our research methodology, we then provide first illustrative evidence for our hypothetical claim by qualitatively analyzing two project management classes that applied BIM-based applications. Afterwards, we discuss the theoretical implications of our findings from analyzing the two classes. We close the paper by briefly suggesting directions for future research and by providing a summarizing conclusion.
Section snippets
BIM to support project management education
Project planning and execution depends on the valuing and trading-off of the scope, time, and cost of the project [3], [4]. Plans and specifications represent the project scope. Scope defines the work that is required to complete the project successfully. Based on the scope, project planners estimate the time it takes to carry out the work and the costs of doing so. In practice, whether practitioners are aware of it or not, project planning and execution is integrated project management. In
Research methodology
To provide evidence for the aforementioned hypotheses, we qualitatively analyze how BIM supported the learning of project management methods in two construction management university classes: The “Managing Fabrication and Construction” class at Stanford University and the “Integrated Project Management” class at the Twente University in The Netherlands. This multiple case study allowed us to investigate the phenomenon of how BIM can support construction management education within a real-world
Class background
The first example of a BIM supported project-based learning format is the graduate-level “Managing Fabrication and Construction” course taught at Stanford University. The class has been incrementally moving towards the BIM-based format as permitted by software tools since 1994. The class consisted of a mixture of lectures, in-class exercises, assigned labs, team projects, presentations, discussions, and examination. With parallel coursework in cost estimating, expected undergraduate coursework
Comparison of the Stanford class exams
The grades of the course's final exams provide an indicator of the students' knowledge at the end of the class. The class exam is paper-based. To provide as transparent a representation as we could, we chose to compare the exam results for the four years of available exam results, starting with 2006:
2006: the last time the class was taught without the use of BIM-based project management tools for all students and all aspects of scope, schedule, and cost management (called non-BIM in this paper)
Limitations and suggestion for future research
Overall, we observed similar characteristics in both classes and are confident that the reported observations are real. While our observations provide a degree of predictability for other classes that the integration of BIM-based tools will also allow for the integration of more detailed and realistic class projects, we must caution for the overall generality of the findings for all project management classes. It is necessary to review the inherent weaknesses in spite of this intuitive
Conclusion
In this paper, we show that the introduction of BIM-based project management tools helped educators of two project management courses to develop class assignments based on more realistic project settings and information to support students with learning how to apply different formal project management methods to real-world project management problems. In particular, we show that the introduction of BIM allowed the educators to design class projects that include more realistic cases that better
Acknowledgements
We appreciate the software tools and support provided by the vendors: Autodesk, Vico, Tocoman, Primavera, Sage, and Tekla. We are also thankful to the students that took the courses and provided the feedback on their experiences. We thank the reviewers of this paper and its earlier drafts, including Tobias Maile, Amir Kavousian, Jung In Kim, Tony Dong, Olli Seppanen, Tomi Tutti, Richard See, Dana Probert, and Thomas Wingate. We are thankful for the BIM modeling provided by Sangwoo Cho. In
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