Barriers and Risks in BIM-Embedded Design Collaboration: A Two-Mode Social Network Analysis

The construction industry has always been criticized for fragmentation arising from the separated design and construction processes. Although Building Information Modeling (BIM) is considered to be beneficial for effective collaboration through the lifecycle of construction projects, the BIM-embedded design collaboration is still problematic. The aims of this study are a) investigating the relationships between the key risks and barriers in GBA setting from users` perspective, and b) applying the Social Network Analysis (SNA) methods to visualize the barriers and risks in network structure. This paper applies a two-mode social network analysis (SNA) to investigate the key barriers and risks and to understand their relationship in BIM-embedded design collaboration in the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area (GBA) context. Two independent construction projects were investigated, and five face-to-face and online semi-structured interviews were conducted with experienced design management team members. In this study, the barriers are the reasons that cause the risks, and the risks indicate the poor project performance in BIM-embedded collaboration. Based on the collected dataset, six key barriers as actors and ten risks as the events have been considered; the resultant matrix for investigation is a 6 × 10 matrix, representing a two-mode social network. The results suggest that promoting a collaborative culture is vital for project managers to deliver construction projects in the BIM vision in the company-level. On this basis, the evaluation of company internal design coordination should be taken into account when BIM integration. Moreover, the findings of this research highlight the key barriers as lack of trust and share, fragmented work, multiple silos and different understanding of BIM; plus, the risks of the difficulty in model management, miscommunication and increased short-term reworks received more impacts on impeding BIM-embedded design collaborations. Recommendations were given at the end of this paper for breaking the chains of unfavorable causations for high-quality construction project management.