Recently placed in charge of Revit group at firm

[huy1988931189]

Hey guys, I wanted to get some pointers on how to lead a small group of architects and engineers for a huge project. My firm wants to switch to BIM by the end of this year, and this project is sort of a test on the capabilities of Revit. Since I am one of the few people at this hundred person firm that knows Revit (Chinese firm), I was placed in charge of an interdisciplinary team to integrate an ongoing project into BIM software, namely Revit. Some big things to know is that this project is in the DD phase and everyone is using a Chinese AutoCAD mod called TArch. The people on this team have just started dabbling in Revit, so this will be a primarily learning exercise, although the project manager has stated that we should expect to turn in some construction documents near the end. I'm familiar with some of the collaboration options in Revit, like linking files, separate Architecture/Structures/Systems files, but I'm not as clear on worksets and how to go about implementing those. I've read FAQs and guides on them, but if any of you guys have any experience on collaborating between the Revit disciplines and working on multiple files, that would be extremely helpful.

[Alfredo Medina]

Welcome to the forum. According to what you say, the staff has zero experience with Revit, they have been using a CAD program, they are going to start "a huge project", and this project is "sort of a test". All this sounds like a recipe for disaster. In my opinion, you should not start the huge project in these conditions. Let the office run their projects as they are doing it now, and in the meantime, organize training courses on Revit for the staff. You may need to design courses with different content and length: one for the production staff, and another one for the project managers. During the course, develop a small project, this your test project. After the course, start a real project, small, as your first pilot project. During the creation of this first project, you will be adjusting the workflows, the preferences, creating a template, creating custom families, establishing procedures, etc. All that needs to be eventually in writing, and the results of all that need to explained to all the staff, also. If you are not familiar with the topics of teamwork and worksharing, and collaboration with consultant's models, you need to document yourself about it, maybe with handouts from Autodesk University, or from finding training from other reliable sources. Once you have gone through all this, then you and your staff will be better prepared to do the huge project in Revit, always with your attention and mentorship from the beginning and during the life of the project.

[damon.sidel]

Bottom line: hire a professional.

I second Alfredo's comment that this sounds like a recipe for disaster. I would go one step further than Alfredo in terms of setting guidelines for you developing workflows, standards, etc. as you train staff. Many of the long-time members on this forum came to Revit when it was young and there weren't many known rules and best practices. We developed our own guidelines through doing real projects. These days, Revit is well established and guidelines for best practices are well known.

Find somebody who has a lot of experience to start with a small project and train a select few. This individual or consulting firm (with a full-time, in-house presence for the first project at least) should start developing standards (based on existing office standards) and processes during that time, then when the office is ready, they can roll it out on a larger scale; either a larger project or office-wide.

Just my opinion, but in this case, a very strong opinion. :)

[Mike L Sealander]

Yes, get some talent in the door. You might want to think about the robustness of your hardware and network infrastructure, too. In the meantime, plan on having regular team meetings.

[MikeJarosz]

I disagree with these negative opinions. In my experience, what you can accomplish depends on the team you assemble and their outlook, not their Revit experience or the size of the project. What you want from your team is the desire to learn. You have to look in the mirror and ask yourself “can I do this”.

Take me as an example.

I'm called into the partner's office one day, and told that I have been chosen to be on the World Trade Center CAD team. You know, that project the entire world is watching. BTW, you are going to be using Revit for the below grade ("bathtub") design because of the 3D complexity. Although I am an experienced architect and member of the office IT/CAD group, I didn't know a thing about Revit… Nothing. .. Zero… Not many people in those days did. The CAD people laughed and predicted failure.

Among the others chosen for the WTC team was James Vandezande. He had recently received some training on Revit 5.? and was told he had to give the team what we called "just in time" training. We jumped in. Before long, we had the whole bathtub modeled, including the PATH train station. One of the guys on the team was into model railroading, on his own initiative he got details of the PATH train cars and modeled them in native Revit. We accurately modeled the tie-backs into Manhattan bedrock, the critical structure that kept the whole tub from caving in. We were below sea level, after all.

One day, partner Carl Galioto stopped by to see our progress with the basement levels. I believe he was impressed, because he asked me if we could do the whole thing in Revit. I told him I didn’t see any reason why not. So we did. Right up to the red aviation light at the tippy top of the broadcast antenna.

We received a lot of help from Revit. Phil Read, Matt Jezyk, Lillian Smith and Marty Rozmanith all deserve a lot of credit for the help and encouragement they gave us.

You do not need to test the capabilities of Revit. That verdict is in. Revit can do it. Look at the Barclay Center in NYC. The crucial element to our success was the backing from senior management. Too many managers panic at the first sign of trouble and give up the experiment. Instead, we got encouragement.

As Damon points out “These days, Revit is well established and guidelines for best practices are well known.” This fact puts you way ahead of where we were. And, we used R6.0. You have R2013! Most of the CAD people have long since stopped their laughing and are actually looking a bit worried these days. Time to move on up.

[antman]

You have to look in the mirror and ask yourself “can I do this”.


The crucial element to our success was the backing from senior management.

I agree with Mike, especially on these two points. As for my experience:

8 months after (bad idea - always jump in immediately after training) my 3-day essentials training I started a small 7,000 sf office building project, bringing one additional team member in midway and acquainting him with Revit in the process. This served to work out some issues and roughly define processes, standards, and content. Immediately following, we jumped headlong into a 2,000 student high school project with 7 main and 5 auxiliary buildings. Our team of 8 architecture and 4 structure each attended a 3-day essentials training after I conducted one day in house of familiarization for them. With my full time support and some as needed from our trainer, we finished the project in 6 months. Not only that, but the team was super happy with Revit and dreaded going back to AutoCAD for other projects when that one finished.

[MikeJarosz]

I wanted to not talk so much about me, but rather address the issue at hand, so I left out something the Revit community should know.

The reason you haven't seen any of this WTC work is because we had an iron-clad non disclosure agreement. You can just imagine the bigwigs we had to deal with. Each of us were called into a conference room to meet with outside counsel to actually sign a binding contractual agreement that we would not disclose anything about the design of the trade center without prior approval. And there were penalties associated with that piece of paper.

It burns me up that after all that work we can't show any of it. The only portfolio documentation I have for all my work on the WTC is ragged, redlined markups from coordination meetings. I did a worm's eye view of the bathtub that Vandezande sometimes shows, without identifying what you are actually looking at. Great shot of the elevator pits. 6 foot impact slabs.

#%#$^(^^$%$#@#!

[Steve_Stafford]

There is solid advice in each post. Which sort of team do you have? Is the office behind you or just handing you rope? Alfredo is being cautious wanting you to succeed but to set expectations reasonably and prepare well. Mike is encouraging you to go for it because it can be done, he knows from experience too. There are so many recipes for disaster, fewer for real success, is your team working from the right recipe?

[huy1988931189]

Hey guys, I really appreciate the discussion about implementing Revit here. After further talks with my project manager, I have a much clearer idea of what they want with this particular project. Thankfully I have the backing of the senior staff and they recognize that switching from 2D AutoCAD to 3D BIM design will be a slow and often times painful process.

Here is some more information regarding this project. I am part of design team that specializes in hospital and healthcare architecture. We have collaborated with the firm's structural and MEP system engineers before, and we are in the middle of 3 projects, one of which is the one I talked about in my OP. One thing to note is that there is very little free time to work on a test model, as most of our time is taken up by on-going projects. However, the reason why I believe we can implement BIM successfully at this firm is because the project managers are assessing this transition period carefully and methodically.

We have hired a BIM consultant to work with our firm's small (3 person) BIM center on the projects they have going on, which mainly consists of tutoring them on family creations I think, while I will be leading the BIM team for this particular project. I will come out and say honestly that I have at least a year or two on the people in the BIM center, which was one of the reasons I was hired and placed on this design team. While our BIM center will concentrate on creating families, I will be overseeing the creation of the project's Revit model and working on our firm's BEP with our BIM consultant. While this project won't be completely using BIM, our next one will most likely be, so I really want to gather as much information and ideas from you guys as you're willing to give in order to minimize the aches and pains we'll no doubt go through.

To answer a question:

I am leading an interdisciplinary team that will focus directly on Revit modeling. There will be a few architects and engineers; one for each M E P, one for structural, one for landscaping, one for interior design, and me for architecture. Our Revit experience is all over the map, but we are relatively young and have been exposed to BIM and its concepts.

[Alfredo Medina]

This last message of yours shows a much better scenario than your first post, in which you described a situation that looked like there was a group of some 100 people, and a lonely Revit evangelist, making a huge project in Revit.

To clarify, in my first post, I used the word "disaster" not in regards to the project, because the office knows how to make the project, of course, and will do it anyway. "Disaster" in that case refers to the implementation of Revit in that office, in the sense that if you don't have the necessary support from management, and if the users don't go through the necessary transition from the CAD mindset to the BIM mindset, the pressure of getting the project done while at the same time having to deal with the frustrations of getting used to Revit's methods, plus the 1 to 100 ratio (lonely Revit evangelist vs 100 CAD users), all that combined, usually results in a meeting in which the majority decide that they can get the job faster and better if they continue to use CAD, therefore they decide to put Revit on the shelf and concentrate on getting the project done in the way they are used to. After that, it will be hard to attempt the Revit implementation again, because the CAD users would have demonstrated "their" point, and you could not demonstrate yours.

In the case of Mike and James Vandezande, and the World Trade Center project, that is a different story, in which, if I understood correctly, there was this small group of enthusiasts starting to get things done in a new software, gradually demonstrating that they could do it, successfully, to other members and to upper management; and this first success led to the spread of Revit to more team members, eventually leading to having the whole project done in Revit. Notice that in this case, there was this first demonstration of success, which is very important to get other people on board and motivated, and notice that they had the assistance of some external experts who helped them at some points during the process.

[MikeJarosz]

Alfredo: all true

huy.....: If you can get your hands on "Mastering Autodesk Revit Architecture 2011", there is a center section of color photos. Two pages of that section are Long Island Women's Hospital. An exterior view and a cutaway view of the interior shows every bedpan, IV stand and medical device imaginable. If you need proof a hospital can be done in Revit, this is it. BTW, it is built and occupied.

[irneb]

I'm with Mike & Alfredo on this: The 2 major stuff you have to have in place are Management buy-in and the willingness of operators to learn the new tool. Without those 2 no matter what you do is doomed to failure. With those two you can overcome any issues which will arise. I've had experience from both sides of both ideas: A boss who is unwilling to compromise on ANYTHING, and a boss who doesn't really care about the detail - only wants the result to "work". Operators who only want to do what they've been doing for years, and those who actually want to do something new.

Some stuff to look out for, from my personal experience. I've done several of these "introduce Revit as the new tool" situations on several different sized companies (ranging from 10 to 150 employees) on several different sized projects (from simplistic warehouses, through medium complexity office blocks to highly complex hotels and multi-function buildings):


Be willing to adjust some current "standards" especially with schedules. It's sometimes very difficult (or even impossible) to get Revit to follow the exact same layout, look & feel as the drawing you'd have done in acad. This needs a lot of management buy-in, they need to allow for some changes and not be stuck with a situation where you're told: "It has to produce the exact same deliverable as we used to get from acad".
Take some time to develop your templates (annotation families, title blocks, etc.). And make these into a shared folder structure where you'll also place your developed families so everyone's using the same set of families. The last thing you want is several people developing duplicate work in different ways. E.g. one guy makes a toilet family as a wall based, while the other does it as a floor based, and a 3rd as a free-standing with an offset from the level - this will make it impossible to change between any of them without re-placing each separately. Preferably keep only vetted families in there - perhaps use a set of draft folders for families generated on the fly, then periodically go through these to see if they should be cleaned / fixed / redone for placement into the "final" set.
Try enforcing some naming consistency with your families, and types. Otherwise you end up with 1000's of duplicates simply because the name chosen at the time differs. Again, this causes duplicate and inconsistent work. One type which is extremely prone to this hangup is wall types - try to keep your wall types to a minimum, but definitely keep their naming consistent so it sorts properly - else operators can't find the wall type they're searching for and go re-make a new duplicate one. Same goes for parameter names, groupings & types in families - learn to use Shared Parameters to make life easier in this regard.
Training is an ongoing process (especially if your staff aren't experienced in Revit). All operators should at least have an introductory course in Revit, but I've found better results from on-the-job-training than sending a batch of operators off to be trained and then have to come back and try to "remember" how to do the stuff on a running project. With such a large team, I'd advise you have at least one "expert" to handle queries as and when they happen. IMO you learn a hell of a lot more from doing, making a mistake, asking for some help, and then doing it a "better" way ... instead of going to learn how to do a set of things, then coming back and trying to figure out when should you use what tool. Also such queries needs to be kept track of, so the entire team can be shown how to perform certain tasks periodically. From these queries you'll notice a trend of what sort of extra training is needed, then periodically (we do this one day every 1 or 2 weeks) get the team together and show them a hands-on example of all the issues that came up. Be willing to re-show again if this query comes up later.