Revit Skills Evaluation

[Isaacarus]

Our office is new to revit. While I have been using it for while now others are really just getting into it. My boss is 100% behind the Revit platform, in fact he is already one of our more proficient users. He now wants to be able to track each employees progress in adapting to the new software so that we can help each person target areas of weakness. In order to do so he has asked me to develop a revit "report card" that would be issued by me on a regular basis.

The Question is if you were asked to do a similar task which areas would you feel most important to include in the report. What are the most critical skills one must have to be an efficient Revit user. What skills would you include in a foundation set of skills that would allow one to be effective without trying to take on too much. Which skills if any could wait till later to learn.


Any comments, ideas or examples would be greatly appreciated.

[shaunamorain]

If your office standards are already set up, then I'd say families, views, and tools such as reference planes. Being somewhat of a newbie myself, that's what I can come up with.

[pdavis]

I can tell you in our offices we have not reached the point where we are evaluating skill levels of individual users in a formal testing manner. I have been asking users what the need help on and I can look at what they are doing in Revit and evaluate where there strengths and weaknesses are. One thing we are going to be implementing is NOT providing instruction on family creation to all employees. We are going to centralize most of that, and only provide family creation instruction to our advanced users.

For the short term, our basic training is being provided by either consultants or our mother ship's Autodesk dealer and I am already sending emails letting them know to only teach loading families and direct questions to either their local CADD/BIM Manager or to the National CADD/BIM Manager.

We are also establishing a share point site where users can get information on our processes and custom training content that we are creating.

So far we have not had any problems with anyone claiming they know this or that, when reality is they do not know this or that. So if someone doesn't know something, there at least so far has not been any fear or embarrassment to ask. When we do find that someone is not following best practices, we just discuss the problem with them.

I would be interested to hear in the future how you track the progress of users. Are all your projects similar in nature?

[Isaacarus]

Well our office is a relatively small design studio. We are experiencing some significant growth due to the success of many of our projects, which range from High-end Custom Residential to Institutional and some commercial work.

We are not really at a point where we are formally testing people either, nor do I think it is likely that we will be doing so in the near future. What we are trying to do is find a way that we can measure where people are with their skills. By doing this we hope to find ways to help them improve. This will also help us determine how we are staffing projects.

One of the things that we are trying to eliminate is the resistant attitude to change. Fortunately we have very minimal resistance compared to what I have been hearing from others. I think by regularly presenting employees and our principal with status report cards for their own benefit we can help illustrate that learning this software is a constant necessary part of their job. It will also reinforce that there will never be a point where they know enough about the software that they can stop exploring new tools and means of accomplishing a task. As a former AutoCAD instructor this was the biggest pitfall of that platform. Everyone could get a set of CDs out with it so they stopped paying attention to whether it was the best way to do it. They stopped learning the advanced tools. From my experience I would say 90% of architects know about 20% of AutoCAD. I don't want that to happen with Revit.

That is the goal of this exercise. To maintain traction for learning. To Keep up enthusiasm during some very difficult times and concepts ahead for most of our employees who do not have a lot of advanced experience with any software platform.

[s.messing]

One thing we are going to be implementing is NOT providing instruction on family creation to all employees. We are going to centralize most of that, and only provide family creation instruction to our advanced users.I would be curious to hear what you consider a user "advanced" enough to be allowed to create families. In my humble opinion, I think families must be taught somewhere after "beginner" and before "advanced". I am in the process of preparing a family creator class for some of my "intermediate" users and was about to post asking for people's opinions on how much I should show them in family creation.



He now wants to be able to track each employees progress in adapting to the new software so that we can help each person target areas of weakness. In order to do so he has asked me to develop a revit "report card" that would be issued by me on a regular basis.
We have begun developing a similar report card style spreadsheet that lists the users and their strengths/ weaknesses. First, we set up a user survey so that each employee using Revit would have the opportunity to rate his/ her own strengths, weaknesses, and desired next step learning. Then, we watched, asked questions, and kept our eyes open to compile our own opinions. Basically, we gave each user a number (1-10) and one or two strengths (family creation and sheet layout for example). Then we have a category called "next logical step" that suggests what kind of training will be most beneficial to this person. Also, we have set up a system wherein anyone in the office can add to a list about difficult topics in Revit. We are compiling a list with names and will use that to train and advise specific targeted users...
As far as foundation skills, the lists vary, but I would be curious to see if someone has a basics training class list of topics. We have set up several styles of intro training, but I have not decided which ones have the most positive impact on the users.

Good luck.
Stephen

[Isaacarus]

Thanks, those are some great ideas! I really appreciate everyones time and thoughts. Keep it coming!

[pdavis]

I would be curious to hear what you consider a user "advanced" enough to be allowed to create families. In my humble opinion, I think families must be taught somewhere after "beginner" and before "advanced". I am in the process of preparing a family creator class for some of my "intermediate" users and was about to post asking for people's opinions on how much I should show them in family creation.



Families are a powerful tool and if Families are created improperly you can end up with huge model and unstable models.

An advanced user would be someone with CAD or BIM management skills.

As more and more of our offices transition to Revit Building and Structure, we will have dedicated people that police the models to make sure that best practices are being followed and any problems are addresses. These staff members will also be working on projects as well. With the size of our firm, we will also eventually have a single person that does nothing but deal with families.

But I respectfully disagree that families are a beginner level skill. If you don't know and understand the fundamentals of sketching, constraining and modeling in Revit, then you shouldn't be taught families.

We handle basic training in the classroom. Basic training is basically means nothing what the buttons do. Advanced level training is on the project, so that the "students" learn the BIM process and don't try to revert to how they had been doing things. Project based training also reduces the cost, since people are working on the project and billing to the project.

[aaronrumple]

I break it down this way:

Every project needs a "Master Modeler". Someone that understands how to work in 3D and assemble buildings.

Every project needs a "Family Man." Someone to make the content and ensure that the right data is ending up in the objects in the right way.

Then there are the "Hungry Masses". These are the people still learning Revit who have the basic concepts, but don't have a fluid workflow and are still struggling with wall joins and such. You have to feed them the right information and watch them - but they can help all the Revit tasks.

Finally - your have the "Day Laborer". These are the contract people you might use to help with drafting. You don't want to invest huge amounts of time teaching them Revit, but they can be a big help with 2D drafting, notes an dimensioning.

[Isaacarus]

Again thanks for the responses. I will emphasize that we are a pretty small design studio. We have about 10 employees and we are relatively top heavy in terms of architectural experience. More than 50% are registered and we only have 1 maybe two "entry" level employees. This means that for the most part all of us are serving as project managers for our own projects. We one project picks up steam we help each other out. Despite the way it sound it has actually worked quite effectively so far even for our larger projects.

The main problem I see is that we simply don't have the personnel to dedicate to having a master modeler or a families only guy. In both cases that would have to be me on every project and I have my own projects to oversee.

While I am mostly looking for ways to evaluate learning process and outlining skills that people find most important. I would still be interested in hearing how you might adapt your ideal workflow if you were in a smaller studio like ours.

[jcoe]

Families are a powerful tool and if Families are created improperly you can end up with huge model and unstable models.

But I respectfully disagree that families are a beginner level skill. If you don't know and understand the fundamentals of sketching, constraining and modeling in Revit, then you shouldn't be taught families.



I definitely agree with this. We are a 75-person firm with two offices and I am responsible for everything Revit in addition to my architectural duties. I have been reluctant to train anyone on the family editor because it can be daunting, especially for those who are still struggling with modeling. I also feel that when more people are involved, the integrity of your family library and subsequently your model suffers because, more times than not, others will do "their own thing" regardless of the standards you have in place. A small firm may have better control over this, but I would still keep family creation to a select few.

I do like the idea of a formal skill evaluation, though.

[neb1998]

Again thanks for the responses. I will emphasize that we are a pretty small design studio. We have about 10 employees and we are relatively top heavy in terms of architectural experience. More than 50% are registered and we only have 1 maybe two "entry" level employees. This means that for the most part all of us are serving as project managers for our own projects. We one project picks up steam we help each other out. Despite the way it sound it has actually worked quite effectively so far even for our larger projects.

The main problem I see is that we simply don't have the personnel to dedicate to having a master modeler or a families only guy. In both cases that would have to be me on every project and I have my own projects to oversee.

While I am mostly looking for ways to evaluate learning process and outlining skills that people find most important. I would still be interested in hearing how you might adapt your ideal workflow if you were in a smaller studio like ours.
This is where revit (once learned) can really shine...On projects that would have taken 3-4 employees to run you can now handle with one revit architect and maybe one supporting personal to 3-4 revit architects that help with family creation and working out problems with the model when you are out of the office.

I find one person can handle a major project with not much outside input.

[pdavis]

I break it down this way:

Every project needs a "Master Modeler". Someone that understands how to work in 3D and assemble buildings.

Every project needs a "Family Man." Someone to make the content and ensure that the right data is ending up in the objects in the right way.

Then there are the "Hungry Masses". These are the people still learning Revit who have the basic concepts, but don't have a fluid workflow and are still struggling with wall joins and such. You have to feed them the right information and watch them - but they can help all the Revit tasks.

Finally - your have the "Day Laborer". These are the contract people you might use to help with drafting. You don't want to invest huge amounts of time teaching them Revit, but they can be a big help with 2D drafting, notes an dimensioning.

You hit on the nose. We call then "Model Manager", "Model Cops", "Family Man", and "Umm it is supposed to do that"

[Steve_Stafford]

Regarding teaching the family editor early or late...

A big firm tends to look at things much differently than a small firm. When talking with Scott Brown while I was working with him at WATG he often said that he wanted to teach people the family editor FIRST. I agreed with him then and still do to a point. The problem is that making Revit accessible to people who know nothing about it means letting them do tangible tasks that they relate to.

Starting out with the family editor means they are dealing with things that most staff have never had to deal with on this level. So they spend 3 days or a week working on stuff that doesn't really track with what they do day to day.

But...if you do teach the family editor first they learn about constraints, parameters, the I in bim, how these buggers are manufacture and built in the field even and how to use solids and voids. Then when they use Revit for a building, constraints are a non-issue, massing is a no brainer, parameters and scheduling is fairly obvious and so on.

Either way you do it you are going to alienate somebody. Whether you are a big firm or small, make sure you are dealing with people on a person to person level so you actually know what they lack confidence doing and where they want to grow. Otherwise they'll leave and leave you wondering what went wrong.

[Isaacarus]

Those are some great points about teaching the family editor early. One of the issues that we are having is people getting so excited about what revit can do, that they want to jump right into to everything. While I am happy with the enthusiasm what I am finding is that people are not spending the time to really understand what they are doing and why the software is able to do what it does. I think having an understanding of how the software works is essential to being able to work with it independently and continuing to improve. This understanding is essential for being able to determine the best way to accomplish a task. With out getting other users to this level I worry that we will either have poor models or I will always have to spend the time to set them up and monitor all of them throughout the course of the job.

Does anyone have a list of concepts that they find essential to understanding the software? Any further suggestions on how I can evaluate other users level of understanding without going to a formal test system?