Best BIM Training Programme Finalist: OPERAM ACADEMY

A new approach to information management to help meet business goals

Royal BAM Group are a perfect example of a leading construction organisation that recognise that better management of information will help reduce risk, increase predictability and achieve better business outcomes to meet their business goals. To meet those business needs, Royal BAM Group recognised they should adopt the new ISO 19650 series.

These new series of standards define the business processes for the effective management of asset-related information during the delivery and operational phase of built assets.

Knowing that the success was dependent on successfully educating their workforce. Royal BAM Group didn’t want the hassle, time constraints or large costs of arranging classroom-based education for their multi-national workforce.  BAM needed a scalable and accessible online learning solution to meet their needs.

Therefore, Royal BAM and Operam Academy entered collaboration agreement to help BAM’s learners with the adoption of the new international standards and best practice for the management of information. Operam provided the online learning solution and all educational content. BAM learners provided the platform testing and content feedback.

Educating a workforce to achieve a shared understanding across an entire organization

This education was to be made available to all staff.  To enable them to acquire the knowledge they need to support BAM’s Digital Construction initiative.  And starting at the natural point of “What BIM is and what it isn’t.

Part of BAM’s initiative is to ensure there is a group-wide shared understanding on the importance of managing information correctly. However, across the industry the focus of education is around the tools and there is very little that provides the knowledge of the upstream activities. To change this, BAM worked with Operam to set the expectation of a complete curriculum. Taking all level of workers from start to finish in the management of information processes.

Each lesson was to have clear learning aims and objectives, whilst detailing the expected learning outcomes achieved for each course. Knowing a similar typical classroom or power-point course took of 26 hours to complete. BAM set the target of learners accessing the material online, at time convenient to them.

How Operam Academy met the learning need

Operam Academy is an online learning solution that educates workforce’s on international standards and best practice for the management of information. Delivered as a cloud solution to desktop and app, it is accessible and scalable across organisations of all sizes without the need for additional software.

Operam Academy produced a wide-ranging curriculum that covers all workers across a typical construction company.  All content is aligned to ISO 19650, with 20 courses with 72 lessons available in total. And with the plan to continuing to add content, including material aligned to the release of ISO 19650 parts 3 and 5 in 2020.

Understanding that people learn in different ways, Operam built a solution to meet those different learning needs, across formal, informal and social learning channels. You can see a short two-minute demo video of the online eLearning solution content here.

Operam Academy comes with full system administration access, ensuring organisations can monitor user’s engagement, time spent and assessment pass rates.

Operam’s mission is to make the seemingly complex, simple.   And are making education on the effective management of information accessible to everyone, not just the ‘Bimmers’. Focused on the upstream activities and educating the different management functions. This increases the chances of providing the right commercial and collaborative environment.  Ensuring delivery teams can exploit the downstream opportunities that BIM presents.

Operam Academy are the first truly interactive online learning solution to educate multi-national workforces on the international standards and best practice for the management of information.