One lesson learned from the Walsh Group’s construction- management assignment on a 650,000-sq-ft hospital in Elgin, Ill.—a project Walsh took over as mass excavation and steel procurement were under way—is that a lack of team experience with building information modeling should not be an inhibiting factor on a complex construction project.
Despite a rocky start and an opening scheduled for early 2010, Sherman Hospital is on time and on budget. “This is a BIM success story,” says Dan Klancnik, virtual construction manager for Chicago-based Walsh, who readily admits not all of them turn out that way. Success was achieved even though most of the individuals from Walsh and none of the subcontractors had BIM project experience, with the exception of BIM consultant Steven Cook from Kristine Fallon Associates Inc., Chicago. “For most of the people working for Walsh, it was their first BIM project,” Klancnik says.