Field Notes on Infrastructure BIM Documentation — Edla Ucker, Udraft
Field Notes
What twenty years of structural
and infrastructure delivery
actually teaches you.
Notes from inside the work. What actually happens on structural and infrastructure projects, why it happens,
and what twenty years of delivery teaches you that nothing else does.
THE BASICS – JUNE 2026
What is BIM? What is ISO 19650? Let me explain it the way I’d explain it to my 8-year-old.
The standard language of BIM puts most people off before they even start.
Appointing Party. Appointed Party. Exchange Information Requirements. Level of Information Need. Common Data Environment. BIM Execution Plan.
If you work in the industry and those terms make your head spin, you are not alone, and it is not because you are not technical enough. It is because the standard was written by a committee, not a teacher.
So let me try a different way.
What is BIM?
You know LEGO.
When you build something with LEGO — a castle, a spaceship, a city — you do not just stack bricks randomly. You have instructions. Each piece has a number, a colour, and a position. You know what the finished thing looks like, how big each section is, and what goes where.
Now imagine the LEGO set is a real bridge. BIM is the complete description of that bridge — not just what it looks like, but everything you need to know about every piece of it.
In practice, the information model comes together as three things:
Geometrical information — the shape, size, location, and how things connect. This is what most people think BIM is. It is one-third of the picture.
Alphanumerical information — the data attached to every element. The material it is made from. Its weight. Its cost. Its serial number. Its maintenance schedule. When it needs to be replaced.
Documentation — the records, drawings, reports, test certificates, manuals, and photographs that tell the story of the asset over its life.
All three together. That is the information model.
BIM is not a software. Software is just the tool. BIM is how you work — a way of making sure that everything known about a built asset is structured, reliable, and usable by the people who need it, at every stage of its life.
What is ISO 19650?
Now imagine your child’s class is doing a big art project together. Twenty kids, all working on different sections of one giant mural.
If everyone just starts painting whatever they want, in whatever colour, with no plan — it will be a mess. Someone paints over someone else’s section. Nobody knows who is doing the sky. Two kids paint the same tree. The teacher cannot tell what is finished and what is not. And when it is time to hand the mural to the school to keep forever, half the sections are missing.
So before anyone picks up a brush, the teacher does something important.
She writes down exactly what the mural needs to show. She gives each kid a specific section with clear instructions — what to paint, in what colours, by when. There is one wall in the classroom where everyone pins up their finished sections so the whole class can see how it is coming together. When a section is done, the teacher checks it against the brief before it goes on the final mural. At the end, the finished mural is handed to the school — properly labelled, documented, and kept.
ISO 19650 is the teacher’s system.
In the real world, those roles have names:
The teacher is the Appointing Party — the client, the government agency, the asset owner. The person who knows what they need and sets the requirements before work starts.
The brief is the Exchange Information Requirements (EIR) — the document that says exactly what information must be delivered, to what level of information need, and by when.
Each student’s plan for their section is the BIM Execution Plan (BEP) — the delivery team’s response, setting out how they will meet the requirements.
The shared wall where everyone pins their work is the Common Data Environment (CDE) — the agreed place and process where information is managed throughout the project, moving through defined stages: Work in Progress, Shared for coordination, Published for construction, Archived for the record.
The mural as it exists during the project — all the working sections, every colour decision, every reference, the whole thing in progress — is the Project Information Model (PIM). It contains all three information types: geometrical, alphanumerical, and documentation. Everything produced during delivery lives here.
The version handed to the school to keep and use is the Asset Information Model (AIM). This is not a copy of the full mural working process — it is the relevant, structured information extracted from the PIM that the school actually needs to look after what was built. The geometry and the asset data are its core. Most working documentation stays in the archive. The AIM is built for the operator, not the builder — and it is what gets maintained and updated for the life of the asset.
Why does any of this matter?
In the real world, most projects never set up the teacher’s system in the first place. There is no brief written before work starts. No shared wall. No check against requirements before delivery. The 3D model gets built — sometimes very well — and handed over at the end of a project with geometry intact and asset data missing. The facility manager opens it and cannot use it. The client paid for a LEGO set and got the bricks, with no instructions, in no particular order, in a box.
In New South Wales, ISO 19650 is mandated on government infrastructure projects. Queensland is moving in that direction. Victoria is actively implementing it across major projects. On major public projects, the system is quickly becoming non-negotiable.
The problem is that knowing the names of the process and actually running it are very different things. Writing an Exchange Information Requirements document that is specific enough to be enforceable. Structuring a Common Data Environment that works. Verifying that what the delivery team produced actually answers what was asked. These are skills that take time to develop, and the gap between compliance in name and compliance in practice is where most projects currently sit.
The short version
BIM is everything you need to know about a built asset — organised, structured, and usable. Not a software. Not just a 3D model. A complete picture.
ISO 19650 is the system that makes sure everyone working on that asset is working the right way — so the picture is accurate, complete, and actually useful when the project is finished.
One is what you are building. The other is how you build it properly.
Edla Ucker · Founder, Udraft · udraft.com.au
PRACTICE – MAY 2026
The moment you know
It does not announce itself on the cover sheet.
The cover sheet looks fine. Sometimes it looks better than fine with renders, clean general notes and a professional title block. You flip through the first few sheets and everything appears in order. You think you are working with a competent documentation package.
Then you need to make an update…
It should take twenty minutes. You open the model, find the element, make the change, and the views update automatically because that is what a properly built Revit model does. Twenty minutes.
But the view does not update and you check the detail. It is not from the model. It never was. It is a drafting view: drawn in 2D, placed on the sheet, completely disconnected from the geometry it is supposed to represent. The section it references does not match the plan. The plan does not match the model. The model has the element in two places, once where it belongs and once somewhere else entirely, put there months ago to generate a specific view for a specific sheet by someone who is no longer on the project.
You are now three hours into what should have been twenty minutes and you have not made the update yet. This is the moment you know!
What you are looking at is a documentation package that was assembled rather than built. Multiple people worked on it… different hands, different habits, different ideas about what a standard means, even when the standard was explained clearly at the start. Annotations with leaders pointing in different directions. Text at inconsistent sizes. Line weights that change without reason from sheet to sheet. None of it catches the eye on a quick scroll. All of it becomes a problem the moment someone needs to touch it.
The renders are beautiful, the general arrangement looks professional, the cover sheet is immaculate… and none of it reflects what is actually in the model.
I have seen this from offshore teams. I have also seen it from local ones. I have seen it from people with senior titles who achieved those positions in AutoCAD and never made the full transition to Revit, who believe that a quick 3D modelling course fills the gap, when the gap is not about software at all. I have seen it signed off by coordinators and BIM managers charging senior rates who could not identify the problem because they were never inside the file long enough to find it.
The title does not tell you whether someone can build a Revit model that still works when the design changes. The CV does not tell you. The renders definitely do not tell you.
You find out when you try to make the update!
A documentation culture has learned to make things look correct without making them correct, optimised for the engineer’s sign-off, not for the next person who opens the file.
A model that looks right in a PDF is not the same as a model that is right. The difference is invisible until someone needs to use it.
I have trained senior drafters — people who were senior in 2D, senior in a different software, senior in a different sector — who discovered that being senior in Revit on an infrastructure project to Australian standards is an entirely different competence. Because nobody had ever shown them what right actually looks like from the inside. What it feels like to open a file someone else built and be able to navigate it, trust it, update it, and hand it on.
That is what the Udraft training is built to teach. Not software. Not buttons. What right looks like from the inside.
Because the industry has too many documentation packages that look correct from the outside and fall apart the moment someone needs to use them.
And the people who cannot tell the difference are signing off on them every day.
Edla Ucker · Founder, Udraft · udraft.com.au
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No schedule. No content calendar. One piece when it is ready on structural and infrastructure documentation and the realities of senior delivery in Australia.