how often do you update?

[Wanderer]

how often do you update your CAD standards manual?

we brought ours online in early 2002, revises in 03 and been meaning to revise again since. ;)

does anyone have a set schedule? what makes you revise?

[Augi Doggie]

how often do you update your CAD standards manual?

we brought ours online in early 2002, revises in 03 and been meaning to revise again since. ;)

does anyone have a set schedule? what makes you revise?
I suggest quarterly updates, possibly bi-annual, but only if there are significant changes to the standards worthy of note to the employees using it.

Sometimes small changes may just require an email to your CAD users and addition to the standards manual with the next significant change.

[CNAPIERALA]

When i was working for a Engineering firm as Cad Manager i would update it whenever there was a major change or about every month. If you make changes too often people dont pay attention to them.

Chris

[jaberwok]

........CAD standards manual?

Oh. I wish.

:-(

[Augi Doggie]

...If you make changes too often people dont pay attention to them...
Very true, that's why I would suggest several months in between updates. If it's updated too often people will get the impression that there's something wrong with it and that you're fixing it not updating it.

[Hammer.John.J]

whenever i send out "hatemail" an email with an update, a trick or tip, a shortcut, etc. if i do an email it gets converted to pdf and added to the guidelines. sometimes 5-6 times a month sometimes 1 every 3 months.

[CADKitty]

Oh. I wish.

:-( ^^What he said^^
I'll let you know after I get to write the sucker...:sad:

[JASONM30395]

We deployed our "draft" copy 9 mo. ago and have been waiting for all the feed back to come in but plan to do an update every 6 mo. to a year.

[Wanderer]

I suggest quarterly updates, possibly bi-annual, but only if there are significant changes to the standards worthy of note to the employees using it.

Sometimes small changes may just require an email to your CAD users and addition to the standards manual with the next significant change.might be of note to remind that I don't do production drafting in-house, and my standards are mainly for our contractors to use... I try to save up my ideas for updates to do all at once, ideally I'd like to make changes once a year (just as a nice timeline to remind contractors and their new or forgetful empolyees that we do have standards).

I like feedback and have some changes to make based on a rather competent assessment recently given by one of our contractors. The biggest problem with this is people either don't make feedback or their feedback isn't constructive, it's just a basic rant about how it's not they way they've always done things. ;)

As it were, I'm about to issue some more changes. Some dealing with software changes over the past few years (suggestions for using new capabilities a lot of people don't realize they possess), along with other minor things like I brought up in another thread recently about piping labels and other tidbits.

Thanks for the feedback guys, always good to hear from others.

[robert.1.hall72202]

We deployed our "draft" copy 9 mo. ago and have been waiting for all the feed back to come in but plan to do an update every 6 mo. to a year.

I agree with you on the 6 month updates. Just need to excersise some commitment and find the time.

My draft standard rolled off my desk the last week in december.

[Chris.Partin]

At the least I update my office's manual once a year close to the release of a new version of AutoCAD. I try and update it quarterly, but I've fallen behind a bit. Our standards don't change too much, but as the new versions of the software come out we add some of the new features into our standard procedures and filter out the procedures we don't use anymore.

The way my office is, if you give them too much too often they either forget or ignore.

[Augi Doggie]

.....The way my office is, if you give them too much too often they either forget or ignore.
Most offices are similar, too many changes and they tend to forget some of them. I'm a big proponent of quarterly changes. You can add one or two big changes per quarter. If you have more than that, you might want to wait for the next quarter to impliment some more of them.

Too many changes at once also tends to hurt the validity of the standards. A lot of changes often signals the possible existence of problems for people. In other words people will think "there most be something wrong if they're changing this many things".