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Revit Architecture
by: Nancy McClure
AEC Training and Education for Strategic Success
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he times, they are a-changin’! The AEC industry is awash with new BIM tools promising increased efficiency and accuracy, but requiring an overhaul of traditional workflow processes to achieve it. In this article, I’ll discuss how education and training are crucial to help firms evolve their processes while maintaining productivity.
EDUCATION VERSUS TRAINING Often considered the same, education and training have end goals that are notably different. Education is gained knowledge, the basis of developing rationale and reason. It’s the What and Why of our actions, and is crucial to individual development, as well as effective leadership and management.
often need additional training to translate new file formats into a mode they can use, or to integrate their output with other disciplines of the design team. How much training does a firm need? What should staff members be trained on? Until a team experiences the change in workflow, they cannot predict all of the ways that processes will be affected. Even after they do, it’s often difficult to translate that into transferable “lessons learned.” “Documentation requires a lot of time and energy,” says Chris Parsons, founder and CEO of Knowledge Architecture, a consultancy that integrates data management tools and social intranets for the AEC industry, “and is often an overhead expense firms find difficult to afford.” Parsons describes the use of a knowledge network as key to connecting a firm’s most vital assets—its knowledge resources—and unlocking the valuable experience team members hold in their heads.
ACCUMULATE AND AGGREGATE Figure 1
Training, on the other hand, addresses the How of using design tools, many of which have significantly increased in complexity over previous methods.
KNOWING WHAT YOU DON’T KNOW A change of technical tools is disruptive. Established methods and sequencing change, and staffing and timeline decisions change along with them. Disruption is not limited to firms implementing new software—those continuing with their standard software
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The knowledge network can take many forms—a series of checklists addressing various phases of project development or a more formal narrative document, as long as it is a “living document” that is updated and revised frequently. A good example is an intraoffice communication platform such as Sharepoint or Google Sites, which allow quick broadcasts and comment-enabled conversations to accumulate. Subjects can be tagged to make searching and aggregating possible, thereby achieving collective knowledge. When a subject is clearly generating questions or providing answers, that informs the firm of the need to seek specific training, or to present its accumulated knowledge in a more formal mode.
November 2013