Revit in a Large Firm – A tale of implementing Revit.
My name is Robert Manna and I am a staff architect/BIM implementer. I'm writing to share our implementation story with the hope that it will help you to help others as we all work to change our profession(s) or possibly to confirm and validate your own firm's experience doing so as well.
Starting out small (in a big firm)
In December of 2003, my firm’s involvement with Revit began with a single project team of four people who decided to try this up-and-coming piece of software on a high-rise residential project. At the time Burt Hill had about 350 staff members in six regional offices. Today, Burt Hill now an international Architecture, Engineering,Planning and Design firm has 1,000people in 12 offices spread around the globe. During this time of extraordinary growth, a team of dedicated individuals have worked together to implement Revit architecture as our tool of choice for Architecture and Interior design and documentation. Now, five years later we’ve used Revit forover one hundred projects and a majority of our Architecture and Interiors staff have been trained to use Revit.[djf1]
Firm Structure
Burt Hill strives to be a single firm and while each office has unique attributesthe distribution and application of new tools like Revit and a process like Building Information Modeling (BIM) are considered important enough that they should be applied in all offices in the firm, as equally as possible. In 2006 our CEO issued a challenge for the firm to plan to be 100% BIM by April of 2009.[djf2] How have we done? We’ll answer that a little later. The decision to issue this deadline was based on a handful pilot projects that took place in various offices over the previous three years. The first pilot ran for almost a year before two more pilots started almost simultaneously in early 2005.
Getting Started
In the fall of 2005, representatives from the pilot project teams met to discuss the status of Revit and whether it was worthwhile to continue to use the software. The purpose of the meeting was not just to evaluate Revit, but to consider this new work flow and the tools that were being used; was there an opportunity to take advantage of this new approach to design and documentation with these developments in technology? None of the attendees knew it at the time, but that meeting was the start of our BIM implementation.Even at that point we made some key decisions that have guided our efforts over the years.
[djf3]The critical philosophical point was our vision of Revit as one piece of a larger practice change, from a 2D document-based workflow, to an information-model based workflow. Revit would be one of a set of tools we will use together, to drive building design.
T[djf4]he first and most critical decision was a strategic one: Implement BIM broadly across the whole organization. Not only did we want to see all offices adopt the technology, we wanted everyone to move at the same rate, and to work together as much as possible. When it came time to plan how we would achieve these ends, we looked at a number of approaches, but a few important points bear mention.
A major decision was to focus on education and training, which we described as “training our way out of this mess.” Burt Hill historically provided internal training, for example on 2D Microstation, and it became apparent to us that our own Burt Hill experts could provide better relevant training and coaching thanexternal trainers we were familiar with. External trainers knew (but not always) which buttons to push, but too often missed the critical impacts that changing software and workflows have on practice.
Another choice made after that meeting was that the effort to implement BIM should be done as a “project” with a separate budget and manager, not simply an “IT” effort. This was important as the majority of the “team” has been made up of professionals whom also practice architecture (and what they teach).
Success
Thanks to these early decisions and planning, our efforts have met with reasonable success. The largest project to dateis the completion of our second pilot project, the 120,000 sq ft DorranceHamiltonBuilding. Another important measure, we believe, is that we have had very few employees who wanted to go back to using CAD. People at times might be frustrated, or angered by limitationsor bugs in the software, but they want to remain engaged with the software.[r5]
We are very proud of our owneducation program. Initially when there were only a few projects we engaged in two day blitz sessions to teach and help start a team off on the right path.As the number of projects increased we decided this required a real education curriculum. Using “college”[r6][djf7]as a model, we started and continue to develop a broad series of courses broken up by skill level and topic, with identified “track[djf8]s”. In 2008 we [r9]deliveredmore than 100 courses, with 68 coursehours available to teach. The courses teach not only which buttons to push, but how to apply the tool(s) in practice, best practices, and any issues/limitation that may exist.
As part of the system, our educators never teach in their home officeas we find that it lends greater credibility to our educator because the students are not already “too” familiar with him/her. This way they don’t walk into a class with predetermined ideas about their expertise.As part of our education effort we’ve also invested in a wiki to document the curriculum and provide a source of information that all users can contribute to.
We have been very successfulgetting feedback from our user base as well as providing information. For example we do a monthly e-newsletter via e-mail. It is short and follows a set format and thetext is kept to a few sentences or bullet points with images as necessary. This allows us to provide useful, quick and easy to absorb information to everyone. We solicit feedback using our Survey Monkey account. The surveys were originally born of the desire to get immediate feedback when an education course is complete, however we’ve also found it useful for learning what users need in the way of content, or what we can do better to serve their needs. Surveys are a “window looking into”our professional staff, allowing them to guideand participate more directly in our BIM implementation.
Lessons
In the last five years there are some things we know now that we wish we knew then!
Perhaps the biggest thing that we did not fully grasp when we startedwas the impact the process of change would have on our firm and business as a whole.We have since learned that it is critical to “manage expectations” and set realistic goals, otherwise it is very easy to lose support and momentum.[djf10]
[r11]2D CAD has historically been the application of “drafting technique” to the computer. The concept that our “finished” product (drawings) is actually a by-product of another process (modeling) is not something always easily “taught”. Thereforewestrive tohave staff, who have a diverse range of professional experience and opinion(s),participate in the implementation to ensure that we have a balanced approach to serving all the professionals within our business.
Plan, plan, and plan some more
While we have done a fair amount of planning, what we never did, due to our organic growth was to truly sit down and define a clear set of goals; or what it would mean to be successful (particularly after the CEO’s deadline)[djf12].
We have found that the change in process affects so much of our business that the bigger task has become change management. In fact the specific software we are talking about does not actually matter to us nearly as much as we must teach theprocess change of “modeling to design and then document”. However, this type of changeis disruptive to the process of our core business, which is delivering completed designs. The fear introduced by such change must be dealt with, and the only way to deal with it, is to plan and strategize for it.
Rewarding effort
It is critical to reward hard work and loyalty. A $30 steak, or even a trip to AutodeskUniversity is a small expense when compared to the latent knowledge highly involved staff carry with them, particularly when going to great efforts to train and disseminate knowledge. The ability to recognize these people also requires that the senior management of the firm support this process of transition. As such we are continuously modifying how we work to embrace the future, trying to find new ways to measure what and how we do our work. There are any number of ways to show talented and motivated staff that they are truly appreciatedand it is critical to success considering that this transition involves such a high degree of change.
As part of the willingness to plan, we have also been willing to pay the cost.The core planning groupof about six people haveregular conference calls, and meet in person quarterly. Smaller project teams like the education group also talk and meet regularly. The effort to transform the process by which we practice our business has reached beyond “IT”, which has required us to realize that while we might see that there are certain outcomes for the firm that would be beneficial, there are only specific goals that the BIM Implementation team can reach on theirown. We cannot for instance, change our Human Resources department, or our business technology group. We must operate within certain constraints.
[r13]Conclusion:
Burt Hill continues to work hard atour BIM implementation. Earlier we wrote that our challenge was to be 100% BIM by April 2009.We revised this earlier “simply stated” goal to, being able to support 100% of Architecture and Interior projects using Revit as the primary tool, which we believe is a subtle but critical distinction. It is “easy” to turn teams loose with the software and hope for the best. It is a completely different matter to be able to do that and have successful projects. The key is being able to provide the support required to achieve that success.
We also have to be patient. Considering the typical size and design schedule of most of our projects, we have yet to see very many “returns” on projects designed using Revit. To date, we’ve had three large buildings(nearly) completed as well as a variety of small projects. 2009 and 2010 will be when we start to see a great deal of our work actually built andwe look forward to seeing the finished buildings!
Robert currently lives in Philadelphia with his wife Krista, herself a Revit expert, and is planning an eventual move back to the Boston Area. Robert graduated from RPI and has been with Burt Hill for six years, working on a number of projects including the Dorrance HamiltonBuilding. Robert currently divides his time between writing curricula, lending support to project teams, and managing content firm wide. In 2008 he received a Burt Hill Internal Research Grant to explore Crowd Simulation as a generative tool. Sometime in the future he’ll work on a real project and build a house outside of Boston (designed in Revit). Robert blogs at and can be reached via e-mail at [djf14]
[djf1]Very leery of these type of statistics. We are looking at project starts, I would cite those. Also, how can you not mention the mandate in this intro?
[djf2]Actually he said to “BE” 100% BIM, which is less technical and probably more relevant. I think the story of our successes also has to include the thread of the “defining success down” that has plagued us.l
[djf3]I think it’s important to have Vision up front.
[djf4]Then a strategic decision ( I would put practitioners as implementers on par with this as strategy, or you could mention it within the vision as “the first strategic decision flowed directly from the vision of practice change: we decided to have practitioners, rather than technologists, run the effort.
[r5]Users want to stay engaged with Revit
[r6]Do you think I can get away with “AU” rather then the full title? Just trying to save a little paper space.
[djf7]No, write it out. Unexplained Abbreviations are Never acceptable
[djf8]Actually, AU is NOT the model, college is, I just thought of this at AU…
[r9]X hours of training
[djf10]This is going to need to be a hell of a lot more powerful if you’re going to set it up as “the biggest thing” Too many passive verbs (was… was!) too many “ands” if it is THE biggest thing, it cannot have 3 parts.
[r11]Need better transistion here….
[djf12]Again, too many subordinate clauses. What the hell did we never (or maybe a fair bit) do? I don’t even know.
[r13]This section needs more work
[djf14]Ah, generally I think there is good stuff here, but I think you need to organize it. Have you drawn up an outline?