The day started off with an overwhelming confluence of people. Nearly 10,000 people are in attendance at this years event. And I think they all ate breakfast at the same time. It is quite a hike to get to the food area. Then the long hike back…
The kickoff event started with Carl Bass and more. Many speakers and live demos. Mostly they were pointed at manufacturing, infrastructure and some AEC. Maya had a presence in the event and was used for some effects.
The event hall was packed – 360 stage. The whole audience was surrounded by video screens that projected stitched images of cityscapes. One image included a fly thru of the Washington DC area.
The AUGI booth is being set up… it will be ready for the Beer Bust tonight.
I arrived in Las Vegas on Sunday for some pre AU events.
I spent the day on Monday with the AUGI Board of Directors developing plans for future AUGI programs, events, and offerings.
Then it was on the AUGI Leadership Conference. We had over 125 people involved. This was a dedicated time for leaders to develop their skills at starting and maintaining Local User Groups and Chapters.
I met up with leaders from Portland, Ft. Wayne and Reno. There were very interested in getting new ideas for user groups and moving their groups forward.
Tomorrow I present on the CAD Manager Career Path: How to Climb the Ladder. Here is a snippet from the presentation:
Benefits of a CAD Management Career Ladder
- The Ladder is easy to climb (to a point). Going from one rung to another can be a methodical process. Moving to the next level is a fairly straight forward progression.
- The Ladder is extensible. You can move beyond CAD Management to other areas of technology management and leadership.
- The Ladder is transferable. You will gain and use very transferable skills during your
progression and tenure as CAD Manager. - The career cannot be outsourced. Management is not like CAD Drafting. Some one in another country cannot take your place. Management is a hands-on, face to face, people interactive function. Long distance CAD Management is tough.
Still as valid today as when I wrote them last year…
You can use these for just about any event you attend but they are focused on AU 2007.
I wrote them and posted them on BLAUGI – the AUGI Blog last year.
Take a look…
CAD Standards are meant to be changed. They are not to be created and set up as if chiseled in stone tablets. They should be reviewed and updated on a regular basis. I keep a Master copy of the Standard that I mark up and then publish when there are enough changes to make an impact.
When should you upgrade the standard? Here are some suggestions…
- When a new release of software comes out and you need to add standards for new tools
- When some part of the standard is flat out wrong
- When some part of the standard needs to be clarified because the standard was silent before
- When it has been so long that no one remembers the last time it was updated
While I encourage the update of the standard, I also encourage you not to update it too often. If you put out updates every month or two, then people will get frustrated that they cannot keep up with the changes.
It is a balance that you need to determine for your own environment. Each office may need a different timeline.
The Standard is an Ideal – you may never reach perfection. In fact you most likely will not ever see a perfect set of CAD files in your entire career. But that does not mean that we just throw up our hands and give up trying. How many perfect games have there been by Major League Baseball pitchers. The list is quite short when compared to the number of games played. Only 17 players have ever pitched a perfect game in MLB History. But they don’t stop trying.
When you are developing your standard, set the bar high. Write it as if you were going to hit the target every time. Create on paper, the perfect set of files and then try hard to meet that standard.
Keep in mind that while you are shoot for perfection, you need to be rooted in reality. Don’t set something up that can never be reached. It should be possible (if someone is insanely diliegent and is the only one working on a set of files and not on else touches them) to reach the ideal.
Most of the time you will get close and most of the time close is better than not trying.
As you set the bar high (the dashed red line), your quality should be improving over time (the black line). The reality is often a jagged line of greater and lesser quality (the dashed blue line) that hopefully improves as time goes by.
By setting the bar a little higher, you keep moving the average quality level up. This spurs everyone on to do better as they gain more talent in CAD and a better understanding of the Standard.
When developing your CAD Standards keep in mind that you are painting a target for your team to hit. You are not creating a “how to” book. Leave the “how to” part for training. By giving them a target to hit you are allowing for some flexibility in what they do to hit that target.
Let’s say that you are creating a Layer List. It should include all of the info they need to create the correct layer with name, color, pen style, etc. Your standard should not tell them how to create it. You may use a LISP routine, or the layer dialog box, or the layer command line options, or create from Standard (in ACA). Leave the method of creating the layer up to them.
You could define the text sizes and placement of general notes (what goes on what layer and what file) but leave the method for creating that text up to them. They may type it in Word and cut and paste it into MTEXT. They may type it out by hand. They may even ask someone who can type faster than them to do the job. Let them figure that out.
You just set up the target. Define as much as you need to make sure that the end result is always the same.
Have you checked out the SketchUp Tutorial videos on their YouTube Channel?
This is a good source for online learning of Google SketchUp, brought to you by the folks who make the software.
Are you going to Autodesk University this year?
If so – let us know
If not – why not?
Finally – someone is publishing information about how much BIM is being used.
This is from the Interoperability in the Construction Industry SmartMarket Report – a 36-page printed report (available as hard copy or FREE PDF) that reviews the results of research conducted by McGraw-Hill Construction Analytics during late-Spring 2007.
This is from a very interesting report.
Purchase it or download the Free PDF here
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