Pilot project guidance

[.chad]

We finally have a new construction project coming up and hopefully we can get the boss to use it as a Revit pilot. I am looking for some advice / guidance on the pitfalls of getting into a starter project.

The project is a multi-story assisted living building, units are pretty repetitive. Engineers will most likely not be using any variant on Revit, so things will be exported back and forth. The most glaring problem that I can foresee is that it is currently in schematic design and that work is being done in CAD (ACA2009) by my boss (and firm owner) who somehow fails to see why he needs to learn it, much less switch the office over - but that is a different issue alltogether (i think.) Given that if we do try and finish the CD's in Revit how should we go about converting from ACA, since a good portion of the work is already done and there will be a lot of redundant work going on :roll:.

Where I really see this going is the negative end or the spectrum, where he will come back with a retort about how inefficient it is to do the work this way when there is so much back and forth between CAD and Revit instead of doing it all in Revit from the begining. (im not bitter about the process at all either)

I am hoping that with a little guidance I can somehow make this actually work out and we can move out of the dark ages and get the whole office over to it.

Thanks. :beer:

p.s. sorry if this is in the wrong forum.

[saeborne]

SD is not too late to switch platforms. In fact, we have changed over projects that were deep into design development. Revit's efficiency more than made up for any lost time.

I constantly tell people in my office that the design is the hard part, not the Revit Modeling. And actually, modeling an established design is an excellent way to learn the software, because it allows a new user to focus on the aspects of geometry and families, and not focus on the design critique of the project.

My advice is, "Go for it!"

[.chad]

is that efficiency still there even on a first time project? i am not so worried about the software nuts and bolts as i am some of the finesse issues and timelines.

[pfaudler]

We strated using Revit on a first project at RIBA stage D and produced all tender and partial CD docs from Revit model. the project was £70M in a value and had 14 detached building on it. We definitely saw benefits using Revit at tender stage even. The contractor and client saw the benefits as well.
And i think by switching form acad to Revit we were able to deliver project on time.
regards

[3dway]

Don't let the time that goes to establishing standards, setting lineweights, making titleblocks, and to a lesser extent building families, etc... be counted against the project for the purposes of determining how long the job took and if it's more efficient or not.

Get training. IMO we're worse off for not having enough training. My first couple of jobs in Revit are not as developed as they should be because I spent a lot of time learning tools and begging in forums for answers. Ask the principles to consider the cost of three hours of learning versus your charge out rate. Every thing that you have to look up, figure out on your own will cost you time. If you're in the middle of the implementation job, it costs your charge out rate. The cost of training looks high if you look at it in a vaccuum, but if you compare it to job time, maybe not as bad.

**edit in** consider cost of training per hour for a group against the charge out rate, of all of your Revit users in that training group, added together.

[azmz3]

Our first Revit project was converting work already done in AutoCAD to Revit, and I think it was a very good way for us to learn the program more in-depth after our 3-day training class we had. Since then we have started project proposals straight from Revit, and that has been good training to figure out worksets and design option features in Revit and working with other team members.