🎁 Bricks in 2021 ✨ and what's next in 2022 🚀

What happened in Bricks in 2021, new features, agile BIM community... and what come next in 2022

🎁 Bricks in 2021 ✨ and what's next in 2022  🚀
Bricks in 2022

As the year is ended, and it is freezing cold ❄️ here in Paris, let's revisit what happened for Bricks in 2021. And let's see what Bricks team is planning for 2022.

👍 Thanks you for Bricks community 👋


But first I want to give you a big thanks for your participation in a way or another to Bricks and Agile BIM community. It was an awesome year!

Thanks for your useful feedbacks, that helped us build Bricks better. So that it can deserve to be ranked as one of the best project management platform for AEC and especially for :

  • Architects
  • BIM manager
  • Civil engineer
  • Project owner
  • and Agile BIM enthusiasts.

So what happened for Bricks and Agile BIM in 2021? Let's see now!

⛳ Agile BIM meetups and community

Agile BIM meetups


Bricks is the first agile project management platform for Architecture & construction. Since 2 years now we contributed to the creation of the agile BIM community. Agile BIM is a community of AEC profesionnals curious about using Agile in construction and of agile Coaches curious about AEC.

Agile BIM main activity is to organize some meetups along the year. We hope you could watch some of them. If not, it is never too late, just visit agile BIM Youtube channel and subscribe to it to get aware of the new meetups, and short videos.

Next year we will continue the agile BIM meetups, with a special focus on the disruption that are taking place now in  AEC : BIM, AI, construction field automation to quote a few. All these changes have a relation with agility and can be a very interesting move in the good direction.

If you want to present at a  meetup, or want we talk about a specific topic, please join us on agile BIM slack or one other of agile BIM channels or send us an email.

✅ Learn Agile BIM, step by step

Learn agile BIM

With the idea to make it even easier to start with agile, we launched an email learning series. You can join this free agile course, specifically designed for people with no previous knowledge of Agile, and working in the field of AEC.  

With this agile for AEC formation, you can start step by step to experiment Agile with your team.

In 2022, we will add more episodes and eventually build a complete formation. We will talk you about it soon, stay tuned!

🎓 University + Open source projects Partnerships


In 2021, we are glad to have participated in multiple events of universities and BIM master around Europe and beyond : Paris Master BIM, Paris Val de Seine Architecture School,  Silesian University of Technology in Gliwice (Poland), BIM Arabia and more.

We are always happy to collaborate with the universities and to onboard new students with Bricks.

If you are a teacher and want to teach agile in your university, architecture school or BIM master, please contact us to talk about it. We will be glad to offer you some educational licence seats so that your students can experiment freely. And to present Bricks and agile BIM to your students.

If you develop an open source project in the field of Architecture and construction, you could also contact us so that we can offer you some licences, to develop your project with agility. We are big fan of open source Architecture, so we want to contribute to its development.

🤝  Brick ambassadors

If you are enthusiast about Bricks mission to agilize construction and want to represent Bricks within your community, we are seeking more ambassadors!

By representing Bricks, you will earn some benefits for the new audience you contributed to the Bricks ecosystem.

You can also take part in the internal decisions in Bricks, discuss with us in our internal slack. We also feature you in our communication on social network, and invite you in priority to our Bricks and agile BIM special events.

Please contact-us to become a Bricks ambassador.

🚀 Bricks new features

Now what was improved in 2021 in Bricks and which new features were added?

🖼️ IFC viewer

Bricks IFC viewer

In 2021, we introduced the model viewer which accept IFC files. It uses under the hood the awesome IFC.js library which is open source and free to use by anyone.

Since the model viewer is now part of Bricks, it really helps to combine agile project management with the BIM models. You can then view, in context of the model, the topics you need to work on and plan their resolution efficiently.

Here is the main workflows that are already possible to do with Bricks IFC viewer :

  • Upload an IFC in a project and navigate in the viewer
  • Create a topic attached to a specific IFC model and viewpoint to save a problem to solve for example when doing BIM coordination
  • View several models at a time in the viewer to compare them
  • Take a screenshot of the model view and download it to share it with your colleagues
  • Import topics and their 3d viewpoints with a BCF file

In 2022, we will continue the development of the viewer and introduce new features you asked us as :

  • To do some cross-sections of the model
  • To be able to measure objects in the 3D space
  • To be able to filter by storey, BIM family

We will also introduce a simple and efficient way to version your models associated with the agile Sprint. In short, a way to quickly get access to the latest IFC Model of your team, disciplines by disciplines.

📐 Project templates

Topics templates

Often we end up doing the same thing, again and again. For example, take the stages split on your different projects? Pretty similar split generally! In all building design, we mainly also perform the same actions, like settings up the Revit families or planning the parking lots.

Instead of reinventing the wheel for each project, it could be convenient to consolidate the workflow of your company in templates. Especially new people in your company or in AEC in general will thank you to guide them in the typical actions needed to design a project.

For now, we propose ready-made templates for example to quickly use the RIBA stages in a click and thus set up your projects easily.  Or templates adapted to specific programmes like museum, house... to help you bootstrap your project quickly with  Bricks.

In 2022, we will keep this collection of templates growing, but also introduce the organization templates. Templates you can create yourself and share with your organization. We plan to deliver this feature in the first part of 2022. So let's keep posted!

📌 Sprints and Agile BIM

Active sprint board

In order to make agile project management easier and especially scrum for architecture & construction, we released this year several improvements :

  • Active sprint page: A dedicated page to follow up your current active sprints. It is presented as a board, but already filtered by sprint. Only the current active sprint show here, so just start your sprints when you are ready!
  • Move topics to next sprint: Even if scrum recommend prioritizing topics you can finish within a sprint duration, the reality is that often some topics are not completely finished.  To make it easier for you to move the unfinished stories to next sprint, we released a feature that actually do that for you!
  • Resize and move sprints and stages graphically in the Bricks planning page. More often than not, the dates moves in construction industry, so it is necessary to easily adapt the planning of sprints and stages so that it reflect reality. It is now possible to do it easily with a simple drag and drop.

In 2022, we will continue to make agile  a second nature for Architecture professionals. We will more associate the sprints with delivery of the IFC models, add some useful stats of the team progress to allow you to self improve. And integrate the agile Coaching to the app, with in context tutorials so that you can learn all the time, step by step agile.

🔮 Bricks in 2022

Bricks next steps

The adventure will continue in 2022 to transform the project collaboration and make it much more popular to use Agile in architecture design.

In addition to the aforementioned improvements, we have also in a good position in our wish list :

  • An organization dashboard and roadmap to help your team have a birds eye view on all the project of your organization
  • Global improvements of the interface and the mobile experience
  • Integrations with hundreds of apps thanks to Zapier and more integrations
  • Continuation of our open API to allow doing what you want in Bricks from other applications
  • Historization and Archival features so that you could also look back to the discussion that happened years before
  • Improved reports to allow you to send all your meetings reports from Bricks
  • Pdf annotation and improved document management

Well, that lots of work already, and I am quite enthusiast and looking forward to seeing all that in Bricks.

Anyway, I wish you an excellent year 2022 ✨ 🎉, and welcome to the Bricks and Agile BIM community! 👋