Digital Practice, Without the Pretence
The Secret BIM Manager is a blog about what really happens when architecture meets technology — the messy, human, and occasionally absurd reality of BIM, Revit, and digital design management in practice.
It’s written by someone who has worked in architectural studios since 1994, back when floorplans were inked with Rotring pens, drawings were traced by hand, and buildings were delivered without BIM — and yet somehow still got built.
I am not a digital native. I’ve lived through the profession’s slow, uneven digitalisation: from drawing boards to CAD, from CAD to BIM, and from files on servers to models in the cloud. This blog exists in that gap between what technology promises and how it actually behaves once it meets deadlines, budgets, and people.
What You’ll Find Here
You’ll find candid reflections on BIM culture, leadership, and collaboration, alongside Revit tutorials rooted in real project scenarios — not out-of-the-box “Revit Essentials”, but the kind of guidance that only emerges from things going wrong on live jobs. Broken links, parameter politics, over-modelled details, under-defined responsibility — the bits no training course ever really prepares you for.
Along the way, the blog leans on analogies that help make sense of the madness: cargo cults, slow horses, AI anxiety, and the quiet theatre of coordination meetings. The aim isn’t to be clever for its own sake, but to make complex, frustrating systems legible — and occasionally survivable.
Every post tries to cut through the buzzwords and show what digital practice actually feels like in an architectural office: equal parts ambition, compromise, frustration, and dry humour.
Why “Secret”?
Because talking honestly about BIM can be… career-limiting. There’s what gets said in meetings, and then there’s what actually happens on projects.
This blog isn’t about naming names or settling scores. It’s about creating space for reflection — on how BIM is really used, misused, resisted, and occasionally made to work — and on how the profession might do better without pretending every problem is a software issue.
Join the Conversation
If you’ve ever fixed a Revit model at two in the morning before a coordination deadline, been told to “just make it BIM,” or wondered why every digital improvement seems to spawn another spreadsheet, then you’ll fit right in.
This is a space for architects, technologists, and managers who care about buildings, understand tools as tools, and are honest about the gap between digital ambition and everyday practice.
Welcome to The Secret BIM Manager.