How I Lead a Global Digital Team with Sophie Montenot

Sophie Montenot has spent twenty years delivering landmark builds across the Middle East, China, and Singapore such as Sports Hub, Changi Airport Terminal 5, and now a global remit as Digital Delivery Lead at Surbana Jurong (SJ Group). What sets her perspective apart is how plainly she names the gap between digital strategy on paper and digital strategy on a real project. The lessons that follow are the ones most worth stealing.

Singapore Mandated BIM in 2014. That Isn't the Interesting Part.

Everyone in the industry knows about Singapore's Building and Construction Authority mandate. What gets quoted less often is what happened alongside it.

The government funded training. It subsidised technology stacks. It actively helped firms invest in the capability it was about to require.

That is the move. A mandate alone widens the gap between the firms that can already afford to adopt and the ones that can't. A mandate with funding closes it.

Sophie watched the opposite play out in the Middle East in the mid-2000s. No mandate, no shared baseline, and projects spent months arguing about tooling before they could get to coordination. The clients who wanted digital got it. Nobody else moved.

If you want an industry to change, fund the change you're requiring. That is the actual lesson from Singapore, and most countries skip it.

On a Joint Venture, Your Parent Company Doesn't Exist

Changi T5 was delivered by a three-firm JV. Three tool stacks. Three sets of templates. Three opinions about how coordination should run.

Sophie's rule was uncomfortable but non-negotiable: whatever you do under your parent company, forget about it. You follow the project standard.

This sounds obvious until you try to enforce it. Senior engineers arrive with twenty years of muscle memory in their home environment, and they will quietly default back to it the moment pressure rises.

The first job of a digital lead on any JV is not building the strategy. It's negotiating one shared way of working with all three partners, then defending it for the duration of the project. Tool harmony isn't a courtesy. It's the only thing the client experiences.

If Your Tool Needs a Manual, You've Already Lost

When a hundred engineers are about to open your platform, the design of that platform matters more than your training plan. Sophie's principle is direct: when an engineer opens the model on a Tuesday morning, the structure of the project should be obvious within seconds.

If the team needs documentation to understand what they're looking at, the deployment has already failed.

Most enterprise tooling is configured for governance, audit, and central control. That's how IT wants it. The trouble is that the engineer using it on the project doesn't care about any of that. They care whether they can find the model they need, run the coordination check, and get back to work.

Design the digital environment for the engineer, not the auditor. Adoption follows usability, not policy.

The Most Valuable Digital Move on Changi T5 Was a 12-Line Script

Sophie's clearest win on Changi T5 didn't come from a new platform. It came from a small Dynamo script that visualised the 900mm clearance zone above each baggage conveyor belt and marked it as a no-go space in the model.

Engineers no longer had to remember the rule. The model enforced it.

This is the unglamorous core of digital construction. You take an engineering problem, in this case, "don't route MEP through the suitcase travel envelope", and translate it into a visible constraint that lives inside the model.

The Baggage Handling and Automated People Mover teams had previously treated digital tools as something to apply at the end, after design decisions were already locked. Once Sophie put their systems into a coordinated visual environment at the front of the process, they started asking better questions. Can we see this section. What happens if we move that.

Digital should frame the decision, not decorate it. If the model only shows up after the decision is made, it's a documentation tool, not a design tool. That's a much lower-value use of the same software.

Coordination Isn't a Volume Problem. It's a Closure Problem.

The hardest part of Changi T5 wasn't any single coordination challenge. It was the sheer volume of issues moving across cloud platforms.

Sophie's observation: raising issues is straightforward. Closing them, with the receiving engineer actually understanding the intent behind the comment, is where teams quietly fall behind.

A BCF (BIM Collaboration Format) field with three lines of text is not enough. The person on the other end has to understand what the engineer meant, not just what the field said. Pure cloud distribution can't replace short, frequent coordination cycles where intent gets clarified before it gets lost in translation.

If you want to measure the health of a coordination process, don't measure issues raised. Measure how long issues stay open. That number tells you whether your digital workflow is actually compressing the design cycle or just adding administrative weight to it.

Key Takeaways

• Mandates without funding don't move industries. Pair every BIM requirement with subsidised training and tooling, or expect uneven adoption.
• On any JV, negotiate the project standard before the first deliverable, then defend it relentlessly. The client should experience one company, not three.
• Design your digital environment for the engineer who opens it for the first time. If they need a manual, the deployment has failed.
• Bring digital tools into the room when engineering decisions are still open. Visualisation is a decision aid at the start of a project, not a deliverable at the end of it.
• Where a constraint is hard to remember, encode it in the model. A 12-line Dynamo script that surfaces a clearance envelope beats a 40-page coordination protocol.
• Measure coordination by issue closure time, not issue volume. A growing queue of open issues is the leading indicator that a project is losing control.
• When consolidating tools after an acquisition, audit what the legacy teams actually do well before you standardise it away.