In the design and construction phases, your BIM is likely packed with 3D models of the future facilities and even digital twins of your critical assets. But what about during operations and maintenance, where you face most of your total cost of ownership? When implementing BIM for FM, where you’re repurposing your BIM data to better leverage it for facility management, an important part of the process is creating a new type of “digital twin,” the user persona.
Where should you start when building personas for BIM for FM?
According to Chuck Mies, LEED A.P., Assoc. AIA of Autodesk, and a pioneer in BIM for FM, you need to first think about the end user. In a recent Eptura webinar, Leverage BIM to Unlock Facility and Asset Data, he asks this critical rhetorical question: “If we don’t understand who the final consumers are, what problem are we trying to solve?”
Unless you know who’s going to use it, there’s no way to know what data you need to take along for the BIM for FM journey. Developing role-based personas helps you understand who needs what data and how best to set everyone up for success.
But first, it’s worth recapping the overall BIM for FM process to best understand where building personas go.
Recapping the BIM-for-FM journey
Although they develop lots of building information modeling (BIM) data during design, planning, and construction, many organizations lack a process for leveraging that investment for the last — and longest and most expensive — phases of the life cycle, operations and maintenance. So, when it comes time for facility management (FM), departments are left having to re-invent the wheel.
But by making the BIM for FM journey, you can see a better return on your investments in data.
To start, you need to answer the following core questions:
- Who is going to use the data and why do they need it?
- What data are you going to collect and how are you going to do it?
- How will you validate and maintain the data once you have it?
And for those first questions, an important part of finding the answers can involve developing user personas.
User personas in BIM for FM
On one level, a user persona is like a digital twin, a virtual representation of something that exists in the physical world. But there are important differences. First, it’s not the twin of something. It’s the twin of someone.
Second, it’s not a twin at all.
Understanding user personas
Instead of being a faithful copy of one specific person, a user persona is an archetype you build out of the most important traits shared by a large percentage of a specific type of end user. So, for example, a regular digital twin might be a highly accurate digital model of a specific motor you have on a production line. But the user persona you create of the technician who keeps that motor running doesn’t perfectly match any specific person in the maintenance department. Instead, it has the important characteristics shared by most of the technicians. These shared characteristics can include:
- Educational background
- Responsibilities
- Goals
- Attitudes
Your goal is to be able to then use the persona to accurately predict behavior, specifically in terms of how they use data. You want to be able to predict what data those maintenance technicians need and how they use it to accomplish their goals.
Creating user personas: Asking the right questions
The overall process of BIM for FM starts with asking the right questions, and it’s the same for creating user personas. The basic questions you need to answer when creating a user persona for a specific role are:
- Who are they and what do they do?
- What are their main, overall goals?
- What is preventing them from reaching these goals?
Mies suggests starting with job titles. For example, Facility Manager, Maintenance Manager, or Maintenance Technician. You can then look up the roles and responsibilities that are already established in your organization. Instead of guessing what a maintenance manager does, you can reference the existing job description from the human resources department. Recent job postings can also help you, both from your company as well as external sources, such as recruitment sites and related industry publications. Lists are always helpful, but Mies also suggests summarizing them into an overall statement. For example, “Maintenance Manager User Persona One needs instant access to asset and equipment data so they can schedule and track both on-demand and preventive maintenance to boost time on wrench and cut costly downtime.”
From there, you can start to think about the types of data the user persona needs to reach their goals. So, Maintenance Manager User Persona One might need access to:
- Digital O&M manuals
- Asset and equipment locations
- Associated open and historical work orders
- Maintenance and repair checklists
- Task instructions and known safety issues
- Associated parts and materials
- Reports on maintenance KPIs
But a good persona is more than a combination of lists and summary statements.
Mies suggests giving your persona not only a name but also a face.
Instead of Maintenance Manager User Persona One, you have Mike McPhillips, with a stock image of a guy in a blue-collar shirt holding a tablet. The reason is human nature. You need to get into the head of your persona, both to create and then leverage them, and it’s just easier to relate to a person, even a made-up one.
Creating user personas: Asking the right people
When looking at what’s standing in their way, you can include, for example Roberta the maintenance manager, lack of access, visibility, and tracking. But those are general roadblocks, and the maintenance manager at your facility might have others to add or a completely different set.
The only way to know, and this is likely true for all the information you want to include in the persona, is to ask the real maintenance manager directly.
And that’s the case for all your personas. Asking people directly delivers good data.
But it’s not the only way to capture information for a persona. You can also look at job descriptions, both internal and ones on job sites, as well as industry publications and even websites and message boards. For example, if you were putting together a persona for a facility manager, you could look at some of job postings at IFMA. If you’re building a persona for a maintenance tech, you could look at the maintenance subreddit for some idea of the common challenges they face.
Summary
Although many organizations invest heavily in BIM during design, planning, and construction, they don’t have a process in place to leverage that data for the operations and maintenance phases, where they face the largest percentage of the total cost of ownership. A critical step in the BIM for FM journey is creating a new type of “digital twin,” the user persona.
Unlike a true twin, personas are archetypes based on common characteristics of a type of data user, for example a facility manager or maintenance manager. The benefit of creating personas is that once you understand who needs the data and how they need to use it, you can more easily decide which BIM data to bring over to the FM side. Good personas start with asking the right questions. Who are they? What are their goals? What’s stopping them from being successful.
To find those answers, you should talk directly with the people in those positions. You can also look at related job descriptions and job postings. In some cases, it can be helpful to look at related message boards to get a sense of the common concerns and challenges.
