The Secret BIM Manager is a field journal from inside architectural practice.
Real-world BIM, Revit, digital process, and the uncomfortable truths no one puts in the BEP.
No vendors. No hype. Just what actually breaks — and why.
Latest journals
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Keep Your Negatives Safe
Photography has been an integral part of my creative life since my high school years. Since we’re talking about the 1990s, I used film—not out of nostalgia, but simply because that was the medium of photography at the time. What I came to understand was that the print was never the work. The negative was.…
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If BIM Level 3 Is the Answer, What Was the Question?
BIM Level 3 is often treated as an inevitable destination — a promised land where silos disappear, decisions stick, and collaboration finally works. But beneath the ambition sits an awkward truth: nobody ever agreed on the question it was meant to answer.
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Lawyers, Engineers, and the Cost of Trust
BIM isn’t struggling because the industry is fragmented. It’s struggling because trust is expensive. In cultures shaped by lawyers, coordination turns into liability management. In cultures shaped by engineers, the response is predictable: build systems that make reality survivable.
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Cargo Cult BIM
Many firms have mastered the rituals of BIM — the 3D models, the flashy dashboards, the ISO references — without ever achieving what BIM was meant to deliver: collaboration, clarity, and insight. This is Cargo Cult BIM — where belief replaces understanding, and performance replaces progress.
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The Five Monkeys and the Revit Model
Most Revit standards don’t fail because they’re wrong. They fail because nobody remembers why they exist. What the Five Monkeys experiment reveals about BIM culture, inherited fear, and why architectural practices keep pulling each other off the ladder.
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Why Throwing People at a BIM Deadline Rarely Works
When BIM deadlines loom, architectural practices often reach for the same solution: add more people. It feels decisive, but it rarely works. BIM has a sequence, a memory, and a stubborn relationship with time — and no amount of last-minute resourcing can change that.
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Jackson Lamb Would Make a Great BIM Manager
Jackson Lamb wouldn’t survive a corporate BIM steering group, which is precisely why he’d be effective. Slow Horses is a lesson in how flawed teams, badly housed and poorly regarded, still manage to deliver. If you’ve ever worked in BIM, this will feel uncomfortably familiar.
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Filterworld Architecture: Flattening the City
BIM and AI promise precision, but something essential is slipping away. As algorithms flatten design and cities begin to look the same, architects risk trading ownership of the process for optimisation.
Field Notes
Observations collected the hard way. Read at your own risk.
Revit doesn’t punish curiosity. Office culture does.
A note on why experimentation dies long before models do.
Most BIM problems are social problems pretending to be technical.
If your solution starts with software, you’re already late.
Metrics without context optimise the wrong behaviour.
What gets measured gets gamed, especially in BIM.