Luke Johnson of What Revit Wants recently reshared a post titled "The First Article You Should Read About Revit". Like most of Luke's writing it's good stuff and insightful, however it is clearly targeted at designers. But what if that's not you? What if you're a builder? Or an owner? Or what if you're a designer who finds yourself working for a particularly BIM savvy owner? The discussion changes quite a bit in those cases. Below I take the questions Luke answered and address them from the perspective of a facility owner/operator. Please feel free to share your opinions or thoughts in the comments.
When you are approaching creating a project in Revit, what sort of questions should you be asking yourself? What mindset should you be in?
Begin with the end in mind.
Do you, as the eventual owner of the facility and model understand what you are going to do with that model when construction is complete?
What information needs to be in the model for you to meet your operational needs?
What information doesn't need to be in the model, but still needs to be referenced?
Does the consultant or builder doing the design and construction understand what the owners are going to do with the model?
If the answer to any of these is No, Maybe, Kinda, I'm Not Sure or some other flavor of less than certainty, then you are probably going to have an unsatisfactory experience and result.
Think of the BIM process as a lengthy journey. If you don't know where you are trying to get to, how can you know if you are on the right path?
Revit, and BIM in general, are billed as lifecycle tools. Yet go to any presentation on those tools and the odds are low that you'll hear anything beyond the scope of the design and construction of the project and the benefits for the owner will boil down to saving time/money in project delivery. You're unlikely to hear about all of the data that can be harvested for use in operator systems. Data that can exported for GIS platforms, space management, facility maintenance, emergency preparedness, or linked with other data sources for creating operational graphics that visualize operational status, condition assessments, or scheduled maintenance.
A lot of the fault here lies with owners for not demanding more, but the subject matter experts owners hire (architects, engineers, and contractors) bear some of the burden as well for not being better informed on what the tools they are using can do for their clients. When an owner says "I want BIM", they deliver a 3D model instead of "a shared knowledge resource for information about a facility forming a reliable basis for decisions during its life-cycle".
What mindset or thought process is counterproductive to working in Revit?
There are a number of good (bad?) answers to this question. Perhaps the most relevant is the desire among some owners to have BIM done without knowing what it means. They hear the buzzwords and acronyms, decide it's the newest thing so it must be the best, and start requiring it without being well informed on what it is and how to leverage it. This inevitably leads to a bad experience and higher costs with little to no benefit. BIM/Revit aren't some heavily codified system like LEED or an ISO certification, you don't stick a plaque on a wall pronouncing the facility as being done with BIM and call it a day. For an owner to really leverage BIM, they need to position themselves to utilize the BIM information throughout the entire life of the building before a project begins.
Perhaps the most amusing mindset I've come across was a facility owner who wanted everything to be LOD 500. 500 was the highest so that made it the best and they only wanted the best. They wanted their entire facility (which was very large) modeled to LOD 500, which would have resulted in an unusable model. That level of development would have meant modeling so much detail, the file would have been impossible to open and work with and would have been far, far more information than they would need to maintain the facility.
If you were teaching someone Revit what outline would you give them? What would you tell them to learn first, second, and so on..
I like Luke's answer to this question, but I think he misses a step or two. When someone asks me about learning Revit, the first thing I ask them is what do they think Revit can do and what do they want to do with it? If they're looking to develop a set of construction drawings, then the path outlined at What Revit Wants is a great one to take. But if they are looking to develop base facility models for a campus, create an L500 model for shop drawings, or just need to know how to review submitted models for conformance with a set of BIM standards, then a completely different approach would be appropriate. That all assumes that what the user wants to do is something that Revit is actually capable of. One facility engineer once told me he wanted to use Revit to see what equipment was running and to be able to turn it on or off remotely. That's a little bit outside of Revit's capabilities.
That doesn't really answer the question though. So, first, sit down with a Revit expert and get a realistic idea of what the program and affiliated tools actually can do. Second, establish realistic use cases, being sure to include any affected stakeholders and subject matter experts. Third, get appropriate, targeted, training for appropriate personnel.
What is a Revit trick, shortcut, or way of doing something would you wish someone would have told you long ago?
The power of Schedules in Revit simply cannot be overstated. Proficiency with Schedules is what really separates someone who is using Revit like it is CAD from someone who is using the tool as it is meant to be used. As an owner/operator, having a set of base schedules in our templates allows us to QAQC a huge amount of information quickly to see if the content developers are using the tools correctly and providing us with the information we need to maintain the facility.
As valuable a tool as they are, Revit schedules could be even more powerful (why can't we schedule the layers that make up a wall or floor?) and useful if Autodesk put in the necessary development time.
What is the most common mistake you see in revit models or building revit content?
Since owners don't typically generate much information within the models, this doesn't have an exact parallel for owners. That said, the most common mistakes owners make are echoes of earlier answers. Owners commonly don't know what to do with their models once the project is over, which means that at best they struggle to get useful facility information out of the model and at worst, they never even try, the model deliverables sit on a network or portable media and never get looked at again.
My personal pet peeve in Revit use is people who treat Revit/BIM like it's CAD. That covers a wide range mistakes, from using dumb (non-parametric) text instead of tags, to schedules made with detail lines and text. It wastes time, it wastes money, it introduces a huge opportunity for error and shows a fundamental lack of understanding of how the platform works.
As far as content goes, the most common mistake I see is users who use downloaded content. Downloaded content is almost always bloated, over-modeled, over-constrained, and lacks the appropriate parameters to do what the owner needs it to do over the course of the building's lifecycle.
If you were passing by a student in a hallway and you could only impart 30 seconds of Revit wisdom on them, what would you say?
First, learn how a building operates, then learn how it is built, then get into the design (which will make more sense knowing the first two). If I still had time, I'd echo what Luke said, there's more earnings potential with a strong grasp of Revit and BIM than there is with a PhD in Architecture, provided you are prepared to stay on the leading edge of the technology. That earning potential is also higher with a general contractor or owner than it is with a design firm.
Where do you see the future of Revit, what is it's significance, and potential?
Dynamo is huge. Most presentations I've seen on Dynamo have emphasized it's use in manipulating and iterating geometries. Which is fun for a while until you realize that a very small segment of users will ever have call to implement it in a project. Dynamo's real power comes in filling in the gaps in functionality with Revit data and schedules and making the 'hidden' Revit data visible.
The second major aspect of Revit's future is integration with facility management platforms. There are a number of developers pushing out tools that smoothly transition the design and construction information in a Revit model into platforms that the facility owners, operators, and maintainers can more readily access and integrate with existing and emerging workflows. Autodesk surely recognizes that owners are outgrowing the 'BIM as buzzword' phase and are asking more insightfully about what's really in it for them. Is BIM as a lifecycle process a sincere reality, or is that just marketing? Personally, I think it started out as the latter, as marketing speak that lacked the means for fulfillment. However, as sophisticated owners have bought in to BIM (and Revit) they have demanded a higher level of data functionality and the necessary tools to meet those needs in a practical manner have begun to emerge.
There you have it. Revit is a powerful tool for designers and builders, but it's potentially even more valuable for owners who know how to leverage it.
No comments:
Post a Comment