Why I’m Building a BIM Portal
A build-in-public series on creating a lightweight BIM operations portal without exposing project details.
Most BIM teams do not struggle with modeling.
They struggle with operations.
Project setup. Roles. Team onboarding. Execution plans. Model health checks. Sustainability documentation. The small coordination tasks that repeat on every job and compound across many projects.
Nothing is “broken.”
But the friction between people, process, and platforms adds up.
The patterns I kept seeing
Across different projects and teams, the same issues repeat:
- setup steps that live in checklists and chat threads
- inconsistent role and team onboarding
- duplicated effort when creating “standard” project documentation
- model health checks that happen late (or differently each time)
- experiments with AI that are not tied to persisted project state
The bottleneck is not Revit.
It is repeatable operational work.
What I’m building
I am building a BIM Portal — a lightweight operations layer that turns recurring BIM delivery tasks into reliable, repeatable workflows.
Think of it as a place to manage the glue:
- project setup steps and status
- team, roles, and onboarding
- execution plan structure and controlled updates
- model indexing and health signals
- sustainability review workflows (in a safe, non-project-specific way)
- a BIM assistant that summarizes, checks, and guides next actions
This is not a product announcement.
It is a build log.
One principle that drives the build
Everything should have a canonical state.
No transient AI output that disappears.
No “temporary edits” that drift.
No invisible queues that only exist in someone’s head.
If it matters, it should be stored, versioned, and reviewable.
What’s next
I will break this build into short posts (4–5 minutes each):
- the system map (frontend, backend, storage, authentication)
- the “baseline + overrides + merged state” pattern
- handling eventually consistent external systems
- what AI is good for (and what it is not) in BIM operations
- deployment lessons and guardrails
Building in public — without leaking what should remain private.