Foriegn Training

Ahhhh!!!! Since the beginning of the month things have just been crazy! I was in one of our other stateside offices to give advanced family training to our MEP engineers who are starting to explore Revit systems, and now I'm in our foreign office for about a week to do Revit training with a 20 person team to kick off a new Revit (and first) Revit project here. Thankfully I'm not alone trying to teach 20 people, but the experience has been great! We already have them working in their project files! I've attached a couple of my very poor night pictures, so if you can figure out what its a picture of, you might have chance of determining what country I'm in! In any case I'm back in the states next week (Tuesday) then Thanksgiving, and then AU! I'm looking forward to AU as an intense vacation!

One of our biggest problems in hopping the pond to our foreign office is that we have very little custom Metric content. Though we've very quickly got a project template started for them, and we are working on a titleblock, buts its all very fast and very insane. Before leaving I will be teaching my intensive family training course to users who hadn't even touched Revit until this past week!



Cheers,
-R

Family Clinic (learning to create parametric families)

So the other big thing that happened before going to San Fran & the west coast was that I held an intensive day long advanced family creation clinic (my pastor thought this was a little sketchy sounding ;) ) based around my firm's family standards as defined by the family outline specification that was one of my first blog posts. The training session started with about an hour and half going through a power point that I created that illustrates best practices for creating solid parametric families that are easy to diagnose and distill; as long as everyone follows the rules such as; always name reference planes, and categorize your parameters, don't let them all sit under the "other" heading. There are more.... :) but you gotta come work for us first ;).

After the powerpoint, which was interspersed with live Revit demos to illustrate various points, we moved on to creating a family. Here's a pic of what I told them they would have by the end of the day.

Specs:

2 pick family with arrayed nested cabinet family that can be user modified, doors are also nested and interchangeable. As a bonus they're challenged to write the formula that will limit the number of cabinet instances so that they don't extend past the overall length (yes I did write the formula as proof of concept).

All of them did it (I had about 8 people in the class, course my CIO was reading his e-mail, didn't see Revit open on the laptop ;) ). It was a fantastic training session and we covered just about everything related to families. Workplanes, subcategories, parameters, formulas, shared & nested families, visibility settings, shared parameters, keynotes, and of course general best practices on building complex families. Everyone felt that the course was a great success, and I was very happy with the results. I was very fortunate in that one of my co-workers in the course is a note taking nazi and she has provided excellent written documentation of what we did, making it much easier to make it repeatable and tweakable.

At the start of the day I provided them with a CD that included the power point, a PDF synopis of key points to remember (printed too), the required family templates, keynote file, shared parameter file, excel file of the firm's additional subcategories, and examples of the finished families, and the doors (I pre-made them for them). My favorite part though was that I was also able to include progressive copies of the families. By setting the number of back-up copies to 250 I was able to create a sequence of files by saving after every major action as I created the families. In the end I have 14 sequential files of the base cabinet, they proved very useful as I had a latecomer to the class, and I was able to catch him up ASAP by simply opening one of the 14 files and he was ready to go.

All in all this was a great experience and I was very satisfied with the results, and everyone who participated thought that it was great (though a long day). Now though, I know where I can break up the course to do it in shorter smaller parts. In addition to teaching the course internally, I hope to take it public at some point (with some modifications ;) ). I look forward to doing it again and perfecting it. :)

Cheers,
-R

training BIM

We recently had a two day retreat where everyone involved with implementing BIM accross our U.S. offices got together to really start laying the ground work for a firm wide push to adopt the design philosphies of BIM, and therefore the use of Revit. Our CEO has already drawn the line in the sand, he expects us to be 100% BIM in 3 years, this is HUGE, the first reaction is probably one of shock, consider our market sectors for a moment, health care, higher ed, mixed use development, high end multi family residential, sci tech, k-12, and commercial/retail. That is a variety of project types and project requirements to move into a BIM mode of production. However, the second reaction should be "thats HUGE" not because of the mamoth task ahead of us, but because we have complete corporate leadership buy-in as far moving our practice to a BIM based practice. Not only that, but our CEO and other key leaders in the firm understand conceptually what it means to be practicing BIM, and why the investment in transistion to a program like Revit is worth it.

So; that is what our 2 day meeting was about, creating a full implemntation plan for our firm, what are our priorities, what do we need to do, who are we going to need to do it, how much time is it going to take. This way we can tell our leadership what we need to full fill their goals, and they can endorse it, and help to make sure it happens. One of our great advanatages we feel moving forward is that most of the people who were at our 2 day meeting are practicing architects and engineers, this train isn't being driven by IT, IT is enabling us, and supporting us, but at the end of the day the implementation and use of BIM is being pushed forward by people who are working on projects everyday!

This brings me in a round about way to my original intent of this post. In our 2 day meeting we talked about training. During that discussion we realized that in the process of moving our firm to BIM/Revit, there are two different things we need to train people on. Users need to learn how to technically use Revit, but at the same time people need to learn what BIM is. BIM is not Revit, Revit is a BIM tool, to practice the theories of BIM a user does not have to be working in Revit, they could be in sketch-up, or archicad, or excel, the point is that BIM needs to be a philosphy of practice that affects how we design, how we deliver value, how we practice our proffession. To us, it is important to clearly seperate BIM from Revit, Revit may not be here forever, but we strongly feel that BIM is where our proffession(s) have to go, we can't look back, we must press ahead!

To that end I've created a simple vignette that illustrates the concept of BIM, without using Revit! (oh and say hi! to Mrs. Robert, :) )

What's New...

Nothing major to annouce.

Our DC office did training with E-Specs today & Revit. I'm looking forward to hearing an update from them tomorrow about how it all went. Based on intial reaction it sounds like it was a productive day. I will post some information about the general reaction and results as it comes in.

Our DC office is also planning on doing a targeted cost estimation exercise with an independent cost estimator based on Revit quantities. They will be using some of the practices developed by Ken Stowe from Autodesk Revit to export and tag the quantities in excel spreadsheets. I'll also update everyone with regards to those results.

We are proceeding with upgrading our active projects to version RB9, and deploying RS1 for our MEP engineers. A project kicked off this week that will make use of both products to design and document a building.

I'm also working on a presentation on best practices when creating Revit families to assure a certain level of quality and uniformity. This presentation is based on the outline family specification we've developed. I'm creating the presentation with the thought that I'll potentially present it to a larger audience outside of Burt Hill. I'm currently planning on posting a "teaser" version once it is complete.

Thanks for reading, and stay tuned for more updates!