BIM based design management of a building project collaboratively designed with a foreign design firm in China : a case study

In parallel with China’s growing construction market, there has been an influx of foreign architectural and engineering design firms into the Chinese construction market. Those firms generally form partnerships with local Chinese firms or institutions to overcome various complications in the country. Adding to the complexity, relatively recent technologies such as Building Information Modelling (BIM) also started to play a role in those collaborative project design management efforts in China. This paper presents an in-depth case study of a complex building design project collaboratively executed using BIM by a foreign design firm from the USA and local Chinese firm in China. The project was analysed from different design management and stakeholder perspectives. Some of the findings confirm the pervious accounts from the literature. New insights and the key lessons learned for BIM based design management in this context are also presented