How does your firm document BIM standards? Do you have a BIM standards manual? Where does it reside, on the network or on your intranet? Do people follow the standards? If not, why do you think that’s the case?
Share your experiences in the comments below.
A BIM Standards manual exists at my firm. It is on our network. But, no ones follows it. I found it because I asked about it. I’m not even sure that it was approved by management it the state I found it. (I am currently creating a new Revit template.) I think that no one follows it because there is not a standard “uploading” proceedure for new employees at out company.
That’s a good point Travis. Firms need an onboarding process for getting new employees up to speed. They also need a process for updating and revising the standard.
Great points about facilitating BIM standards. I have one item to share… I recently wrote this post on linking the standards manual from Revit’s starting view: https://bimchapters.blogspot.com/2018/10/hyperlink-from-revit-starting-view-to.html
Thanks Daniel for the great post. I will be implementing this into our office template. Thank you 🙂
The link is not working.
Rodrigo,
It’s working for me. Are you getting an error?
Michael
BIM Standards…. we don’t need no stinkin’ BIM standards!
Seriously, small, small firm… 3 folks and one is the principle, we don’t have BIM Standards in the office. None of our clients care about BIM…. they like the kewl 3d aspect of Revit… Most don’t even care about that. None of our clients care that we use a BIM software… they just want plans for construction. Not for the “I” part of BIM. Our Revit models go no where but with us.
Sorry.
In little old Australia, we are trying to approaching things from a different angle in the MEP modelling space. The industry has come together to create and champion the BIM-MEP-AUS initiative. The standards are created, the template is developed, and everyone uses it, with the aim that clients will get the same quality outcome each time. It is still growing, but worth having a look at.
https://www.bimmepaus.com.au/initiative/
Ian,
That’s really interesting! The fact that there’s a template already built makes adoption that much easier. Thanks for sharing.
We have a template file that we’ve been developing and updating over the years, but that’s about it as a BIM Standard. It gives everyone a good starting point, and out family library is OK, but with 40 people dozens of active projects you’ll see a wide variation in how things get done in a project if you were to open one of those files! We are constantly looking for ways to better streamline the adoption and standardization of standards in the firm, and I dream of creating some kind of online tool for this. Maybe in 2019? It’s only February after all!
ATG USA has BIM Management software. Here is the Link https://atgusa.com/ctc-products/. The tools are called Revit Express Tools. We use mostly there free tools. But they have a subscriptions that would help BIM Managers standardize protocols company wide.
We document our standards using onenote, you could call this a manual.
We have begun adding hyperlinks to applicable standards from our project template and other master files to the onenote binder.
We try to keep things simple (one topic per note), and include snips to show examples.
Usage of our families and templates is excellent. I make an effort to ensure it is as easy as possible for them to use our standard content by taking a hand in the setup of projects and make sure we are loading the latest content before they even begin.
Usage of our ‘manual’ could be improved, part of the challenge is like Travis said above about employee ‘uploading’. We have had new employee ‘uploading’ be disrupted all too often by deadlines and so its not done completely or properly.
Where we have had challenges is when users seem to have an aversion to referencing and looking up standards or asking questions in general. As manager I see the degree of usage as a remark on my approachability and the respect they have for me, as well as for my communication of the idea of producing work to a company standard. To this end, I find connecting with the users in a weekly session where we share lessons learned and swap tips has improved their engagement.
We do almost the same thing.
the starter project has most of the crucial project interoperability and “common practice” elements baked in – or enough to steer users towards them rather than their favorite workaround.
The OneNote gives users handy reference for how to accomplish specific tasks, and documents more arcane elements of our template so it’s easy to figure out what they’re “supposed” to be doing.
As a practice, we end up with a varied scope of work that often lends itself to needing to break from standards to accomplish the project. By giving folks enough structure and tools but allowing them to go off the ranch on occasion, they’re more likely to stick within the standards — as they get frustrated working in other user’s projects that aren’t standards compliant.
We have some documents about how we want our users to model there models.
In our own ribbontab I added a panel with a link to the networkfolder where our BIM standards are located.
See image in link
https://ibb.co/s1HC30L
Maarten
We are a firm of 45-50 that once only had one office location but has expanded to 3 locations within the last few years. The original location has not had a decent CAD Standard for quite some time and definitely has never had a BIM Manual. I am in the process of developing new versions of both. This conversation has been perfectly timed in helping me make some decisions on how to implement these items! The EAST framework helps me quantify thoughts on how I believe I will make this work! Wish me luck…
We have been using Pinnacle Series as a tool for technical support for our staff. Pinnacle also allows customization of the cloud-based interface which allows us to provide customized content alongside the OTB content provided by Pinnacle. This is where our standards and manuals will live. This will allow me to provide hyperlinks to pertinent content from within in our templates… from anywhere, as it is cloud-based. But I also do like the drafting view instructions idea also and may incorporate some of those.
FYI… Pinnacle Series has informed me that they are working on a tool that may help with better integration of company standards on their platform. Not sure what that looks like yet but they are obviously reacting to the wishes of their users.
I was never a fan of using the starting view in Revit as a communication page because no one used it. I witnessed that with our projects and from project files coming from other firms. My thoughts… project communications should be occurring face-to-face or at least via email or phone conversations…. not by a page in a project file that some may or may not look at. So, I have rebuilt our starting view as a view that contains instructional information and hyperlinks to our online instructional and standards content.
The social aspect of communicating healthy behavior occurs with monthly ‘Tech Huddles’ meetings and with an internal intranet. I do love the idea of rating the projects as you had mentioned Michael! I think we will look into doing something like that. Thanks!