Understanding the impact of the digital shift on construction project management
The construction industry is currently undergoing significant change as a result of digital technologies. Among the technological approaches, the Building Information Modeling (BIM) approach has received considerable attention in recent years from both researchers and industry professionals, and its growing success seems to have opened the door to major paradigm shifts in the industry. Faced with these changes, the traditional skills of project professionals or managers no longer seem sufficient to manage the new information perspective of construction project management. New skills become necessary, embodied by new roles (BIM managers, BIM coordinators, BIM modeler, information managers, etc.) that are becoming increasingly important in projects. Some studies have studied these new roles on a theoretical level, without addressing the question of their positioning in relation to traditional roles in project management, nor how project managers and BIM specialists position themselves in relation to the generic processes proposed in the BIM implementation guides. This case study shows that the roles of BIM specialists are not the same from one discipline to another, and that these roles are not just technical roles. In addition, the information sub-process seems to crystallize around BIM managers, which tends to create two sources of leadership in a project: BIM managers and project managers. The study also reveals that practitioners find that the BIM collaboration processes proposed in the BIM implementation plan and in the project documents are too generic and that there is generally a gap between these processes and those actually used in the project.