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One of the common assumptions is that larger firms have a better opportunity than smaller firms in their capacity to take on new technologies or innovate. Although larger firms might have a broader pool of resources, much of the investment is proportionally the same. We have been fortunate enough to help a number of firms implement Revit over the years, and each has looked to focus on different capabilities of the software that best express their individual direction. Although these firms have varied in size and individual desire to take on risk, their investments have all been relatively equal. From big firms to small, the investment ratio consistently equates to about 1 percent of the size of the firm. If you consider a 1,000-person firm, that equals about 10 full-time people; however, scale that down to a 10-person firm, and that becomes 1 person’s time for five weeks.

The key to optimizing this 1-percent investment is focusing your firm’s energy and resources on the most appropriate implementation objectives.

Identifying the importance of visualization, analysis, and strategy to your process will help guide you in selecting areas of implementation within your own practice. If your investment (regardless of scale) is focused and well planned, it will yield strong results. When choosing areas of implementation or how much focus to give to these areas, there are no wrong answers. Just choose a path that reflects the comfort level of your firm while maintaining focus on achieving success.

We elaborate on most of these topics throughout the remainder of this book. Using real-world examples, we illustrate a variety of techniques to visualize, analyze, and strategize using Revit.

Staffing for BIM

As you rethink the process of design and documentation, one of the fundamental changes you will need to address is staffing. A common misconception of project management when teams are first moving from CAD to BIM is that staffing the project will be the same in both workflows. This couldn’t be further from the truth because when the workflow changes, staffing allocations, the time to complete tasks, and the percentage of work by phase are all affected as a result of the changes.

Several years ago, Patrick MacLeamy, FAIA, set out to illustrate the fundamental benefit to more informed design that happened to be a by-product of building information modeling. The graph, which has come to be known as the MacLeamy Curve (Figure 1.11), is not intended to imply a simple shift in labor earlier in the design process; rather, it stresses the importance of being able to make higher-value decisions before it becomes too difficult to make changes to a design. The x-axis of the chart represents project phases from conceptual design through occupancy, whereas the y-axis represents the amount of effort in each phase.

Figure 1.11 The effort curves in the design and construction industry

Another way to think about this shift is as a diagram of leverage, as shown in Figure 1.12. Implementing BIM in earlier phases of a project gives you the greatest opportunity to add value to the overall compilation of building information delivered for a facility. When you begin BIM earlier, you may need to increase staff to build a better model or to perform energy analysis or preliminary quantity takeoffs; however, using a better tool like Revit software will not necessarily translate to the same labor used in a CAD-based project. You will find how this affects your team effort after a few BIM projects.

Figure 1.12 BIM provides the most leverage when it is implemented early in the design.

Source: Based on a graphic created by Lee Miller, HOK

Understanding Project Roles

With such a significant change in the effort behind a BIM-based project workflow, it’s also important to understand how this change affects the various roles and responsibilities for the project team. Project managers need to be able to predict staffing and time to complete tasks throughout the project phases and have relied on past precedent of staff and project types to do this. Because a BIM-based project can significantly alter the project workflow, many of the historic timetables for task completion are no longer valid. However, a BIM-based project can be broken down into a few primary roles that will allow you some level of predictability throughout the various project phases. Although the specific effort and staffing will vary between offices (and even projects), there are some general roles that will need to be accounted for on every project.

Here are three primary roles that should be considered on every BIM project:

Architect Generates design intent and coordinates issues such as material, code compliance, wall type, spatial program, and so on.

Modeler Creates 2D or 3D content that directly represents the design intent.

Drafter Works with annotations, sheet layout, view creation, and detail creation.

These roles represent efforts and general tasks that you need to take into account on any Revit project. On a large project, these roles could also represent individual people, whereas on a smaller project they might be all the same person fulfilling multiple roles. We’ll now explore each of these in more detail and discuss how these roles affect the project workflow.

DESCRIBING THE ROLE OF THE ARCHITECT

The role of the architect is to generate the design intent and manage the technical issues of the project. As the model is being created, you will naturally have to solve issues like constructability and wall types and managing the program of spatial and equipment requirements, as well as other issues involving code compliance and client relationships. This role will be the one applying standards to the project (as in wall types, keynotes, and so on) and organizing the document set. This role will need to be present on the project from the beginning to ensure consistency of the virtual building creation and isn’t necessarily limited to only one person. This role also might or might not be a “designer.” Although it is possible to do early design in Revit software, many project teams prefer to use other tools such as SketchUp or even a pencil and tracing paper. The job of the architect is steering the creation of the building within the Revit environment. This role includes the following tasks:

● Leading the creation of architectural elements and building from within the model

● Designing around code requirements and other building logistics

● Constructability and detailing aspects of the design

DESCRIBING THE ROLE OF THE MODELER

The role of the modeler – in some firms referred to as the BIM coordinator – is to create and manage the 3D families and detail components needed in the project, which include all the parametric families for things such as windows, doors, casework, wall types, stairs, railings, furnishings, and so on. Typically, this role is the responsibility of less-experienced staff who might not be able to fulfill the role of architect. This role tends to have longer periods of undisturbed time, making it better suited to deal with some of the longer, more involved tasks in modeling content. Finally, it also tends to have some familiarity with modeling applications from academia or prior work experience. The modeler might not have worked with Revit software directly but possibly with 3ds Max software or Rhino. This role includes the following tasks:

● Creating model content and families

● Creating drafting components

● Managing system families within the project

DESCRIBING THE ROLE OF THE DRAFTER

The role of the drafter is to create sheets and embellish associated views with annotations or other 2D content. The drafter is responsible for the bulk of the work needed to document the project. In earlier stages of the project, this role is typically assumed by either the architect or the modeler, but as documentation progresses into later phases of design, this can quickly become the role of multiple people on a larger project. This role includes the following tasks:

● Keynoting

● Dimensioning

● Creating sheets and configuring views

● Creating schedules

Establishing a BIM Execution Plan

To optimize your results with BIM, it’s important to start with the end in mind. Although a lot of tasks are possible with a BIM model before you draw your first wall, you will want to create a BIM execution plan. We go into more detail about creating these plans and some resources for them in Chapter 6, “Working with Consultants,” but essentially a BIM plan helps to drive the direction of the modeling effort and modeling outcomes. Will your project need to add parameters for energy modeling? Daylighting? Does the owner have expectations for a model deliverable? How much does everyone model without being too much? All of those possibilities and more are explored and documented in a BIM execution plan. It gives the project team a definitive outcome to model toward.

The BIM plan will also help address which team members you’ll need at which phases of the design. For instance, at the inception of a project design, a modeling role will be of the best use. This person can help create building form, add conceptual content, and get the massing for the building established. If you’re using the conceptual modeling tools (covered in Chapter 8, “Advanced Modeling and Massing”), the modeler can even do some early sustainable design calculations (covered in Chapter 9, “Conceptual Design and Design Analysis”).

Once the project begins to take a more established form and you complete conceptual design, you’ll need an architect role to step into the project. As in a typical project, you’ll have to mold the form into a building by applying materials, applying wall types, and validating spatial requirements and the owner’s program.

During schematic design, you’ll need to include the role of the drafter to begin laying out sheets and creating views. These sheets and views don’t have to be for a construction document set as of yet, but you’ll need to establish views for any schematic design submittals. If these views are set up properly, they can be reused later for design development and construction document submittals as the model continues to gain a greater level of detail.

You should avoid adding staff to your project during the construction documentation phase. In a BIM/Revit workflow, this can sometimes cause more problems than it solves and slow down the team rather than get work done faster.

Another proven technique of managing larger Revit projects is to assign work according to elements of the building rather than by drawing a series. For example, one person would be responsible for building enclosures and another for structure, interior partitions, furniture, vertical circulation, and so on. This strategy encourages each team member to develop their portion of the design more collaboratively because the modeling for each component must be coordinated with the surrounding systems.

Even though your team won’t be assigned work through a series of sheets, each person should be tasked with overseeing each sheet series. The annotation related to each building system is the responsibility of the respectively assigned team member, but someone else will be responsible for reviewing each series of sheets to ensure that they are appropriately maintained for presentation or distribution. On smaller projects, the project architect would likely be the person supervising the entire sheet set.

This dual responsibility is an important aspect of team management that will keep your BIM projects on track. Spending the majority of time working in the model and thus neglecting the preparation of properly annotated sheet views becomes very alluring.

ADDING TEAM MEMBERS TO FIGHT FIRES

In many projects, there might come a time when the schedule gets tight and project management wants to add more staff to meet a specific deadline. When in a 2D CAD environment, new team members would be added to help meet a deadline and would have the burden of trying to learn the architecture of the building, the thoughts behind its design, and how its various systems interact. In a Revit project, they have that same obligation, but they have the additional task of learning how the model has been configured. The model will have constraints set against various elements (such as locking a corridor width) and various digital construction issues (such as how floors and walls might be tied together, what the various family names are, or workset organization). New team members require additional time to “ramp up.”

Regardless of planning, deadlines still escape the best of architects and project managers. It’s a good idea to know when and how you can “staff up” to be sure to meet those deadlines. Keeping in mind that your team members new to the project have to learn about both the design and the model, here are some task ideas to both help production and make sure they don’t accidentally break anything:

Content Creation You will find that you will be making model families or detail components until the end of the project. This will help get the new team members engaged in a specific part of the project and also isolate them enough until they learn a bit more about how the model has been configured.

The Drafting Role Even if this isn’t their ultimate role, having new team members help create views and lay out sheets will get them familiar with the architecture while still allowing the team to keep progressing on the document set.

Working on Detailing Every project can always use someone who knows how to put a building together. If you have someone new to the project and possibly even new to Revit software, let that individual embellish some of the views already created and laid out on sheets with 2D components, linework, and annotations.