Abstract
This paper proposes a set of guidelines for using Building Information Modelling (BIM) to manage client requirements in the context of social housing projects. A process model representing main activities involved in requirements management has been devised, as well as nine constructs that can be used for assessing the effectiveness of using BIM for client requirements management. The process of managing and modelling clients’ requirements is important to improve value generation, considering the limited resources usually available for social housing projects, as well as the need to deal with the diversity of user profiles. The use of BIM-based tools to support this process can potentially improve the performance of those projects in terms of environmental and social sustainability. Design Science Research was the methodological approach adopted in this investigation. The main outcome of this study, the set of guidelines, emerged from an empirical study carried out in a social housing project from Brazil. This study explores the managerial perspective of client requirements modelling, proposing practical contributions, such as understanding the challenges of managing requirements in social housing projects, and theoretical contributions, such as descriptions of the activities involved in client requirements management and their interactions, and constructs for assessing BIM-based solutions for that problem.
Highlights
Value generation in construction projects depends strongly on the identification, processing and communication of client requirements to support decision making in the design process [1]
There are well-known difficulties in managing client requirements in construction projects: (i) Client requirements are often poorly identified and updated [2,3]; (ii) clients’ needs change over time, and new requirements often emerge throughout project stages [4,5,6,7]; (iii) little use is made of repositories of information on client requirements [7]; (iv) requirements are not widely available, and not accessible to all product development team members [3,7,8]; and (v) there are difficulties in tracking requirements, due to the fact that much of the information involved is qualitative [7,9,10]
The research was divided into three stages: (i) Understanding the context; (ii) development of an empirical study in which Building Information Modelling (BIM)-based tools were used for modelling client requirements for a social housing project; and (iii) assessing the use of BIM for client requirement management, based on a set of proposed criteria
Summary
Value generation in construction projects depends strongly on the identification, processing and communication of client requirements to support decision making in the design process [1]. The aim of this research work is to propose a set of guidelines for the use of BIM to manage client requirements in the context of social housing projects Those guidelines are based on a process model that have been devised to represent the main activities involved in client requirements management, as well as on a number of constructs that have been proposed for assessing the effectiveness of the application of BIM in client requirements management. This investigation is based on an empirical study carried out in a social housing project from Brazil, which was financed by Caixa Econômica Federal (National Savings Bank), as part of the Minha Casa Minha Vida (MHML—My House My Life) program. Two possible stakeholders have been identified as potential users of BIM-based client requirements management: (i) Companies involved in the development and construction of social housing projects; (ii) funding agencies and local authorities, which are in charge of assessing proposals for social housing projects, and carrying out inspections during the construction phase
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