One or More BIM managers in France: the confusion of the kind

Since 2015, the arrival of BIM in the building sector in France has turned the corporation world upside down. Not only constructive practices have been impacted, but also the uses and the men who have undergone important changes.
Thus, the new collaborative mode generated by the BIM and the digital model have challenged the supremacy of some construction actors because the process involves working together taking into account the needs of other contributors.
New BIM tools have emerged and actors in the act of building must take ownership of them. It is in this context that under the impetus of a European directive and the French government’s encouragement of new missions and job profiles have.
Moreover, concurrent engineering requires that each actor can advance at the same time as the others, at the whim of the information that reaches him, and the information he has to transmit. However, in the French legal system around public procurement, things are not planned in this direction. Also a consequent evolution must take place to adapt to the methodology.
The new missions generated by the BIM in France require a good mastery of the tools and the process. Also, to meet the objectives of the BIM approach, it is possible to define a typical job profile around the BIM, adapted to the various sectors concerned? The multitude of job offers using the same terms with very different objectives and the complexity of the proposed missions motivated by our approach.
In order to reinforce exchanges with professionals or specialists, we carried out a statistical study to answer this problem. Five topics are discussed around the business area: the BIM in the company, the function (business), software used and BIM missions practiced (39 items). About 1400 professionals were interviewed. These people work in companies (micro businesses, SMEs and Groups) of construction, engineering offices or, architectural agencies. 77% of respondents have the status of employees. All participants are graduated in their trade, the majority having level 1. Most people have less than a year of experience in BIM, but some have 10 years.
The results of our survey help to understand why it is not possible to define a single type of BIM Manager. Indeed, the specificities of the companies are so numerous and complex and the missions so varied, that there is not a single model for a function. On the other hand it was possible to define 3 main professions around the BIM (Manager, Coordinator and Modeler) and 3 main missions for the BIM Manager (deployment of the method, assistance to project management and management of a project).