Is your business smart enough? An interview on CAD usage

Tuesday, 12 May 2009

The AEC industry is highly diverse, yet the same underlying issues affect everyone. As the recession deepens, CEOs, Directors, Associates and CAD/IT Managers are all working to make sure operations are as efficient as possible, to keep up with new design technologies and the latest versions of CAD/BIM software, to provide training and continuing professional development, while working with strict budgetary controls and limited resources (not to mention trying to keep their jobs!).

Are there any common lessons that the industry can learn? Are there ways of recording and monitoring the successes and failures of different approaches to CAD use? Can CAD or BIM performance be benchmarked as a way of demonstrating improvements?

Key players in the technology field have been asked precisely those questions: CAD and BIM experts, Evolve Consultancy, have been surveying and reporting on the CAD industry through CAD Managers since 2004; Robert Green, CAD management guru and contributor to Cadalyst Magazine; CADsmart, providers of performance evaluation tools, have a wealth of metrics from over 10,000 individual assessments that can help quantify the true picture of industry performance, that previously could only be speculated upon.

Karen Fugle: Director, Evolve Consultancy. Editor, EatyourCAD.com
Karen has over 15 years’ first-hand experience of modern construction data production and exchange practices through many BIM integration projects and company-wide training schemes. Karen is the editor of the CAD Manager resource site www.eatyourcad.com and hosts the UK and International CAD Manager Forums.

Nigel Davies: Director, Evolve Consultancy. Contributing Author, EatyourCAD,com
Nigel has 20 years’ extensive experience within the AEC industry. Nigel has provided pivotal services to many high-profile clients, regularly presents to major conferences in the US/UK and features in industry press. He is also chair of the AEC (UK) CAD Standards Initiative.

Robert Green: Owner, CAD-Manager.com.  Contributing Editor, Cadalyst Magazine
Robert provides CAD implementation, consulting and programming services for a variety of companies throughout the United States and Canada and is a 14 year veteran speaker at Autodesk University. Robert holds a degree in mechanical engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology and is the author of Expert CAD Management: The Complete Guide.

Rory Vance: CEO, CADsmart
Rory works with a wide range of AEC firms, helping them to improve their CAD training programs and recruitment and induction processes. He is a popular speaker in the area of improving CAD & BIM productivity within the construction industry. Each year he chairs a CAD focus group attended by senior technology representatives from many leading architectural and engineering practices.  He also leads the popular ‘Cutting Edge CAD Management’ conference series.

Tony Brown: Business Development Manager, CADsmart
Tony has been involved in the world of CAD since the late 1980s.  He's been involved with Business Development for a number of innovative CAD software companies, including at NavisWorks, where he helped the business take its first commercial steps.

The interview below brings together their collective data and opinions, questioning many aspects of the AEC industry’s CAD use and asks “how can we improve”?  

The CAD Managers’ Survey 2008 shows that by far the most common support issue – raised in 70.7% of all cases – relates to a lack of knowledge of the CAD software being used.
Why do you think the question, ‘How do I?’ is so commonly asked by CAD users?

Robert: I think the main reason is CAD users are under a lot of pressure to produce designs and documentation so they find it faster ask the CAD manager rather than figure it out on their own. 

Rory: Yeah, they do that because they haven’t had any, or enough, formal training. They are mostly self-taught, on the job. Learning is reactive rather than proactive. Training isn’t focused and that’s why inefficiency creeps in; it’s a massive issue across the whole industry.

Robert: Another reason is because work procedures are often passed down informally, rather than being documented, so nobody really knows the best way to perform a task.  Only standardization and repetitive training can change the “How do I?” culture in my opinion.

Karen: The advanced training is catered for, but don’t forget new user training: the first week at the company generally entails some training – they are at the other end of the 3D gap.

Rory: The whole middle area has been traditionally left out.  

Do you think CAD is treated as a core business product?

Tony: I think that many firms do not see their “product” as something electronic or digital where actually it is. 

Karen: Architects, will always place design ability above CAD ability.

Rory: I agree, good design skills are absolutely essential in an architectural firm, but the reality is that many people come on board and spend much of their time doing CAD. Not designing great designs, not engineering magnificent structures, churning out production information.

Nigel: It’s typically substandard work but they can’t see it. A new designer starts and the CAD manager gets told, “Just get this guy up to speed, you know, you’ve got a morning.” What are you going to teach a person in a morning? Then they get given a CAD license and off they go, producing mediocre work for weeks and weeks on end, and nobody knows (or cares). 

What are you finding when you go back and look at projects and this kind of thing has happened? Are the projects high quality? Is the CAD work good?

Tony: With a drawing board it was easy to monitor if someone had drawn or produced anything from one day to the next, and if it was of the required quality.  With CAD programs it’s difficult to assess the day to day output. Most firms just don’t have the metrics to understand what the level of CAD output is, or could be. Consequently they are getting nowhere near the productivity that they could achieve.

Karen: You audit projects, give your opinion on how it can be improved, but the design team don’t have time to go back and fix the drawings. There’s no time given to training as they have a deadline. Lessons from previous projects are not learnt.

Nigel: Companies are making a profit, they don’t realise that they are making an inefficient profit. Now things have taken a nose-dive, is it any wonder many are struggling to survive?

Tony: Take a look at the automotive industry or manufacturing business, they know how to run a design operation efficiently. However, if you said to some firms of architects “I reckon you can make 5% more profit on that project” then I think they feel they couldn’t work any more efficiently. 

Rory: What we have found is we go into companies where the attitude is very jovial, “OK, so how bad are we?” or “We are actually quite good aren’t we, really?” Most firms don’t realise how inefficient they are. They think they are doing OK and it’s only when one or two things are highlighted that they start to say, “OK, maybe we could improve that.” 

Do you think firms know where they want to get to?

Rory: There are so many mixed messages: vendors selling BIM to the client, the client bringing up BIM and because of this the design firms or engineering firms think they are further ahead with BIM than they are.

Robert: I think most firms know that they want to do things better and suspect BIM may be part of the answer.  However, most firms don’t have the knowledge and leadership it takes to make the transition to BIM on staff so they have little confidence in how to proceed.  The prevailing attitude seems to be that some sort of new national BIM standard will magically emerge and make everything clear but I’m very sceptical that we’ll see that any time soon – at least in the US.  In the mean while uncertainty prevails and companies remain frozen in place.

Karen: If we did a survey on senior partners in companies and asked them, “What do you think BIM is?” very few of them would probably be able to answer that question.  They’ve just heard that this is the new thing to ask for: “We want BIM”.

Rory: But you know what will happen when that survey comes in? The senior partner will say “Um, I don’t know that... that’s the CAD Manager’s field.”  

Nigel: There’s been a very large marketing push to throw all these BIM messages out to senior management and clients who then say, “Oooh, we have got to do this in BIM then” with no concept of what it actually means at an operational level. “We will double our productivity over the next month or two.”  No, you won’t!

Rory: I’m all for improving technology, moving into more efficient modelling, but it’s the transition, it’s the way the industry is trying to shoehorn it in at a pace which is not being dictated by the firms. It’s at a pace being dictated by the vendors, the training companies, and firms have very little concept of the scope of work ahead of them to make that transition from traditional 2D draughting into very efficient modelling. 

According to the CAD Managers’ Survey 2008, technology use is increasing – 3D use is up 1/3 in the last year, the average company now uses 3.5 CAD packages. If there is no training, yet more complicated CAD packages are being used, what’s that going to mean for the industry?

Robert: We’ll continue to go along as we have in the past without much change to be honest.  I’ve always observed a fundamental connection between implementing new technology and training so lacking the latter the former will suffer.

Rory: A lot of the firms that we talk to are dabbling with BIM and 3D, but are still doing the majority of their work in traditional 2D draughting. You’ve got to question how many firms are really doing it, how many firms are talking about doing it because not doing it is seen to be behind the curve.

Karen: We are really dictated to by the education system, by what students are bringing in, and this year students have used Rhino. Last year’s students were using something else and now we have to make them talk.

Nigel:  We are in a situation now when everyone wants the tools they know but nobody knows how to make those tools communicate. Why are companies willing to spend money on the software these guys want to use rather than training these people in how to use the tools the company uses properly?

Rory: What you end up with is a mess that somebody else has to clean up. There is a lot of responsibility that lies at the educational end.  The educational standard of CAD use is way, way short of what the industry needs. There is hardly any MicroStation taught in colleges, maybe AutoCAD, but it’s antiquated. Things like City and Guilds, and the ECDL qualifications, they aren’t in touch with what is real now, so that doesn’t give these kids coming out of college any real sense of what is going to be required of them. 

What is the average performance of a company using CAD?

Rory: It’s around about 62% in terms of accuracy level from our assessments, and the average time is an hour and fifteen minutes for a basic skills evaluation. 

What would you expect it to be?

Rory: Well given that our assessments aren’t asking anything particularly advanced of people and they are looking to see if someone’s got the basic skills, I would have thought that a capable user should be scoring in excess of 80%.

Tony: We work with a large Architectural firm that has generated a lot of detailed metrics and they’ve broken it down into levels of competence for basic skills.  Their view is if someone is getting less than 40% on a basic skills assessment that’s not acceptable performance. If they are getting between 40-65%, that’s just about a pass. What they would rather see is people getting somewhere between 65% and nearer to 85% which would give them a ‘Merit’ on their HR record and highlight them as potential candidates for more intermediate and advanced CAD.

Robert: Unfortunately I think the economic downturn will largely hold skill levels in place as most companies keep their training and CAD upgrades to the bare minimum to save money. 

If we are talking about basic skills assessment and the average is 62%, doesn’t that say that the questions are too hard? 

Rory: I don’t think so because when you look at the spectrum of performance people are achieving 80%, 90%, 100% on a regular basis and in 20, 25 minutes, half an hour. The questions aren’t hard, they are created by people who know their stuff; people who have been using this technology for a long time. So, I would say no, the questions aren’t too hard, it’s just that people don’t know what they don’t know, they’ve never had their skills measured against an independent benchmark before.

Nigel: I think that the CADsmart results are very good representation of what you would expect of an average user.  We did a whole range of assessments for one of the companies we work for and the results were coming out absolutely terrible. Their office manager could not understand why and having used MicroStation before he was worried that the questions were bad, that there were crashes or something wrong with the software that was causing these guys to get really bad scores.  So he sat down and said right, I know MicroStation very badly, I haven’t used it for a couple of years I’m going to do the assessment.  He didn’t have a clue where to start he was looking at it going, “I haven’t used it for so long ago, I don’t understand how to answer this question.”  He did the assessment in 1 hour 30 minutes, which isn’t particularly bad, and scored 88%.

How? 

Nigel: Because he looked up answers in Help as he was going along.

Karen: That’s what I would expect of most people really. I don’t know this so I’ll look it up. Maybe, that’s a generational thing, maybe people these days just don’t know how to help themselves... 

Rory: I agree. That’s also why in our assessments we record the time, because I think if you manage a group and you can see that someone has taken a particularly long time over something you probably want to ask why.  We added a screen recorder function so you could actually see what they were doing. I would rather somebody slowed down and said I don’t know how to do this, I’ll find out, I’ll understand it, I’ll implement it properly and I’ll carry on.

Karen: And instead of coming out of that assessment going, “I don’t know anything,” they come out thinking, “Actually I’ve learned quite a lot.

I don’t think that the user, the CAD person, is taking enough responsibility for their own assessment and I’m really interested to know how often an individual user is logging onto CADsmart to see their own result.  Once they’ve done the assessment they think that’s it; it’s over for them rather than creating an interest in their own measure of ability.  

Rory: It’s reflective of how a firm works. Well-managed firms will generally take this data and use it. Not so well-managed firms won’t act on it. They probably won’t even get through the whole assessment programme, because they are terrified of upsetting their staff. Yet other firms say, “They’re here to do a job, they’re here to be productive. We’re testing everybody and we’re looking at the data, and if someone isn’t very good we’ll focus on training.” They don’t make assessments optional, it’s mandatory. Those are by far the most successful companies. 

What do you see happening now in the recession? What’s the first thing to go, apart from staff?

Rory: Training

Karen: Training and development 

Nigel: We posted a question in the CAD Managers’ Forum, recently that asked, “With the recession what is everybody looking to cut in their budgets?” Pretty much everybody came back and said the first thing to go will be training. So you’ve got a project coming up that has got every company who’s anybody bidding for it at a fee 20% less than it would have been last year and you don’t need the best staff?! Something is wrong with this picture.

Rory: Now is a good time to train, they’ve got a little bit more time on their hands.

Nigel: If your train your staff and you’ve got a project bid, you’ve got better skilled, better educated, more efficient staff to perform that work. A significant advantage over the next company. 

Robert: When companies don’t innovate and implement new technology they will ultimately lose competitive advantage.  I truly believe it is better to have a smaller staff that is better trained than a larger staff that relies on old methods. 

The CAD Managers’ Survey 2008 found 80% of CAD managers were the main source of training for their staff, yet only 3% of their time is down to their own learning and development.  What does that mean for the industry?

Nigel: 80% are expected to teach, but how many of them have been taught how to teach?

Rory: The training statistic that most interested me was that 44% of learning is lost after a day. So you go on a training course, after a day you’re back at the coalface, you’ve lost 44% of what you’ve learnt. That figure only gets worse - after a week or a month you’ve essentially retained 25% or less of what you learnt, so no wonder people are picking up bad habits. 

Nigel: This industry just does not get the concept of blended learning, you know, giving people bite-sized classes on small aspects of the tools that get used in their particular work flow on a regular basis and following it up with practice. Three days out of the office is just not conducive to people understanding and picking up the skills that they need. 

What would your recommendation be to a company for assessing their skills, training and working out whether their training works? 

Robert: If a company keeps track of where they make mistakes and tallies up the man hours consumed due to those mistakes they can target training resources appropriately.  After the training has been conducted a follow up analysis on error rates will indicate whether the training is working.  Interestingly enough, error tracking also points out that when you don’t train users to work smarter you’ll continue to lose money on preventable errors.   Many CAD managers resist when I tell them that project accounting is their friend but if you want to prove the value of training to management I know of no better way to do so.

Rory: Start out with a basic assessment, then you’ve got a minimum threshold competency performance benchmark. You highlight the areas where your experienced users could benefit from learning a bit more.

Nigel: You analyse, you train people, then you reassess and analyse and retrain. It’s that constant cyclical process helps you to improve. 

So how to you predict that CAD skills will look in 12 months time?

Rory: When we come out of the recession and the green shoots start to grow many firms are going to be in a bit of a panic, again, because they haven’t got the right people in the right position. They’ve let a lot of their best people go along with the poor-performing ones, so they are going to be scrabbling around trying to find a good CAD manager or a Revit specialist, or somebody who can perform the task.  We don’t appear to be learning lessons here.

Nigel: I’d really like to see the industry going back to the mentoring model. Taking people on, no matter what level they are, it doesn’t matter if they are senior architects, junior engineers, whatever, they are given a mentor and you all realise, actually, there is always something more that you can learn.

Tony: I hope we won’t see the industry going back to “Let’s just get it done.” Hopefully lessons will have been learned and the industry will be smarter at assessing and monitoring core skills.

Karen: I hope that this recession forces companies to be more realistic. A considered approach to hiring – knowing the CAD skills of your employees before they start, a committed assessment and training program, more respect for the opinion, and the training, of the CAD Manager, and hopefully from that, more efficiency gains and happier staff.

Robert: CAD users and managers who take the personal initiative to learn new software and push their companies towards using more productive methods will ultimately be the winners when the economy recovers.

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