those that chose to attend what was going on. I showed the structural models that I created and walked through how easy it was to create schedules to show information from the model. This really got a lot of attention and slowly created more interest throughout the office as well as started to spread the conversations outside the office to our clients. With all this constant activity of talking about Revit Structure it was easy to see who were going to be our Revit power users. Those who continually showed up for our Revit discussions or those who continually asked questions, was a good indication that they had an interest about being part of the first wave of users to learn and help implement Revit Structure.
The Revit Ready Plan After these few months of working on Revit and actually having a project almost completed, we found that we were producing projects in Revit Structure but didn’t quite know where we were going with it all. What would be our next steps? We felt that we were educated enough to start working on more projects, but we would need more people involved. Up until now most of the time involving education was either while working on a live project, over lunch, at night, or on weekends. We needed to get a plan in place which would allow new users to get involved and not expect them to work extra hours to learn it all. We also needed to make sure that, as a company, all of the executives and employees understood what our plan was so as they talked about Revit with outside clients they were educated enough to have the conversations and let them know what our plans were. This is when we decided to put in place the “Revit Ready Plan”. This plan basically stated by January 1, 2007, Ericksen Roed & Associates will be ready to produce as much work in Autodesk Revit Structure as our clients’ request. This was our first big commitment in saying that we would use Revit Structure in lieu of AutoCAD. A Revit project would be 100% Revit, the use of AutoCAD would not be acceptable nor would it be a safety net to fall back on. We would make it work. We also developed the “Roadmap to Revit Plan” to help layout our initial plans for implementation and let everyone in the company know the direction we were heading and why. We highlighted things that we thought we needed to focus on and outlined a basic method for training. These plans allowed us to have a clear path that everyone understood as well as a set goal for us to achieve. Words of Advice I would like to share a few words of advice that we used along the way as we progressed through out implementation. spring_2009
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• Communicate internally, communicate externally and keep the communication ongoing. The use of Revit on a project is still new to everybody and the new workflows involved need to be communicated. • Find your key people that have the motivating interest and put them at the top of the pyramid where they will prepare and enforce your standards. Our pyramid started out with me, we have 2 to 3 users who are now sophisticated enough with Revit where they are our go to people for others joining the team. • We started out with what I call Baby Steps; we only did what we felt we were capable of doing at the time and stayed within the limitations of the software. I never really set out on this journey with the idea that we had to outdo the next guy. My main goals were that I wanted every Revit project to be a great experience for everyone involved throughout the construction team, we still needed to issue a good set of construction documents on paper and I wanted the motivation level of those involved at their highest.
Where are we now? A lot has happened since that initial year of getting up and running, today we are moving full steam ahead. We have definitely reach the point where we no longer ask “should we do this in Revit Structure?” rather we say “why would we not do this in Revit Structure?”. Not counting a multitude of marketing / preproduction projects, our now dozen users are in the process of completing our 38th project produced 100% in Revit Structure. We are continually adapting to the ever changing workflow and are putting more and more information into our models. Our client relationships are getting stronger and our collaboration workflows are becoming more efficient. I believe that a big part of our successful implementation is that our executive management didn’t shy away from this thing called “Revit” 4 years ago. They jumped on board immediately and have supported it ever since. Jamie D. Richardson is a CAD\BIM Manager at Ericksen Roed & Associates, a Structural Engineering firm based in Saint Paul, MN. Jamie has been instrumental in the rollout of several versions of AutoCAD as well as the implementation of Revit Structure. He has been an avid speaker on Revit Structure at Autodesk University and is a coauthor of the books Mastering Revit Structure 2009 and 2010.
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