The Okana Virtual Project and PlanBEE

Murillo Piazzi shares insights into the largest Okana Virtual Project in collaboration with PlanBEE apprentices across the UK.

  • Portrait of Murillo Piazzi

    Murillo Piazzi

    Senior Digital Consultant

  • July 16, 2024

group shot of students in office in front of balloon arch

How do you give an 18 year old an insight into working on a BIM enabled project?

The Training and Development team at Okana has tested different methodologies to answer this question over the years. Our solution is the Virtual Project – a three to five day training programme where students work to a brief to develop a design and produce deliverables.

Throughout the programme, teams are formed and compete against each other, with one emerging as a winner at the end. There is a plot twist though, this is not a design competition – the teams are evaluated on how well they can comply with the information requirements and the methods they have implemented to produce the deliverables.

The Okana Virtual Project has been developed to show exactly what it is like to work on a BIM project. Work sessions are combined with workshops where tutors give an overview of the latest tools available in the market and best practices for information management. The tutors guide and support the teams in their workflows, and the teams can ask questions to an experienced digital consultant, exactly like project teams would in real life.

In July, we delivered the largest Virtual Project to date, working with 45 PlanBEE apprentices across London, Newcastle, and Manchester.

PlanBEE (Plan for Built Environment Education) is a higher level apprenticeship programme, designed by Okana sister company, Ryder Architecture and accredited by Gateshead College 

This year’s project brief asked the apprentices to design modern office spaces to house a training and technology hub to support Okana’s global services in consultancy. The teams were challenged to think about how they were going to share information between themselves in an efficient manner, how tasks and deliverables would be split across the team, and how information generated by different team members would be combined to generate a final set of deliverables. 

It was interesting to see how different teams adopted different approaches. While some teams invested heavily in developing their design, others took the time to discuss roles and schedule the issue of the deliverables throughout the week. All of them, however, started to feel the pressure as the deadlines approached. They had to issue plans, calculations and reports containing the required pieces of information on specific days of the week. 

The distribution of teams across different locations brought a new dynamic to this edition of the Virtual Project – some healthy competition! The teams were very engaged and keen to find out which location would be winner.   

EduTech, a team based in London, emerged victorious, providing the most evidence of their knowledge of information management processes, and even managed to create a naming convention for their files! This impressed the tutors and set a high standard for future projects. 

On completion, the teams left with a solid understanding of working on a real BIM enabled project and were awarded the Okana BIM training certificate.  

The apprentices were also given access to content throughout the week via a dedicated Okana eLearning portal.  

The Okana Virtual Project is a bespoke training programme tailored to each group of delegates. We recommend the project for teams looking to upskill in managing projects using project management protocols. It offers a virtual environment where delegates are part of a simulated project yet work with expert, experienced digital consultants in real time. 

To find out more about the Okana Virtual Project, contact Okana Training and Development Lead, Andrew Johnson. 

About the authors

Portrait of Murillo Piazzi

Murillo Piazzi

Senior Digital Consultant

Murillo is an experienced digital consultant, having authored training programmes such as Building Information Management (BIM) for health and safety, understanding Construction Operations Building Information Exchange (COBie) and understanding Industry Foundation Classes (IFC). Murillo is also a lead assessor for ISO 19650-1 and 2 and has supported organisations to establish and fulfil information management requirements. Murillo’s aim is to link academia and industry, sharing his knowledge with others.

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