Optimizing Your Workflows and Reducing Schedule Creep through Custom Tools.

ANDRELL LANIEWICZ: So welcome to day two of AU-- day three, if anybody attended a pre-conference event. Everyone's just as excited and eager, bright-eyed as day one, right? Yes? All right. So welcome to Optimizing Your Workflows and Reducing Schedule Creep through Custom Tools. My name's Andrell Laniewicz. I'm a senior AEC application specialist with Southland Industries. My co-speaker is John Cruz. He's going to talk about himself in a minute. He's good at it, by the way.

So a bit about my background, real quick. My background is architecture, but most of my career has been in construction. And for the construction side, it's all been BIM-focused. We decided to do fun facts, so my fun fact is that I'm a huge sci-fi nerd. So if you find me out in the wild, it's great way to just strike up a conversation.

Our QR codes here link to our LinkedIn page, so you can feel free to connect with us as well.

JOHN CRUZ: Can everybody hear me OK? Everybody's excited except for this group of people right here. They're not excited about day three or day two. My name is John Cruz. I'm a premium support specialist or enterprise support specialist. Whoa, I shouldn't be right there. Support specialist for Autodesk. I support Southland directly. I have about six or seven customers, but Southland is one of my top customers. About 10 years MEP design engineering experience and seven years as a BIM VDC manager.

Like I said, my role is a two-prong approach with Southland. I help a lot with their support issues. But it's also in a proactive means, so helping Andrell and her staff and Southland-- kind of identifying new technologies. If we roll something out, I help them along. I've got a little bit of adoption, any kind of technical assistance that we could possibly give. It's my job to be that direct contact between Southland and Autodesk. They approach me, I'm able to direct those requests as needed.

We didn't decide on fun facts. Andrell decided on fun facts. So mine is I'm a college football junkie. That's just me. But I'm excited to talk about what we have today.

ANDRELL LANIEWICZ: So just a quick little blurb about Southland. For an MEP firm, basically full-service. We do everything from pre-con to maintenance. We do fabrications, install, all of the fun. We even do energy analysis and system control settings. We're a billion-dollar company, we're nationwide.

We have union and non-union members, which makes us really uniquely poised to be able to bid for very specific work. So we have the union that's required for some bids and non-union for others. And while these orange little locator icons show where our main offices are, we do have temporary offices for job sites in Denver, Atlanta, Houston, things like that. So we are fully nationwide, and we have a specific division that does go nationwide to those project sites as needed.

So I want to talk about what to expect in this class, really quick. This is a class that talks about managing and evaluating when to use custom tools in your workflow. Our examples show where you can save time and make up time. That was created through schedule creep, which is a buzzword that we'll get into.

And basically, it's not going to show you how to make a tool, but our video and our class handout material does show you how to make an item renumber tool. So it shows you how to make your first little tool to get you started. And it was made by Brandon Zeleniak. He is one of our internal programmers for a little while

JOHN CRUZ: So just go over and talk a little bit about topics covered. Andrell will go a little bit over the three types of business innovation-- the value that each one of those topics brings to the whole process. I'll go into a little bit of workflow analysis so we can start establishing that baseline. We'll talk about risks, paths, implementing the tool itself. We'll go into some options for learning with the Development or working with Development and some of the lessons learned, pros and cons as well, as to working with Development.

We'll throw some stories in, and then at the end, Southland will have a few specific tools that we'll talk about. And then she'll also talk about metrics. So we can definitely define where we're going from point A to point B and whether or not your tools are making an effect.

ANDRELL LANIEWICZ: So as an overview of what this kind of looks like, we'll have a quick story time about a tool. This tool is under a heavy NDA. So I can't really tell you the name of it or what it specifically does. But it takes data from BIM 360 module and puts it into a deliverable form for us. So what happened was, we did a workflow analysis where we found manual data duplication. And when we found that we were duplicating this information that already existed virtually, we reached out to Autodesk Consulting.

JOHN CRUZ: So Autodesk Consulting, being part of that as an EBA customer, they have the ability to have Autodesk Consulting come in and just have an embedded consultant in with Southland to help with the tool.

ANDRELL LANIEWICZ: And the great thing is, we'll talk about each one of these areas more in-depth as we go through the presentation. So this is kind of an in-snapshot of when you go through this, what you can get out of it.

So when we did our implementation, we did office by office. So for us, implementation and training are two separate things. Implementation is, we go, we find that office that wants to try this tool. They're ready for the tool, they're excited for it, we get the buy-in, we find the right people who will be spearheading it in that office. We demo it, we show them what part of the project phase it's going to impact. And then when projects get to that phase, then they call us back and we come do training for that project specifically and that team. And that's kind of how we filter it out through the company.

It's a little slow at first, but then you've got a whole team of people that, they're not going to be the same team on the next project, so all of a sudden you have somebody who is a user and been trained. You now have five guys who can then go to five different projects that you then don't have to train. So slow at first, great by the end.

The only metric that we tracked for this tool specifically was ours. And what you see is that this process was taking 40 hours on small jobs to several weeks on large jobs. That includes almost, I think, six weeks for our largest job. And this tool does it regardless of whether it's 40 hours or six weeks-- in one hour. So now we saved one guy weeks of time that he can be used elsewhere. So this is what we mean when we say we're reducing schedule creep. We're buying back some time.

And my favorite little metric for success in this is that everyone that has used this tool requests it on their new project. Because of how it works with Autodesk, they have to request it and we have to turn it on for the BIM 360 module. So I haven't had someone who worked on it, not request it on a new project. So that's kind of really exciting-- not really a measurable metric, but--

JOHN CRUZ: It helps the adoption as well. So if you're just rolling out some of the cloud products, you got guys saying, hey, I used this last time. Hey, I want it again, I want it again. Your adoption rate goes up.

So let's talk a little bit about schedule creep. Like Andrell said, what is schedule creep? Schedule creep is kind of a buzzword for the time that you'd planned on starting that project. It's all fine and dandy, we all have the best-laid plans of mice and men, right? Is that Steinbeck? I can't remember.

Anyway, late start, actual start-- that's actually what you're going to see. So what that schedule creep is that plan, and then what it actually does. That's time that you're never ever going to get back. And it always will happen. Tasks are added, requirements are added. You're just not going to get that back. It's an obvious thing.

So what can you do to combat those? You start saying, hey look, I can't gain time. None of us can, we all wish we could, but I can start developing tools that might make my processes more streamlined so I can start gathering some of that time back.

And it also helps you set up as you're looking through your schedule and you're seeing where you're pushing your schedule off, you can start to do a little bit of analysis to, where can I possibly apply a tool in that particular part of the schedule that might gain it back to me? So it starts at the beginning. So what does it do-- your task efficiency. What are we looking for? We're looking for eliminating steps, focus on things, picks and clicks, right?

There's a guy doing something in the trailer 10, 15 times a day. Can we automate that to one time a day or maybe not at all? And then lastly, increase productivity. We increase that time, that usage, that guy is, no more picks and clicks. So what do we do with him? You know, he's saved time. Maybe we saved two hours a day on monotonous tasks that he was doing in the first place.

So what do you do? Is he applied to the project? And helping us gain time back there by being more productive? Or do we put him on another project and help in that way? So it's just an idea of where you want to actually measure that metric and that creep as the time you get back.

ANDRELL LANIEWICZ: And if you don't measure it, he'll spend it on YouTube.

So briefly, the three types of business innovation-- there's process automation. This is those picks and clicks. So this is taking one of those gears that you did manually and replacing it with a tool. Process innovation is a change in the process. So three of these gears kind of makes one process loop. And it's just creating a new process loop or replacing a process loop. So instead of doing the three steps, you get an entirely new process. And then process reengineering means that these gears don't even exist anymore. We're putting something new in place entirely.

For any of you who might be involved with any of the BIM 360 products, this is kind of like what Autodesk's approach was to the new model coordination. People keep calling it Glu 2.0, but it really isn't. They just threw everything out the window and started with, what do we actually need? So that's kind of a process reengineering. Value to client and bottom line is higher on the far end and lower on this end, easier to implement and adopt, easier on the low end where there's less value.

So the process automation is kind of that fun phrase-- the low-hanging fruit. It's easy to implement, it's easy to see it, it's easy to do it, and it's easy to show gains. But if you want those bigger gains, you want it to hit profit lines, profit margins, if you want it to impact that schedule, you have to move past just picks and clicks. But it is a good place to start. Start here and then prove you can do it, see how it works, and then move onto bigger and bigger chunks. So how do we figure out if custom tool is right for us? Well, first we have to start with workflow analysis.

JOHN CRUZ: So we have to start a baseline. We have to establish a baseline. We've talked about that schedule creep, and you're identifying where in that schedule you could possibly gain some time back. The example right here that we're using is, maybe you're in design in 10 model or a fabrication model that's moved all the way through fabrication.

So there's a lot of steps to this. And we've put those bubbles that you see up on top. Southland has been able to develop custom tools that are applied in each one of these steps and processes. So during the design model, there's a smart purge tool. When they actually get to actual coordination itself, there's hanger arrangement tools. And then of course, service colors when it actually gets into spooling towards layer. Each one of these little custom tools has helped move the process, gain some of that time back.

So as we dig into it a little bit further, I kind of look at it as a macro and micro look. Don't bite off too much, and don't go into the process thinking, I'm going to do this huge, huge evaluation of the workflow and start breaking it down into little pieces. So here, you've got detailing, shop and field, engineering. All this stuff works together-- all these processes that are actually working. Break it down.

Here, a good example is just the BIM coordination. Because like I said, I hate using its name and we already used it once-- but low hanging fruit. I hate saying that. But it's something that we're all familiar with-- just the coordination process alone. We have an HVAC model, a plumbing model. That model is built, sent into coordination, it's being run, we know what's going on, it gets moved, it gets adjusted, and then what happens? It comes all the way back and you're doing it all over again.

So that red circle-- that's the time that schedule creep's evaluating. We were seeing that we were losing that time. You apply the hanger tool, and in this particular case, what the hanger tool does is that when the detailer is actually modifying and moving that duct work or that piping, the hanger tool is bringing those hanger screws. You know, we're coordinating hangers along with just piping. And now we want to make sure nobody is running through our hangers and so forth like that.

So the whole process is being coordinated. So if we move a duct or we modify a piece of pipe, the hanger tool automatically moves rather than-- depending on your level of sophistication in your office, some of us still are adopting, and understanding how coordination works. You may still have that drafter who moves a pipe and then deletes all the hangers or slides them over. And in the real world, things just don't move horizontally. Vertical rise, things are twisting, all kinds of different things. So this tool allowed them to just move that duct, everything automates, boom. And you go on and move and you send your stuff back to coordination eliminating a lot of amount of time.

So as you're going through, as you finish the workflow analysis, you're figuring out, what is this actually going to give me? Is it going to give me is going to save me something on deliverable based? Is it going to save me on what I'm actually sending out the door to the customer, to the owner? Is going to save me time? Is it going to save me wasted data or effort?

And the last one is really big-- human error. We all make mistakes every once in a while. Maybe like I said, that coordinator's moving, that drafter's moving stuff, you might miss something. If you're doing it automated-- boom, less chance for human error.

ANDRELL LANIEWICZ: So the hanger tool focuses on a time-consuming portion in a workflow analysis. And that BIM 360 module was a wasted data and effort area.

So once you've done your workflow analysis and you figured out, all right, we have this idea of what we want this tool to do. We know where we want it to go in the process, we know we want it to do. We know the end ideal workflow state. So put all of this together and you have to still answer three questions with yes. If any of them are no, you should not move forward with it.

As was pointed out to me before, this presentation makes it sound like we've got all of our stuff together. It's great workflow, it's wonderful. Everything that's up here is a lesson learned across a little over three years. And this is the state it's at now.

So can we do it? You need to make sure the technology, business, and budget are ready. If they're not, shelve it quickly. Because there will be a time where the technology will be ready, the business will want it, and the budget will increase for you. Until then, don't waste your time. Put it in somewhere where you're allowed to focus.

Will we use it? So can we get the cultural buy-in and is it the tool going to be user friendly? This is more important when you're doing process reengineering portions-- so the farther one, the more intense areas. This is going to be more valuable to analyze there. So you may even want to do a paper mock-up to see what users think of it before you proceed much further as well.

And will it create value? So does it improve the end product? So in its ideal state, will it actually improve the product? Or is it just improving the user's life with that one pick and click? So these are things you need to be able to weigh. And does it save time? That's the pick and click version.

The last question here is actually one you want to kind of answer at the end is, did it accomplish its goal? So once you've done the tool and you've implemented it, you need to come back and answer that. And that'll give you more lessons learned moving forward for your next tool.

So if you're interested to learn more about workflow analysis and lean processes and things like that, we recommend the book, The Goal. There's a video on lynda.com on these topics, including the Theory of Constraints. These will affect the way you look at problems so that it's not so scary. It really helps you look and focus.

The way Southland has developed internally is, we kind of processes a bit to heart, and we made an internal operational excellence team and a project management office that help us-- it's like, OK, these are the tools that we want, this is our ideal end state. Does this align with Southland's overall vision?

Because we're a business unit inside of a larger business. So we have to make sure that what we're working on isn't siloed. And that's what these offices do, these groups do. We want to make sure that what we're doing is going to make everything lean and that our process is lean. And the other one, make sure that our process isn't missing any steps that are going to make what we're doing become a board of work.

So after all of that, you need to research. You need to research what your company wants versus need in this tool. The best thing I can say is, start with a deliverable. What is your deliverable and what do you need to do to get it there? Use those as the needs, and the wants are nice pretty bells and whistles that can either come later or can get knocked off.

Make sure to verify the needs list with multiple levels. Verify with the end user, verify with managers, verify with the people who are going to get that deliverable too-- what they think, especially if it's in-house it's really easy. If it's out-of-house, it's a little awkward. And then don't get attached just because you might think something's really great and then it gets the ax. And don't get attached. That's my personal lesson.

JOHN CRUZ: It's like being an architect or a designer. Don't fall in love with your drawing because it's going to change.

ANDRELL LANIEWICZ: Every one of these bullets is up here because we've experienced it.

What already exists-- so is there an existing workaround? Go to AUGI, see what they're saying, here's my problem, what's happening, the Autodesk knowledge boards, the idea boards. Reach out to companies that might have something close as well.

So there might be a company that works and has a hanger tool and has a duct tool, and you're looking for something kind of similar in the fabrication side. For all you know, they could be working on it in beta and it's just a good thing. You can reach out and see what they have, what they're at, and what their next steps are as well.

And what are your competitors doing? So you can scour their blogs, their marketing posts. We've all been there. We know the marketing posts are the polished, beautiful little pieces, right? So just because they can do it doesn't mean that's what they necessarily are doing or that it brought value. It just looks pretty, it's pretty BIM. So actually look at blogs, actually look at workflows.

And the most important part is, you have to make sure. When dealing with competitors, you have to make sure that you're not making a tool to get in line with them to keep up. You need to make a tool to get ahead. And if you're not getting ahead, then you're wasting time. And there'll be a tool on the market before you catch up. So just wait. If you don't innovate, it's not good.

So I want to take a moment, and pause, and talk about some risk reduction. So we've established our needs, we've established what's out there. And now we're at the point now where we've agreed that we're going to make a tool. So some things that Southland does to help with risk-- and again, all of these are lessons learned.

The governance process-- we have a business sponsor in each one of our office. I use office and division interchangeable. We call them divisions. I know most people will call them offices, so I try to use office. So each office will have a business sponsor-- someone who's high enough up in that office that they can pull people from production. The corporate BIM team-- we can't go, hey you, give us one of your detailers for 20 hours this week to go test and do this stuff, right? We don't have that power, but they do.

So you find a sponsor who's high enough up to help you put the right people from that business unit in place. They get the right managers in there and they get the end users in there. So having managers alone-- set standards and then set the goal. And how you achieve that goal is not going to help with that buy-in. A manager will design something and an end user will go, why would we ever do this? So there's a wasted tool. That was a hard one.

So getting your end users to set how to achieve the goal-- that's where your value is. Because they're going to use something that they themselves are like yes, this is how we want to do it. This is what we want.

So our project management process-- so the governance process is with that specific business unit. And the project management process gets the right people at each phase. So this deals with getting our infrastructure and our security team.

For example, we once had a tool that would require some-- or not necessarily a tool, but a process that we were putting in place that would have required some temporary backup saves on our SharePoint. And it turns out that our SharePoint was almost full. We would have had to have paid to go up to the next bracket of SharePoint, which doubles the storage space. And we weren't willing to pay that cost and neither was infrastructure.

And then with security teams, with the 360 products all being cloud-based, everything's going through the network. You really have to make sure they're involved early, because there's nothing worse than hey yeah, we're almost done with this. Now we just need to get the right security sign off pieces added. And then security is like, our stuff doesn't work like this. This is not allowed, this is against our protocol. Yes, it does slow everything down. But since we put these in place, we haven't had a tool make it past the initial stages and fail. So that's been a huge value.

So now that we've done all the workflow analysis-- we talked about some risk-- let's talk about developing the tool. There's development path, there's in-house, there's outsourcing, there's Autodesk development, and existing third-party. I know it's a custom tool, so bear with me when we get to the third-party one. I promise there's some custom in there. So we're going to go down each path and talk about them.

So with in-house development, there's two types of development cycles agile and waterfall. With in-house, it was much easier for us to do agile. I'm not saying we did it 100% and we never used waterfall, and vise versa, with outsourcing. We do tend to use waterfall, but when it calls for it or when it's possible, we will use agile development methods.

So the Agile cycle is what it says up there. You develop a functionality, you test it. The next functionality wants you to group up functionalities together. Then you send it out for testing, you get all the bugs, you come back and you keep testing until everything's nice and pretty and works how you want. Then once that's the case, then you release it into your production cycle.

So with in-house development and this method in particular, everything's going to be 100% custom. The person designing the tools is going to be familiar with your business. They're going to be able to reach out to the right people and say, hey, do you mind testing this? Or hey, can you help me with how do you think this button-- does this wording makes sense to you? So when you have six different offices using different terminology, that's a problem. So that has to be addressed when developing tools. So that's kind of fun.

This person in-house-- all of the bugs, any enhancements, all of it-- it's not out of scope because you're paying for them. You have bought them, you can put them in a basement, you just make sure to send some food down. They'll be fine. So all of the support for the tool, all the costs for it, become and remain internal, aside from a few little pieces-- something like a code management system. These are all really low, really negligible pieces.

Now, the problems with having in-house development is, it's a single point of failure. And you lose that knowledge when you lose that person. Which then makes you want to consider, do you want one developer or a team? Two guys, there's always going to be someone there when someone else goes on vacation or gets sick. Bouncing ideas off of each other means that they'll find problems with design or code quicker. It leaves them time to actually learn and grow.

So how many of you here have been the only one in your role or in your BIM role, and you're trying to keep up with production and learn the new technologies? It's rough. So then it's like, now all of a sudden, do we have a development branch in our company? And the interesting thing I found out in Connect and Construct is that a good chunk of larger firms are realizing the value of this.

And the Air Force just came out with a study where they allowed a small group within their ranks to become developers. And they've saved them millions of dollars because they've created programs-- since everything's a little bit slow to move with all of the infrastructure and things going out of date, they create these programs that save so much time, because instead of sitting there and waiting for things to load, they can just leave. So that was a really great study and really bolstering.

So with outsourced development-- this is a diagram of the waterfall development. We'll talk about it in a second. This is the outsourced development. Large networks help, right? So instead of having your own internal team, you have a larger network that you can work with. You get the tool made custom how you want it. It's their code.

And this is where the legal and intellectual property work comes in. And it is a nightmare. Do not let anyone who is new to managing a process manage this at all. Sometimes you will own the code and the tool. That's your ideal state. Because if you own just the tool and they own the code, if there's updates, bugs, anything that breaks-- that's a forced partnership for life of that tool. And it's less fun when something breaks and you have to pay a lot of money to get it fixed.

So another interesting thing is, if you do outsource development and you work with someone like, say, CADD Microsystems, Imagine It, things like that-- they have their own custom toolboxes. So because you are asking them to do development, you become a client and you can get access to those tools. So those are nice little bonuses that you can use-- kind of a little boost in what you're spending, right? You're getting a few extra tools ready to go. CADD Microsystems, by the way, has a wonderful FilterPLUS search tool for Revit.

Let's see, yeah, managed impeccably-- so one of the downsides, aside from if they own the code is finding your tool or your products. Like if you have families or ITMs, or anything like that, made as part of this, and another company's use. And we have had this happen. And sure, you're legally protected and you can go after it. But that whole time, that company is getting the benefit that you paid for. So what's your competitor doing? Oh hey, so are we.

So your waterfall development process is much slower to get to the end user, a bit. But you do all that design up front. So everything's designed and tested and only once it's working perfectly or as perfectly as software tends to work, then, do you deploy it to everyone. So it takes a lot longer to get it out, but usually it's a bit more stable. So with outsourcing our mission-critical pieces, we tend to go with this because the timeline-- we're able to control it much more accurately and efficiently.

JOHN CRUZ: So the third option available is obviously the Autodesk development option. And of course, this is available only through enterprise solutions. So if you're an EBA customer, you're going to have that available to you through the packs that you've purchased through your agreement.

The nice thing about this is that when you do decide to do something like this, we'll give you an embedded consultant on-site. So that consultant is going to be there with you however long that you've elected to have that person on-site, that person will be there learning your workflows, sitting down with you, understanding what your problems are. He's not just going to leave, come back, leave and come back. He's going to actually be there embedded with you.

So he's going through gap analysis, any type of prototyping, training. Just like I said, the whole process is right there on hand. He or she is there for you. Like I said, they get familiar with your business, they're understanding your strategic goals. The nice thing about this is-- and I kind of jumbled them up a little bit. But if you start developing a tool and you're thinking about developing a tool, and that embedded consultant has an insight to future technologies because he's got the backbone of Autodesk right behind him.

So if you're thinking of developing a tool and that consultant comes in and says, well, hold off. Because that might be down a road map here in a year or two, or maybe next year, or something. Let's look and you might see if you find value somewhere else. So there's a possibility-- that's one of the nice perks and things. Not to mention, it helps accelerate adoption. Your team knows that Autodesk is coming in, helping you develop a tool. Those guys are waiting anxiously to see what's there, what's available, and when can I use it.

And then low financial impact-- well, I say low because you really don't see it. Like I said, you're purchasing production assurance credits through the contract-- through the EBA. So you paid for it already. It's just a matter of when you pull the trigger and use it.

So what if you're not an EBA customer? You still have options. You still have the service marketplace to go to. And there's a lot of program service providers that can go in there and help you third-party.

ANDRELL LANIEWICZ: So speaking of third-party, I'm going to get back to this idea of modifying an existing tool. So this is a little bit of a long-term game. You find a tool in the market that's pretty close, but it's not quite there. You build a relationship with that company that's developing it so that hopefully you can influence enhancement so you can become a strategic partner. And let's say a company has 10 strategic partners and nine of them want one thing and you want something else, chances are you are probably not going to get it, at least not yet. It also has that issue of, you're not getting ahead of your competitors, you're basically staying even with them.

But the tool is developed, it's ready to go. You don't have that wait, and test, and implement, and all of that. You just skip right to training. Well, you should still implement. You should still have an implantation plan. But you skip right to training and use. So those are all really key things to weigh on what you're looking for between budget, between time, between competitiveness.

As far as I know, I think almost all of the big MEP firms are developing their own hanger tool, at this point-- or spool tool or something like that. Everyone I've talked to is developing their own. So it's kind of interesting to hear. And to me, that says that they need to make sure that they're keeping up with some market research with what's out there.

JOHN CRUZ: Yes, so for example, Victaulic. Make sure you go and see those, what is it 620? And then of course FabPro 1, who is just releasing their automated spool tool as well. So just make sure you go out and see those guys in the booth and talk to them a little bit.

ANDRELL LANIEWICZ: All right, so some additional considerations to have-- your goals and metrics. You need to make sure you know what you track already. If you don't track something and you're getting ready to go forward with this tool and it's too late to track something, can you do a side-by-side either project-by-project or office-by-office comparison? And keep in mind what metrics will sell the tool. Because if this tool is successful, you need people to know about it so that you can get more funding or more support for the next one.

But one of the things I do want to keep in mind is that a lot of the easy, low-hanging fruits, picks and click processes that get changed tend to be in this 10% pie, which is the drawing phase. So at Southland, we've discovered that our detailing and drawing is about 10% of our construction process. That tool we showed you at the beginning that saved weeks for that guy, that was in the 90%. That's where you'll have a bigger bang for your buck.

There's always going to be a learning curve, so make sure you have a great mitigation plan. One of the best things we found is excitement. So that implementation office-by-office-- we're driving up excitement, we're showing it, we're demoing it. And if you get people excited, they're going to want to go and learn on their own. They're going to be like, I can't wait for this. I want to try this. I want to push all of the buttons.

And then one of the other things is, you have different types of learners. So when we release a tool, we have both videos and quick reference guides. So you still have to sit through demo and the initial training. But as a reference when you're looking back, you have the option. Do you want to look at a video or do you want a piece of paper that you can quickly reference and look at?

So with implementation, make sure you test in a variety of environments. If you're still using Windows 7, don't do all of your testing in Windows 10. Make sure you're testing in 2018.1, 0.2, 0.3, 3.1-- everything that you're using. Make sure all of your environments are covered.

With your testing groups, make sure you start with people who are not-- So power users, they tend to be more expensive. But they're also one of the first groups you want once it's out of your initial testing. So test with people who are not in production, whose hours aren't going to cost the business money.

And that you're not going to release the tool accidentally into a production live model. I'm not saying that we have had somebody take a tool that they were really excited about and put it into a production model while they were testing it. OK, we have. So be careful with your order of testing.

And get a lot of buy-in. And make sure your launch day isn't before your developer goes on vacation for two weeks or before everyone goes to AU-- anything like that. Make sure launch day is as clear as possible for any internal support. And if you're outsourcing it, make sure they're available on launch day. That's another one.

JOHN CRUZ: So as we were going through the considerations, I was going with Andrell and a Dynamo showed up and I'm like, just use Dynamo. What are you talking about? Come on. But at the time, Andrell also mentioned, three years ago-- the time that they started implementing, looking at all these things, bringing them on board and online-- Dynamo is just getting released, it's still in its infant stage, not really a viable aspect at that particular time.

But we're not totally counting it out. There's just some things that you need to think about-- versioning control. You know, how much control you have with Dynamo scripting. It's doable, but you better have some way to maintain that as you're distributing those tools out to those different divisions. Because you know that's editable. There's no way to lock it down.

So somebody who's a little wise, done a little bit of training in Dynamo and starts manipulating scripts, things become outdated. And you may not have a central repository for one tool. And then we say incomplete out-of-the-box, because if anybody's used Dynamo, you're going to have that initial starting point. But a lot of people use packages from other places in order to put an entire script together. So you have to consider that. But you use it to proof.

ANDRELL LANIEWICZ: Yes. Well we'll have an office use Dynamo, make a script. Hey, this is what we like. Can you make it in a Revit API language? And we're like, OK. So it goes into a development tracker and eventually gets made into an actual button on our ribbon that people can use. And therefore, we control versioning, we control who edits it, and we control how it interacts with a variety of projects. Just because it's a proof on one doesn't mean it actually works in others. There could be something else in there that's not so well-programmed.

JOHN CRUZ: And before we move on, we don't have it there. But just keep in mind-- any use of Dynamo, a lot of firms that I've talked to and a lot of customers that we talk to, they're getting into it. But they'll have one person that's leading that charge and saying, oh, I'm learning Dynamo. I'm doing this, I'm doing this. Who else is doing it? Oh, I don't have anybody yet-- just one. Well, that one person starts putting packages together and you guys start using it, and then he's gone-- who's taking care of those scripts, or the API changes, or a new update comes out and things have to be modified? Make sure there's a team, not just one person.

ANDRELL LANIEWICZ: So that's basically the evaluations. We're going to recap it real quick for you. So analysis is a focus on workflow improvement, research-- what already exists out there. Develop-- keep testing until you're sick of it and test some more. And implement-- when you implement it, your plan needs to include training and support.

So with that, we're going to do a brief foray into storytime for that hanger tool that we mentioned before. So this is a video that shows manual hanger placement. It is sped up two times just so we can get through it nice and quick here. But basically, it's placing hangers. And it takes the same amount of time to place two hangers as it does to do the whole run.

This video is a little bit dated because I believe in the new release, you can't actually measure to the end of the hanger tool families now in Revit. I'm not sure. I heard it. I haven't gotten to test it. But basically, you have someone, they're putting in their hanger, they're adjusting it, they're making sure it's all correct. And then from there, they would run the tool and it does that entire run. And this is in a live project model. Let me clarify-- this is a detached copy of an actual production model. Again, don't test anything in a live model where you'll mess someone else's work up.

And this was developed in-house. And in this suite, we also have the capability to replace hangers. So if there was one hanger type that we started with and then the owner or whoever decides to change hanger types, we can go and select it and change it. We can go back and we can edit it. So let's say, suddenly they all need three nuts and two bolts to hold them together. We can just make that change, rerun it through all of them. When the duct shifts, now we can rerun that line. We'll just do a rerun and it grabs those points and moves it.

So this hang this hanger tool was incredibly in-depth in the sense that not only is the tool one side of it, but we had to make specific families for the tool. So we had our family creation guru, who is amazing, make very specific family types with the parameters and all the components that were required to make this tool work. And those are corporate standard hangers that we use on everything.

So now we've gone through evaluation and creation of a tool, how do we get users to use the tool? Fun, quick side story here-- how I get people to fill out surveys is with baked goods and not store-bought baked goods. So to get people to vote for this class, I showed up at my office with some tres leches cake, and people were like, how do I get a slice? And I'm like, you go vote. And they'd go vote and they'd come back. So I got almost 100% of the office to vote. It was great.

Now, someone else thought this was a brilliant idea. Someone in marketing was like, all right, let's do this. Well, they didn't bake, so they just went and bought store-bought cupcakes. They did not have nearly the success rate. Something about homemade is crazy. So you may not bake, but someone in your office does or their significant other does. Make them your best friend and you'll get your surveys answered.