Abstract

During the past few years, Building Information Modeling (BIM) started to gain acceptance within the AEC industry. But like many software products for project management, BIM currently faces significant issues that hinder its widespread use. These issues include the need for adaptation strategies to be applied to old managements, organizational and communication structures, and software development. This paper focuses on the challenges that are currently facing BIM implementation during the Schematic Design (SD) and Design Development (DD) phase, due to the importance of these phases in making critical decisions that directly affect the building’s life cycle. Thus, this paper seeks to map these challenges and answer the following questions; what are these types of challenges that currently limit BIM implementation? How do these challenges affect BIM implementation? How far is the impact of each challenge on BIM quality? The researcher assessed a sample of ten AEC firms to map the daily challenges they are facing while implementing BIM. The researcher has observed the day-to-day operations, team interactions and communication exchanges for a period of several weeks for each. The final outcome of this research is to identify barriers, organize the findings in terms of themes and categories, and measure the impact of these issues on the final BIM quality.