No More Lunch and Learns

I see it all over the place, and you might have it happening at your firm. Need to do some Revit training? Let’s have a Lunch and Learn! It’s great. Everyone brings their own food, and someone sits down with a laptop and projector and goes over some good tidbits about Revit. What could go wrong?

I obviously have a beef with this training format. I 100% believe that consistent in person training one way or another is critical for continued success with BIM projects and Revit specifically. For some reason, Revit (and other software) training gets relegated to happen over lunch time. This has to stop.

Sticking a training session during lunch tells the attendees two things: first that what you are about to learn isn’t important enough for a firm to spend time on it, and the second is that if you have to miss it, go ahead and miss it.

It is not uncommon for a production person to spend 5 or more hours a day in Revit. Having an hour long “come together” session once a month, or even every other week should not be too much to expect. The time invested in training is important, and learning how to use Revit effectively is crucial. Having to try to learn in between bites of sandwiches and growling stomachs lessens the perceived importance of what is being taught. The time necessary for two hours a month for training is negligible and tells the users that this is important enough to have a “real” meeting for it.

Beyond that, the lunch hour is the typical time (for U.S. folks anyway) to run errands and take care of personal business and to just get away from the desks and recharge. Lunch and Learn sessions take away from this potential personal time, and the sessions will usually lose out to an essential errand that just has to get done.

Pick a time during the workday, and put it on everyone’s calendar. Use that time to go over new procedures, changes in the template, or just cover an issue that a lot of people have come to you with recently. Make it a “real” meeting and that makes it important and a proper place to focus on what is an important task: learning to be more effective and productive in Revit.

Help Your Project Manager – Before He Kills you

To our chagrin, we have discovered that our number one hurdle with transitioning to Revit is not the software learning curve, it’s not the user’s need to shift to a new workflow mindset, it’s not even convincing PICs or the board that it’s time to buy new licenses.  It’s the Project Managers.

You need to be sure you fully educate your non-production PMs about how a Revit project will go.  Best bet is to have someone on the team who has already gone through a Revit project.  Someone who is willing to gently, or not so gently, let the PM know what is possible, what isn’t possible and most importantly what makes sense.

Your typical PM of this nature simply knows that they usually get plans at this week of the project, elevations here, and then sections here.  With Revit, the workflow and document production is shuffled all around, and that’s a good thing!

We have had more than one Revit models that were on the edge of failure because a PM demanded X, Y, and Z at very specific times.  Why?  Because it’s what he always had gotten before.  He didn’t want to hear about what made sense.  The team was too new to Revit to argue, so they built the model to support X, Y, and Z.  Unforunately, in Revit, they should have been focusing on A, B, and C at that time.  So the model suffered, and the team spent more time picking up pieces later on simply to accomodate this PM’s backward demands.

Every firm has at least one PM like this.  There is no easy way to deal with him or her.  Just keep a close eye on the model and work hard to make sure that there are no drastic flaws in the workflow that can bite you down the road.

Winter Blues and Online Classes – AU Virtual

Wow!  It’s been very long since I posted something!  Do you care?  Possibly.  If you do, that’s very sweet of you.  Winter is always tough; I don’t like the sun setting right after lunch.  And to top it off, I didn’t even get to go Vegas this year for Autodesk University.  Luckily, Autodesk brought the best parts of AU to me!  (Note: well, maybe not the BEST parts, but some pretty good parts)

According to this article, attendance at AU was down about 30% this year.  That’s physical-in-person-I-can-touch-you attendance.  Now stop touching me.  This was also the year that Autodesk introduced AU Virtual, which (according to the same article) was “attended” by about 20,000 folks.  First off, this number is hard to quantify and verify.  However, I’m not gonna argue with it, because I bet it was a LOT of folks who watched some AU classes online.

My experience with online classes has been hit or miss over the years, mostly miss.  The content is sometimes questionable (no, not inappropriate, just not what I was hoping for – get your mind out of the gutter.  And I told you to stop touching me!) the presenters are not always engaging, but the worst part is the format.  You are stuck staring at someone’s screen, quite often a PowerPoint, and you hear them talk.  That’s it.  You stare at the screen for an hour listening to someone else go on and on and on.  Eyes glaze, minds wander, snoring ensues.

I haven’t done much research into how the human mind learns and how it assimilates data, but I bet staring at a screen with someone talking at you is low on the list of effective ways to learn something.  Luckily, the folks at Autodesk agreed with me.

A+ to the format of the AU Virtual classes.  You have a screen on the left showing a PowerPoint presentation or an application, and on the right is a human.  A real live human being.  Looking up at the camera and talking.  This tiny little human addition made the learning far more engaging than most other online classes I had seen.

Another issue with most online classes is, man, you REALLY want to show something to someone afterwards, but you can’t record the presentation!

A+ to letting folks download the ENTIRE screencast and “handouts”.  This is an absolutely remarkable feature.  If I could do a backflip, I would.

I won’t put an overall grade on the presenters or the specific classes.  I will say this – the large majority of the classes we watched were very much worth our time and the presenters were clearly knowledgeable.

The only drawback was the selection of classes.  I’ll give this a C.  I imagine this was being handled on a more tentative and experimental basis, but there were certainly many more “real” classes that I would have loved to have seen “virtually”.

Lastly, A+ to the price.  For those folks on subscription, the price was very very low.  I don’t want to use the word “free”, because that’s a big check I cut every year to Autodesk.  Having AU Virtual as complimentary for the subscription folks made the value of subscription much greater, however.  And frankly, I sometimes scratch my head as to what exactly why I am paying for subscription fees (aside from the license agreement), wondering what extra I am getting from this.  Bonuses like this make me scratch my head a little less.  It is my understanding that the cost wasn’t crazy for non-subscription folks.  I bet well worth it.

Obviously, there are features to the “in-person” conference that just cannot be experienced online.  I have attended twice now and I look forward to going again, even with the excellent option of seeing the classes online.  And no, not because it’s just Vegas.

So, a big kudos to the team who put together AU Virtual this year.  If you missed it this year, be sure to take advantage of it next year.  Hopefully, Autodesk will continue to expand the offerings and keep the excellent work they did for the first AU Virtual.  Hopefully, they will keep the same cost for subscription users, or have a VERY low cost to offset some of the expenses.

And hopefully next year, I’ll get to back to Vegas.

What Makes a Successful Reviteer

I have been doing many levels of training and all kinds of support for Revit Architecture in our firm for the last year plus as we’ve been working, project team by project team, on getting revit to be our primary design and documentation software.

A consistent question from the principals in each office is “which person will be good at Revit?”  A very valid question, but obviously a very difficult one to answer.  You can’t point and say “yes” and “no”.  I mean, you can, but you might be wrong.  And you might get in trouble.

What I have discovered is traits that are usually a good indicator of being successful and, more importantly, traits that usually indicate NOT being successful.

Here’s the big one.  AutoCAD (or as we refer to it here in the BIM Basement, “AutoCrap”) or other CADD experience.  There are two camps here.  The first camp thinks that if someone is good in on CADD software, they will be good in them all.  The other camp recognizes that there are differences with traditional CADD and BIM and have convinced themselves that someone who knows CADD will just have their brain full CADD stuff and won’t be able to empty their brain to learn Revit.  From what I’ve seen, it just doesn’t matter.

Obviously, Revit is a piece of software.  There are people who are just naturally inclined to using software.  Setting that aside, knowledge or the lack of in a CADD package are almost a zero indicator on Revit success.  Someone who is good in software may have a quicker time picking it up, but in the long run successful Revit users come from both a strong CADD background and from very limited CADD background.

The best indicator I have found of someone who has success in Revit is knowledge of how a building goes together.  Time and time again, we have seen incorrect views because the model was put together wrong.  And it was put together wrong because the person working on the model did not understand how part A plugged into part B.  They might have known in the past that they were supposed to draft a thick line and then a dashed line next to it, but they never understood what they were drafting.  The people who understood what was being drafted, or what they were drafting know how to build the model properly, which is key to a successful Revit project.

Luckily, that can be learned, if you have the right person.  The number one indicator that I have found concerning someone NOT being succesful in Revit probably won’t come as a shock.  It is a good indicator for most new tasks.  Attitude.  Attitude is huge.  The desire to learn something new, the willingness to admit that their old methods do not apply anymore, the acceptance that things change.  Using Revit and working on a BIM project is a major shift.  A lot of people hate change.  These two items are totally incompatible.

So, unfortunately, there is no litmus test on who will be great at Revit and who won’t.  It pretty much comes down to common sense.

Not to sound melodramatic, but BIM and Revit represent one of the largest changes in the industry since… well, I’m not really sure.  You know who in your firm is ready and able (and willing) to come along for the ride.

It’s March Already! Plus Some Minor DWF Thoughts

So, it’s the beginning of a new month, and those of you playing along will know that that means it’s time for some Revit training at my firm!

This three day crash course finds me on the road to our Virginia Beach office.  I’m blogging from a hotel room.  The schools back home are still closed thanks to the weather, and frankly, it’s REALLY cold down here.

This office’s primary job type is higher education, so that’s nice to get some input on new techniques and practices that we need to bring into the fold of our standards and possibly incorporate into the template.

I’ve found that this Revit deployment has been a good time to do some more standards pushing firm-wide.  No matter how much you try to create and maintain standards with AutoCrap, it always seemed impractical to maintain the level of staff that would be necessary to verify and enforce those standards.  With Revit being so fresh and new to a lot of these folks, we are only teaching them what they need to know to get their job done, and that is always standards specific.

On the flip side, this is forcing us in some cases to reevaluate our standards.  We’ve redesigned our border, amended how we use keynotes, and some other items have gotten the boot or the overhaul.  The funnest part is when everyone thought there was a standard, but it turned out there were about 27 different ways that PMs were doing the same thing (mortar joints in wall sections – I’m looking at you).  It is definitely a task that won’t be done anytime soon, but it is easier to begin the task with Revit.

I’m also using the push as an excuse to endorse greater adoption of DWF use in the firm.  I have never been 100% happy with PDFs and how they handle large format drawings.  I’m always slightly nervous that something is messed up.  So far, DWFs have not let me down.  With each training, I discuss exporting to DWFs and show the markup features and how that can integrate back into Revit sheets.  Really nice stuff.  We’re close to getting some more of our QC guys to work along with us on the DWF front as well.  Really excited about that.

Why I Hate Sketchup

One of our biggest fights with our Revit deployment has got to be with the die hard Sketchup users.

I absolutely understand that Sketchup is easy and doing Revit properly is… not as easy. I get that, I totally do. And the really good Sketchup users, when they finish a model, everyone oohs and ahhs, because it looks so good and it’s so amazing. Then why is Sketchup a bad thing?

If you are reading this, you know part of the answer already.

Sketchup is 100% outside of the documentation process for most firms. Sketchup Master has spent all this time creating this elaborate beautiful model in Sketchup. Now let’s waste some time rebuilding the entire thing in Revit so we can actually put out a set of construction document, which is ultimately what we do. I find it interesting how, on a macro level, this issue with Sketchup reflects exactly the same issue that BIM as a whole process is trying to work past. In the “rainbows and unicorns” world of BIM, the passing of the model from designer to contractor to owner is an attempt to not lose valuable knowledge and information that has been put into that model through the process. The Sketchup to Revit shift is the exact same loss of information. It is a waste of time that is unnecessary.

I would submit another reason Skethchup is bad, bordering on evil. It is imaginary. Now, before you start yelling, I know you can make Revit do some pretty amazingly fake things. Things that completely defy the laws of physics and gravity. But if you use the tool correctly, Revit has checks in there to try to help you along the way and not design something that defies the laws of time and space. Sketchup is nothing but fantasy design. Hopefully the designer has enough experience and knowledge to be able to avoid the pitfalls of building a completely imaginary model, but this isn’t always the case. Sketchup makes it very easy to design something that simply cannot be built. And the owner loves it and it’s gonna be on the cover of some grand architectural review magazine! Except that it’s entirely fiction, and when you Revit guy starts duplicating the model in Revit (which is a waste of time – see above) he or she finds this discrepancy with reality and has to spend more time discussing a solution with the Sketchup designer to find a solution.

Sketchup has a place. That place is the first five minutes of predesign, schematic design or whatever you might want to call it. That’s it. The word “sketch” is in the name for a reason.

This is one of my big soapbox items. I could rant for much longer, but frankly this blog post has gotten too long. I will post again soon where I discuss what I have found with some Sketchup snobs users and how we are trying to deal with them.

Boot Camp and Phases

Second day of training wrapped up.  I always get a bit panicky, looking over my notes and thinking that there is NO POSSIBLE WAY that I can cover all the material.  But we always seem to make it through.

Each time I do the class, I find myself adjusting the emphasis on certain sections.  With the economy in its current state (opposite of “awesome”), our firm has a larger percentage of renovation work than we typically have in the past.  In previous classes, day 3 of training has had a 20 minute discussion of the phasing available in Revit: “Hey, look that each element has a phase.  Neat?  Neat.  And, no, that demolish button doesn’t mean delete.  DELETE means delete.”  Tomorrow I intend to spend at least an hour on it.

We have not seen much need to go beyond the standard “Existing” and “New” phases.  Mainly the way the phase filters forces us to display things pretty much exclusively based on chronology, we just weren’t able to produce the documents we had expected.  There are workarounds, but overall, I would love to see a revamp of the phase filter system.  Instead of seeing it as “now” or “prior”, I would like each phase filter to be able to control the different phases and phase states individually.  Basically, the chart would get more columns based on the phases in the project.  Then one could select on, off or some override settings for that phase and state.

Ah, to dream.

And while I’m dreaming, a root beer float would be great right about now.

Time for Teaching

Tomorrow I’m starting three days of training for some of our architects and architectural staff on Revit Architecture.  I’ll be teaching, as I’m doing once a month now.  It’s surprising how exhausted you can get of just standing/sitting and talking for the whole day.  I am pretty much wiped when 5:00 comes around at the end of teaching day.  I know, I know.  Your heart breaks for me.

We are lining folks up to get trained and will start their first project in Revit within two weeks of training.  Most of these folks are coming from CADD, some from Sketchup (ahhh… my anger toward Sketchup in a firm’s design and documentation process will be laid out in a later post).  The shift is so drastic, that we want to make sure they are trained and then POW! jump into a Revit project.  We give plenty of support as they start working, but we have absolutely found that Revit (or our other CADD platforms for that matter) is not like riding a bike.  We will have spent significant resources getting these people trained and if they don’t use the software, they forget it.  And these are smart people.  The process is just so different from what they are used to, you need to nurture the part of their brain that it gets plugged into.

I enjoy getting the feedback and the conversations and ideas from the class.  What I don’t like is halfway through the third day when their eyes are all glazing over and they don’t answer any questions.  I don’t blame them.  I would go groggy too, if I had to sit and listen to me speak for 8 hours straight.

I also enjoy seeing the light-bulb click on for some of them.  Working in a BIM production cycle is a drastic change.  I give most of the folks three weeks of using the software before the light bulb goes on and the realization that “hey, this is cool.”  A few of the folks have the switch thrown during the class.  They’ll be peering into their monitors and a smile will slowly cross their face.

“Welcome to the party,” I think.  “We’re glad to have you along.”