David Barco Moreno on why BIM coordination starts with people, not tools

Spain is moving rapidly from BIM adoption to maturity. We sat down with local expert and BIM evangelist David Barco Moreno to get his take on the state of BIM in Spain, and what needs to change.

The conversation quickly moved beyond BIM tools, to the people who use them, and why better coordination depends on clearer roles, open workflows, and respect for people’s time. 

Who is David Barco Moreno?

David is widely known across the Spanish-speaking BIM community as the author of the book series Diario de un BIM Manager (Diary of a BIM Manager). He is also Director of Innovation, Intelligence Development, and Business at Berrilan, a digital transformation consultancy based in Donostia-San Sebastián. 

Over almost 25 years in construction, David has worked across architecture, engineering, digital transformation, academia, and consultancy. His team has supported architecture studios, engineering firms, developers, universities, technology centers, public bodies, and private clients. 

The projects have ranged from single-family homes and schools to football stadiums, logistics centers, administrative buildings, technology parks, and even mining projects. 

That range has shaped how David sees coordination. He has seen first-hand how each project brings its own tools, disciplines, pressures, and personalities. The technical challenge matters, but the human challenge matters just as much. 

“You cannot work unilaterally in information silos,” he says. “You have to think about the other traveling companions, the other team members.” 

In other words: coordination is not just a BIM function. It is a project behavior. 

Better BIM coordination starts with people

For David, better BIM coordination should not start with software. Ideally, it should start with how project teams communicate, how they structure responsibilities, how they make decisions, and how much respect they show for each other’s time. 

“The more generous you are with the rest of your colleagues, from your own company and from other companies, the better the project works,” he says. “This is not BIM. These are basic human skills that are not taught.” 

It is a simple idea, but one that feels especially relevant as BIM adoption accelerates across Spain. With the Spanish BIM Plan introducing a progressive roadmap for public procurement from 2024 to 2030, many organizations are moving from asking whether they should use BIM to asking how to use it well. 

And that is where coordination becomes the real test. 

The real problem: coordination without structure

Before BIM coordination can improve, teams need to recognize what is broken. 

For David, one of the clearest problems he experienced in traditional coordination is what he calls “the tangle”: long email threads, unclear decisions, constant version changes, missing context, and teams spending more time explaining what went wrong than solving it. 

“Version 07, 08, 09… those constant version changes are not easily traceable,” he says. “This generated a lot of problems.” 

The same applies to meetings. Without clear roles, responsibilities, agenda items, or decision paths, a coordination meeting can quickly become a place where problems are discussed but not resolved. 

“The lack of structured meetings was a huge problem,” David says. “And above all, not being clear about the role of other team members.” 

That lack of clarity creates friction. It affects designers, contractors, BIM managers, site teams, clients, and project managers. It also affects morale. David recalls a draftsperson being told to change work that had taken 40 hours to produce.“What they had done was undone in order to do it again,” he says. “It was super frustrating for that person, because it was their work.” 

That’s why David sees coordination as an exercise in empathy as much as efficiency. When a change is requested, it doesn’t only affect a model. It affects people, time, decisions, deadlines, trust, and personal motivation. 

 

From scattered issues to shared order

David first encountered BIMcollab through academia and buildingSMART, after learning about the BCF standard. What stood out to him was the possibility of managing issues in a centralized, model-centric way. 

He had already seen other software workflows, but many of them felt isolated or disconnected. BIMcollab offered something different: a structured way to connect issue management with the realities of multidisciplinary project work. 

“When we started using it in our own projects, we realized that what BIMcollab helped us with was order,” he says. 

That word, “order,” is central to David’s view of BIM coordination. 

Order means classifying issues properly. It means setting phases, assigning responsibilities, using tags, defining priorities, and creating a shared language for what matters. 

David gives a simple example: not every issue can be “urgent.” A clash between reinforced concrete structure and HVAC may be critical. A flexible pipe issue may not be. Without shared, agreed-upon criteria, teams cannot prioritize effectively. 

“Tagging certain kinds of problems requires a language,” he says. “A language you cannot improvise.” 

This is where model-based issue management becomes more than a digital replacement for email. It helps teams build a coordination system that is consistent, searchable, structured, and easier to act on. 

The value of open workflows

One of David’s strongest points is that project teams should not have to force every stakeholder into the same tool. 

Designers, engineers, consultants, contractors, and clients often work in different environments. Some may use Navisworks. Others may work in Archicad, Revit, AutoCAD, Civil 3D, or other platforms. In real projects, that diversity is not going away. 

“You cannot force everyone always to use the same tools, the ones you like best,” David says. “You have to allow certain degrees of freedom.” 

For him, the important thing is not that every person uses the same authoring or checking software, but that coordination is centralized. 

That is where open standards such as BCF become critical. They allow teams to exchange model-based issues across software environments, while keeping coordination connected to the model and visible to the right people. 

This is also where David sees practical value in BIMcollab: teams can work in familiar tools while still contributing to a shared coordination workflow. 

“If we already have the project centralized in the cloud, that simplifies people’s lives,” he says. 

BIM coordination is more than clash detection

A recurring theme in our discussion with David was that BIM coordination should not be reduced to clash detection. 

For David, issues are only one part of a broader quality-control workflow. Coordination should also encompass model federation, quantity checks, regulatory compliance, and information requirements. This is exactly the kind of broader quality assurance that BIMcollab’s platform supports. 

He gives the example of a site manager checking facade quantities. By filtering model data, the team can compare reported square meters against what the model shows. If the model indicates 4,252 m² of ventilated facade and the reported figure is 3,900 m², that difference needs to be investigated. “We have a problem,” David says. “There are 300 meters of difference there that I don’t know where they are.” 

He also talks about using Smart Views and IDS concepts to check whether fire-resistance information is filled in correctly and whether values meet acceptable criteria. 

That is the direction he believes coordination is moving: from reactive clash reporting toward proactive model quality control. 

Before creating issues, teams need to ask what type of review they are doing. Is it a visual review? A clash review? A quantity check? A compliance check? A design coordination review? Each requires different criteria. 

David is also clear that model authors need to take responsibility for their own work before pushing errors downstream. That mindset shifts the role of coordination, from catching mistakes to creating a workflow where fewer mistakes reach the next stage. 

Respect your time, and everyone else’s

Perhaps the most memorable moment in the interview was when we asked David what he would say to BIM managers still managing issues through email, PDFs, or spreadsheets. 

Without hesitation, he remarked: 

“The first thing is that they should have more respect for their time.” 

For David, inefficient workflows are not harmless. They cost time, create confusion, delay decisions, and affect other people’s work. 

“When you write an email badly, when you send a badly named document, when you reference an obsolete version, or when you are delayed in giving information on which a decision on site depends, you are affecting many people,” he says. 

This is where BIM managers play a key role. Not only do they select the tools, but they define workflows that can make collaboration easier, clearer, and faster. 

“Select your tools properly,” David says. “Make sure they are simple, efficient, that you can launch them quickly with people, and from there you can then improve other aspects.” 

That simplicity matters. David notes that basic users do not need a heavy onboarding process to start working with BIMcollab. In his experience, even site managers can begin creating, assigning, and resolving issues after only a short introduction. 

“The learning curve is so simple and so fast,” he says. “We have had site managers working with the tool, and in a couple of hours they were already functioning.” 

The first step: federate, check, prioritize

For teams that are still hesitant to change their workflows, David’s advice is practical: start small. 

Not every digital change requires a large company-wide implementation. Some workflows can be tested quickly, validated on a project, and expanded from there. 

For David, the first practical step is model federation. 

But federation alone is not enough. Teams also need to verify that the models are correctly positioned and coordinated. David calls this the “00 coordination”: the basic alignment that must be right before more advanced checking begins. 

From there, teams should define issue criteria and prioritize the reviews that matter most. David recommends starting with the areas that have the biggest project impact. 

“If the structure has a design flaw, it affects the entire building,” he says. “Then the installations. If I resolve structures and installations, I have already resolved one of the greatest problems they will have on site.” 

That sequence reflects a mature coordination mindset: do not try to solve everything at once. Start with the models, check the foundations of the workflow, and prioritize what creates the greatest risk. Then build from there. 

Spain’s next BIM challenge

Spain is moving quickly. BIM adoption is becoming more formalized in public procurement, and the conversation is shifting from whether organizations use BIM to how mature their processes are. 

But maturity will not come from mandates alone. It will depend on how teams structure their information, communicate issues, define responsibilities, and adopt open workflows that allow different stakeholders to collaborate without unnecessary friction. 

For David, openBIM is central to that future, with standards such as IFC, BCF, Open CDE, and IDS being crucial to Spain’s BIM evolution. 

He also sees artificial intelligence playing an important role, particularly in translating requirements, automating quality control, and simplifying analysis and decision-making. What comes next, he believes, is automation of quality control. 

But even when speaking about AI, David returns to pragmatism. Teams do not need to solve everything with AI immediately. They need to understand where automation can help, where standards matter, and where people still need clear processes. 

Tools matter, but people come first.

By the end of our conversation, one idea was clear: BIM coordination is not only a technical discipline. It is a human one. 

The right tools can centralize information, structure issues, connect models, support open standards, and reduce manual work. But tools only deliver value when teams know how to communicate, prioritize, and collaborate. 

For teams still coordinating through scattered emails, PDFs, spreadsheets, or disconnected issue lists, the main takeaway is that better coordination starts with better habits. 

And better habits start with people.