We Don’t Need No Stinking Standards!

ROBERT BECKERBAUER JR: Can you hear me in the back? Can you hear me back there? OK. Now we're going to shut the doors. We're going to go ahead and get started. Thank you all for coming this beautiful 9:15 in the morning. Standards, we don't need no stinking standards. Great name for a class, isn't it?

Real quick, the reason that name came about is I started off 16, 17 years ago working at my firm, doing production work, used to hand an architect a set of drawings, say, here's your code sheet. He'd turn to me and say, I don't need no stinking codes. So in honor of him, I named this class after this.

A couple of quick housekeeping things. I got a lot to cover. What I'm going to show you today is not the only way of doing it. It just happens to be the way I do it. There are more ways to do this than this. Do what you're most comfortable with.

Also, due to the amount of time I have to try to get this all in, please keep the questions to the end. And I will do my best to answer them. So I'm going to get going. I did the introduction. About me, you can read in the handout. I'm not really good about talking about myself.

Quick survey by show of hands, how many here are BIM coordinators, managers, in charge of BIM stuff? OK. Technicians? Other? How many of you are in charge of your office standards creating them, maintaining, enforcing, and teaching them? Any of those categories? So about everybody. OK. So we got the right group.

I forgot to tell you. This came about, this talk is about four years old. About four years ago, I did this at a small conference. At that time, I would've told you I knew everything you ever wanted to know about standards and I was the expert. And four years of looking at standards and having 29 people get hired in my firm, I know nothing. So I went back to this last year did a roundtable at that same conference, did a lot of research, asked a lot of people questions. And this is kind of the culmination of that whole process.

So learning objectives for this class, you can get those off the handouts. Nothing you can really take away from the class. So I changed it to takeaways. We don't need no stinking standards. Yes, you do. Creating standards is so easy even a caveman can do it. Not. For those of you who are not from America, we used to have a commercial that said, even a caveman can do it. So kind of off that line. So effective a 9-year-old can use them. And enforcing, maintaining, and teaching is easy peasy. And no, it's not. And I can vouch for that. Because I hate confrontation, so I hate enforcing standards if I don't have to.

So we're going to get started. Why do we need to talk about standards? How many of you have heard all these comments? I've always done it this way. My way is better. We did it this way. Why did you do it this way? This is how we did at my last firm. That is stupid. I don't do it that way. I think this way's better. The bottom one, the dictator, I just got that one recently.

So if you haven't heard them, you've probably heard something like them, and it's a real good reason why we have to have standards. So can you relate? I've had this conversation multiple times myself. You're going to see a lot of these throughout the deal. When I was talking to people getting information, I got a lot of stories from people. So I was like, I got to include these stories. I love this comment. I've posted it at my desk now. Without standards, all you have is a chaotic mess. And really you do.

The purpose of standards. We've got to define standards before we can talk about them. They allow you to effectively use your company's time and resources. I don't know how many times I have spent going back and fixing things because people don't follow standards. We're wasting company resource time.

Spend less time doing stuff. I use Revit at my firm. So we spend less time spending time on Revit and more time on doing what you're supposed to do. I tell people all the time. I am not a designer. I know Revit. You don't let me design.

The nice part about this is a uniform system, I can put anybody on a project, if you have your standards being followed, and they can know what they're going on in that project. We can get better quality of our documents both internally and externally. My office, we have a rule that if we follow the standards, if you give it out to a consultant that we work with, and they see something's not right, they will call me and say, hey, your team is not following your standards. And then I get to go say, hey, why don't you following it? You're making their life difficult too.

And this is one we're going through in my office right now. We have three offices, one in Omaha, Nebraska, one in St. Louis, and one in Des Moines. And we're in the process of merging three offices groups of standards together and getting everybody so it doesn't matter what office your stuff comes out, it looks the same. And this is my favorite quote to my office. I focus on BIM. I am good at it. You go focus on documents and designing. And I am not a designer nor do I play one on TV.

So to have standards, you got to have a definition. I looked it up in Webster's dictionary. There's a lot of definitions for standards. Flagpole basically. Standard of measure. Style structure of Standard Oil Company, a repertoire of songs. I always tell people I love this one. I know this really well. My daughter plays the viola, and she plays the exact same 10 songs as warm up every day. So I know what her standard repertoire is. And I can tell you how far she's into warm up by what song she's playing.

And a standard manual transmission. I showed that one in my office one day. And I had a millennial ask me what a manual transmission was. I knew I'd aged out. But the standard, the definition we're going to use is a technical standard establishing norm, a requirement about technical systems. Because we all work in the technical world here, Revit, BIM, AutoCAD, whatever it is.

So creating standards is so easy a caveman can do it. Not. I thought it was. I inherited my standards, said I'm going to change them. And three years of modifying them, it's not as easy as I thought it was. So everyone has their own way of creating them. The way you go about doing it, and what you determine to standardize will determine what your success is going to be. I can standardize everything you do and it Revit, every process. But your office isn't going to succeed because it's too standardized.

It keeps everybody on the same page. I can get into a project and help somebody out, I can stick a young architect in the project. They know what's going on right away. They show everyone's not wasting time. I hate getting into something and looking through something going, why is it? Where is this at? Where's that view? What's that view? Because they didn't name it right. I can't find it.

You can sign. We can pretty much put a new person on our project, and a project within a couple hours if they have been gone through the standards and get them working. Not well sometimes, but they can get on. So when I was looking at doing this for this class, I said I got to look at standards. There are multiple places you can get standards from. And this is just a few.

So if you're going to start from scratch, this is where you can start. So I went down to three processes. You can just adopt one of those and say, here it is. Let's go. But it's quick and simple, but it's not, specific to your firm.

You can adopt and modify them. So they're still quick. But now you can spend some time and money modifying them so it fits your certain deals. This is where a lot of people do it. And actually, a lot of the people I talked to come from this stage. They just took and created their own. They took the CAD standards and updated them and say, here we go.

Is it the best way? I don't know. I kind of like a hybrid of two and three better. And resource page If you ever want to know where those are at. So seriously, so easy. Not. All right, so how you decide what to standardize will lead to your success. There is multiple times I've been in a room discussing standards with other people and trying to figure out, what is going to be your standard? And we've standardized something. Six months later, we come back and say, it didn't work. We need to redo that standard. There was the wrong standard.

The middle one I love, because when you come down to it, somebody's got to make the final decision. I mean, you can sit in a room with-- we can poll this room on what's going to be the right line types for a project and have 100 different ways. But in the end, someone's going to have to make the final decision.

Determining what is standardized, you got to figure out what's going to be the best use of your time. The gap on the right, she says, if you can reuse it 90% of the time, she's going to standardize it. If it's a one off, two off, it's not going to happen. Where do you go get your guidance? I got to get some water real quick. And how do you go about creating them?

So the guy on the far right, they're actually still trying to write up their standards. And when I get back next week, I'm supposed to help him figure out how to do some of his. But he only has six people to standardize, so it's kind of not so hard.

And determining what is too much and too little. I have had this conversation multiple times with people over the years. And if you standardize it too much-- we're all architects, engineers, we all like to think. We all like to change things. If you standardize it too much, they're not going to grow. They're not going to change. Sometimes the best solutions come from people growing and changing. So if you put too much, they can't do it. If you do too little, then you're managing chaotic mess.

So how we did it, we converted ours from CAD standards. We had our guy came in, did all that for us many years ago. In the process of changing them, I've been doing a lot of research, talking to fellow BIM managers trying to figure out what they do. And we still had that debate in our office. Do we have too many? Are they too short, too long? I don't know yet. I still think there's someplace in the middle we need to be.

Now once you decide, you got to have a collection place for them, a BIM manual, standards manual, whatever you want to call it. The process of documenting that and how you document is going to make how successful that is. I mean, if it's just haphazard on a piece of paper in someone's desk, it's a terrible manual.

I mean, we used to have an employee manual in my office that was on somebody's computer. I never did see it. But now we have it. So and again, I asked people, where did you find? Dylan, I was given this story. I know we've all had this one probably.

So how do you go about creating it? PowerPoint, Word. My Des Moines office actually has theirs inside of-- half of theirs are actually inside their project. So when you open up, it's a legend. It depends on how, if you're working with somebody else, how you go about giving your model out, your template out to work with them.

Do you have a BIM manual? Most of us are probably along the same line. If you have one, where do you keep it? It's really amazing how many people actually do keep it on an office internet. And I knew that was going to be the answer. But I was expecting, hoping for something else.

And I asked if it was too long or too short, that is a debate that can go on for years. Is your manual too long? Is it too short? The guy in the middle, him and I talk pretty much routinely. And after he have me that quote, I said, I actually got 168 pages covering BIM. I'm pretty light. I only have like 100,

So I'm going to go through and show you my office BIM manual we have. And how we came about doing it, it's in PowerPoint to start out with. It goes to PDF. I'm going to share the PDF version. After the class is over, I will upload it to the site if you guys want it, use it, whatever. My office is fine with giving it out. It's nothing trade secret about it.

The reason it's in PowerPoint is the person who started it started it in PowerPoint. I've never got about changing it. It's 102 pages long. I am not in the mood to change it to Word. So we just keep it in PowerPoint. Bluebeam's a great tool to make PDF with and make them hyperactive, so we do them hyperlinked. There's the hyperlink PDF versions of it. And then I stole from the Des Moines office images of theirs inside their drafting views.

Is one way better than another? No. It's what works best for you guys. We actually have no problem when we work with another firm sending them off our PDF. And say here's our standards. Here's our startup file. Here's how we work. We don't have a problem with that.

So we're going to go out of PowerPoint to this wonderful class file, wherever I put it. Where's the manual? I knew I should have opened this before I got going. And I should have. There it is. No. That's the best practice. I'll show you. There it is. Sorry that took so long. For some reason, this computer wants to open it up not in Bluebeam. I'm going to try that better. Open with Bluebeam.

So I went through the process. When I took this one where it was, the hyperlink, so I can come in here or anybody in my office can come in and say, hey, I want to know what our-- that's the next page-- line styles are. Well, line styles are, so they can click on this. They can go see what we've agreed to between the offices on line styles. And they don't have the questions.

Now this is all in our startup file anyways that we start with. So there shouldn't be any questions. But they can come back and confer with us. We have everything, I think, under the sun in it including how to start a file. For some reason, we put BIM manuals training in it too. But they can come back to the beginning. The key was to make it easy and simple for them to use. If it wasn't simple and it wasn't easy, no matter how much I standardize my stuff and how much I put it in a place to get it, they aren't going to use it. And I'm not sure how much they really do use it anyways. Because sometimes, the questions they get, I don't think they are.

So now we've defined it. Yeah, demo time. That was to remind me. Content, we actually have a content browser we use. There's hundreds of them out there. We actually created a folder for it, trying to think and make it easier for people to find. It hasn't worked. They still can't find it.

So effective even 9-year-olds, I picked this title because I have a 9-year-old at home. And when I was looking at redoing my standards, I said, if I could set her down and say, here's what you got to do working in Revit to follow all this stuff, if she can follow it, then I know anybody I put in my office on it can follow it. Not insulting anybody in my office or anybody using it. It's just it's that simple. They're going to build the file easily.

So when I go back to look at our standards, I say, is it easy enough for her to do it? So are they effective? How do you determine if they're effective? How do you decide what you're going to use as the determination for it? Are they too complex? Are they hard to follow? Again, if a 9-year-old can follow my standards, anybody should be able to follow my standards.

This slide goes back to about three years ago. I was in Phoenix at Built Conference. I was sitting with a gentleman. We were talking about standards in his firm. I said, if someone doesn't follow your standards, what happens? He says, nothing. Upper management doesn't care. There's no support for it. So when I started out researching this class, I asked everybody I could, do you have upper management support?

Because honestly, if you don't, you don't have standards. There's no reason to have them because there's no enforcement. You can even go to the point that one guy told me, he says, the principles say you're going to follow our standards, but the project architect says, no, we're not following those. So again, if you have someone in authority saying no, then you're not going to do them.

How do you determine? If they'd be second nature to somebody, then they're going to be used. They get-- the middle I love because he basically says, you get what you ask for. If you'd follow them, you're going to get what you expect. And again, after I got this comment, this is another one I posted on my desk, make them the easiest thing. People are only going to do what's easy. I can prove that time and time again. So if that's the standard thing is the easiest thing to do, that's all they're going to do. They will not go out of their way to try to make it harder unless they really want to. And then we need to have a talk.

So in my office, we have startup files. People have startup template files. People have programs you start to start your Revit and populates everything. I'm going to show you how we do it. Again, this is not the only way. But by having the startup file, we have everything in it for them. It's already set.

You get in. You start working. You don't worry about how Revit works. You don't worry about line styles. The only thing you have to worry about is your view naming. I haven't figured out how to standardize that yet. But I'm working on that. You don't have to think about anything. It's there for you. So if you go out your way, then I know you're going out of your way.

I'm going to go through this real quick. And then I'm going to demo it. This is a product. The way we do it is we actually use view templates. By having a startup file, I have all these view templates set. No one understands anything about them apparently, because they keep asking questions.

But the cool thing about it is it sets the stuff for them. They don't have to worry about, is this on right? Is this not on right? And then I took it a step farther. And we asked our structural file and MEP guys to give us a template file. We used to call it a dummy file. But we were joking around one day, we thought we were insulting the file's intelligence, so we changed it to template.

It's already in there. So everybody knows, who's ever used Revit in here knows that you get a file in. You got to go through all your elevations, turn off grid lines, levels, stuff like that. We turn all that off for you. So you get your new structural file. You do a reload from, and it changes the name of the file. And everything is still turned off. They don't have to think about what it's doing.

Also, we set up preset views. So if you cut a wall section, it gets to the right view template. The right stuff is turned off. Everything looks right. They don't have to think about it. They can do what they're paid to do, which is to be designers, be documenters.

And then we even took it to this last year been a big initiative in the two officers is to get standard details. So if you need a door detail, you don't have to go redraw it. You just go grab it from a file, drag it on there, and it's there. Been a huge undertaking. It's still being worked on.

Escape. So I come down here to my Revit file. And this is our startup file. This is what it looks like when they opened it up. It has lots of stuff in it, disclaimers. It does have standardized stuff already in it. But what I was talking about with the [INAUDIBLE] linked file, and my shortcuts don't work because this isn't my computer. Where is the managed links? There it is. We've already had these files in here.

So if I come into a wall section file, and I don't know if I have one cut yet. So we're going to have to cut a wall section. So if I cut my building section here, inside this building section view, there is a view template. It's already set up. But if you come underneath the links, you click on it, we have set the structure file to a custom view setting that allows me to go in under annotations and turn off grids and levels.

So anytime anybody in my office gets a structural model and they do reload from, they don't have to spend hours going through saying, hey, I got to go shoot all these levels off. What do I turn off? What do I turn on? They also don't have to worry about what settings are being turned on. There's work sets that the structural people use for structural bearing walls that we don't want to see, because they go through our windows and they don't cut well, that they put on a work set. That's already turned off, so we don't have to worry about thinking about that.

And also underneath there, it sets the scale for them. It sets the colors it sets what it sets in the browser. It makes everything just play nicely. Now thanks to Aaron Mueller, I did go through here last year and add what we call a coordination plan. Because I was talking about, Aaron, about when you put grids on a deal, we always copy monitor our grids from our structure. We went back and said, oh, I got to turn those on through the view template and do that. And he goes, just create a coordination plan. Turn everything on. He says, it's going to be the messiest plan you have, but you will be able to find everything. So that plan has basically a view template and turn everything on.

So again, I tried to set it up to be the easiest thing for the people to follow is the standards. If you cut a wall section, a view template's going to power it for you. You don't have to think about what's going on. You don't have to worry about the office standard is for the stuff.

I've also gone in with our, I don't know if it's in the 18 file, I know I just did it in 19, I've gone through underneath the tags-- and it's not here. I spent hours [INAUDIBLE] every tag we have in our system is in there. So no one has to worry about what tag goes where. It's just there for them. So you tag something, it's there. You don't have to think about it.

So to make them effective, quick summary, they come after the user. They make the project better. And you get in the project and understand what's going on faster. And as a BIM coordinator, manager, person in charge of that, I like being able to get in and figure out what's going on.

Here's the fun part, analyzing standards. You can't determine they're effective unless you analyze them. In my office, we have a policy at DD, 50% CDs, and CD, right after CDs go out, I do a Revit model review. It means I go through your Revit model. I make sure you do the standards right. I do some QC, but not very much. Most of it is just making sure how you follow the Revit standards.

It also gives me the opportunity to figure out what we need to probably teach on. That is actually a bit of a joke to my office. That's me some days, because it's the most boring task you can ever do is open up a model and walk through it. But I'm going to show you a process that I've been using here recently that has sped up my process. It's taken it from eight hours to like four. So by doing it, it allows me to realize what I need to work on with the people.

We actually have three different ways of doing it. The old-fashioned way is open it up, look around. And one of the things we look for is hidden lines. And if you've ever gone through 50 wall section views looking for hidden lines, it is a long process.

So a couple years ago, I came across Autodesk Model Checker. It's a free tool you can get online. I put links in the handout to it. It's fantastic. It automates a lot of that stuff for you. I'm not going to go over how to set up the checks. I'll give you my checks later on when I'm done. That's like a whole 90 minute lab. When I saw it the first time, it was a 90 minute lab. And it took me weeks afterwards talking to the instructor to figure out how to make it work.

And then the last one is I take stuff out to Excel. And I'm going to use CTC tools here. But you can use Imaginit, Ideate, anything else. All it is is you're just trying to get data out. And the reason I started doing this is I was having people, I'd go in reviews and says, that's just your opinion. It's not really that way.

Well, if I can hand them an Excel spreadsheet to show, here's what you did, everything in your project, all that data, there's no opinions. I can see if they're following the right standards. I can see they're using the right naming. I can see if they're using the right families. Everybody knows that some families blow up a project.

So the way we go about it, so analyzing, and there's multiple different ways. I've heard of right now, we're in the process of discovering if there's another way. We're looking at some other ones. But you got to use the one you're the most comfortable with.

I'm going to go through three quick slides that shows you the process. The thing on the right is a nice worksheet a gal made for me one time. And that's the worksheet. That's the old process. Open it up. Look through a review and find enough.

To Model Checker, which runs this nice beautiful report. And when we started doing this, it gives you a grade. 10% says you fail. If you misname something, you fail that whole section. So one wall section not being named will fail, which, in my book, isn't really a failure. But as I use the grade just to see, and if DD, you're at 60%, at mid CDs, you have 40%, what are we doing wrong? We're going the wrong way, obviously.

I have people in my office that will just dwell on that grade. Oh, I got a 10%. Just go fix it then. It's not that hard. You got the list. The cool thing is on the side, it tells you the ID for the category on it. So you can go find it, search by number. And there are other tools out there now that are coming out better than that tool. But that's the one I use right now.

And then this is coming out of CTC, which I'll show you as well as two stills. The bottom one is what we call dim checker. And every dimension in the project, that tool has been so much fun to use from a personal standpoint. Because when you put that out there in front of them and say, I did not override any dimensions, and you can it says override. And they can go back and say, you did right here. And then they can say they understand. They aren't following the rules.

And unfortunately, both of those tools are pay tools by CTC. So they're not free. So that's not a bill for them, even though they would think I was plugging them. So I'm going to try to do in this live. Last time I did this live, it crashed.

All right, so we open up the other model. Up underneath when you add the model manager in there, it's underneath add-ins. It'll say model checker. The first thing you got to have is you've got to have the file. And you go through another saying that it sets up all the checks. I've already preset my checks. And hopefully it reads the copyright over here. I named it something really hard to, if you remember.

So if you look, these are all the things I'm checking for. Now some of these checks, like in place families, so some people seem weird. I had a file crash because we had 2,000 in place families in the project. And then I talked to the gal at Autodesk while she was fixing it. She says, you can't. Maybe you should talk to them about that.

I didn't realize they were doing that. Because one of the things they're doing, we should have created as an external family, brought it in. There are certain things that you do that just causes a lot of crashes. So I pay attention to those more than I do some other stuff because I want to know. It's kind of like a model health check. And I do this a lot of times just to check the model's health.

And this file was not saved. It's local. I stole it right before I left. Should have made it a central. So for the sake of time, I turned off half the checks you could do. There's a lot more. And I'll give this to you guys. It's nothing secret. Most of them came from right out of setting it up, doing it on its own. Come on. Open. Repath this again.

So after you do it, you say, OK, hit save, hit finish. And now it doesn't know what file it's going to use. You come back up and you say, run check. This is saying that it wants me to look at the structural file. I do not check their files. That's up to their own.

Say run report. It takes a little bit of time. This one doesn't take as long. The reason I'm trying to do this one live is because it actually has a really cool feature on it that you can click on a button and say show, and it goes right back. As long as the HTML file's open, it'll go right to it in your Revit model and show you where it's at.

So this project get 56%, which doesn't say much about my modeling skills because this was my last project I did in production. So we can't judge me on this one too much. But I can come through here, and I can say, hey, OK, you failed on view naming. And I can come back and say, what did you do wrong on your view naming? And I could see the failures by name.

Now most of these because they did some upgrades in marketing after it went out, so the architect who did it didn't follow the naming at all, which some of these actually make sense for what he was doing. But the piece I usually pay more attention to, like I said, is down here in the in-place families. I don't know if I turned that on in here. Yeah, I did.

I can see how many in-place families are in here. And I can scroll through here and see, well, should they have made these like this? What some of these are, what are their names? And I can actually come back in and start looking. Well, I guess you can't. The new version, I guess, you can, which I don't have on this computer.

I can also look at CAD files. Why do we have some CAD? Why does this have EPDM details in here? These should be coming from the standard library. I can check. Because when we standardized our libraries between the two offices, we put everything together. So when we keynote a file, it's being keynoted right. So if they're not using something that's set, they're not getting all the work we've already done for them making it easy on them. The key is that by standardizing all this stuff, they don't have to worry about how to do it.

Let's see. Oh, yes, I forgot to do that part. The other part is-- now again, this is a paid tool from CTC, but dim checker. And I know Ideate has something. I don't have a license of it. I know Ideate has tools like this. Imaginit has tools. Actually, Case used to have when they were around used to have tools that did the same thing.

It doesn't matter how you do it. I think you can even do it in Dynamo. The key is just get the data out, get it out to some sets. You can save this file as an Excel file. And then you can sort it, and you can show it to people. And you can come back through here. And you can say, well, why did you coordinate with an architect on this fixture? And we can come back and ask questions. I can say, why didn't-- I can see if they're not dimensioning right.

The other tool I run, and again, you can see that report, is-- hopefully I get this right. I did. It's called [INAUDIBLE] it's from Imaginit again. Not Imaginit, CTC. Sorry, CTC. You're basically trying to get data out. So I have this file I've already created. It it's going to go read this model. It's going to suck all this stuff out of the model into a spreadsheet that's behind itself populated with tabs.

What I'm looking at for here is I'm looking for dimension names. I'm looking for view names, door names, stuff that people aren't following right. And it's amazing how many times I've done this and I found that someone decided they wanted to use something from a manufacturer. And then like, oh, my file's really huge. Well, yeah, you just put a 10 megabyte manufacturer family in here. We could have made that ourselves, made it smaller, and done what you wanted, and then let the specs read what it really is.

But if I wouldn't have had this tool, I would have to do that. Otherwise, what I'm doing is I'm opening up that piece of paper and I'm going through here looking for all this stuff manually by hand. And it's hours from time [INAUDIBLE]. But by doing it, we've been able to see a turnaround in our office of standards being used because we have tools that we're showing them back now. We're doing the reviews. They're seeing their stuff. They're seeing hard data that what they're doing.

They're also realizing that I'm not spending-- they're also starting to figure out what I do it sometimes at work. But I get this file. I can come in here. I can go-- I don't want this. I want the Excel file. So you can come here, and you can see everything that's in here for wall types. Generic models is a great one to go check. Say, what did they do? Sometimes I actually find things in their generic model files is like, hey, I'm going to go steal that. We need to put them in the library, because they can fix it.

Views names, I can see what's going on. I can see how many times it's on a sheet. It's not as important, especially the equipment. We've had a lot of people recently come to me and say, special equipment doesn't work in the tagging. What's going on? You find out it's a manufacturer's piece they used that we already had a generic version of it in the library. But I wouldn't know if I didn't have this to see it.

So move on. Enforcing, maintaining, and teaching is easy peasy. I have known nobody out there who likes to be the hard guy on enforcing. Be the first one that says, hey, you're not following the rules. You need to step up and follow the rules. I personally don't like confrontation that much. So sometimes I kind of don't want to take it on. But I have to if I have to.

Maintaining is just a long process at times. I'm terrible at it. I will admit that. I have a list a mile deep on my desk of stuff I need to add. And teaching, if you don't teach the standards, they don't get used. There are many different ways to enforce them. One is the most comfortable you're doing. This should play. It might not. There you go. Is it not playing?

As much fun as that would be to have that much power, it doesn't happen. I don't think anybody in here has that. The gentleman who gave me that story is a close friend of mine is a BIM manager for an [INAUDIBLE] firm. He goes, that's his dream being able to have that much power. So I told him, I said, I go, you can't do that. He says, I know.

So the real way we have to do it, it's the way I've done it a lot, and I've heard other people tell me they do it as well, it is not the only way, as I said before, is you can sometimes you sit down and talk to them. Sometimes their way might actually be a better way. It might actually be good. Sometimes it's not.

We've actually done it to the point where we put them on a group. We have a BIM committee in our office that's in charge of taking care of answering questions and enforcing standards. We made that person be on the committee. It's amazing how fast they follow standards when they have to teach to people standards. Because it's really hard to say, don't follow that, when you're telling them if you don't do it yourself. You can't tell them to follow it.

And sometimes you just have a long little conversation with them about why it is. And hopefully, they come around. If that doesn't work, it's time to go up a level. And hopefully, it resolves itself. I don't ever like to see anybody get fired. Like I said, I don't like confrontation. So it bothers me when they get fired. But in the same sense, if you're not going to follow the rules, then you need to be gone. We just can't. It doesn't make the rest of the firm better if you're not following the stuff. You're just making everybody else life miserable.

So maintaining is fun. Talked a little bit about where you keep your stuff and updating it. As I said, I'm terrible at mine. I don't update it enough. When I was doing this class, I asked people, how often do you update it? Some people said daily. I thought they were crazy. Weekly, monthly. Other is me. It happens twice a year, we're happy, because we obviously don't change them that often. But there's enough stuff that gets updated occasionally. I just need to put new stuff in.

Especially screenshots that are in there, they still say Revit 2016 on them. We're in 2019 now. They should be updated. Is this one going to play? It's supposed to have music, but I don't know if it's working. I think that was the last one.

I put that all together. Actually, my daughter put that together as a video for me, because, well, one, I thought we'd all be bored looking at slides. But a lot of that's conversations I've been having with people in my own office. We had a new gal came in. She's really smart on Revit. We were probably going to put her on our Revit committee. We've had something along that same conversation, because she had been involved in that at a previous firm. So in my office, like I said, it's my responsibility. They don't get updated often enough I can guarantee you that. We do have them in the BIM manual. It's in two different spots.

So training, either you're good at it or you're not. Some people really like doing it. We had a guy in my office that loved doing it. He's not with us anymore, unfortunately. He moved on to greener grass, I guess. But he loved doing the training. He loved being the guy up there talking and teaching it.

It's interesting when you think about teaching it, I mean, I love teaching my office and what they do. There are some topics that are just harder than all get out to teach. And I just dread having that teaching come. And some of them I just love. I mean, there's some of these easier.

We in my office have a series of what we call Revit coaches, people with specialties. I have one that's really great at rendering. So when it comes to do a rendering class, she's the one that teaches the rendering, not me. I am a terrible renderer. I don't even try it. I have another gentleman that he can teach you work sets and Kurdish and copy monitor to the end of the Earth and back. And he loves doing it and makes it easy and fun. So that's what he does.

But in the same sense, we try to keep a uniform voice. We get together and try to stay together on the same page. And when we do our teaching, it's onboarding. We do it during project reviews. And I spend at least 20% of my time every month doing just training classes and dealing with people. And that's just training. I mean, that's sitting at their desk and doing hands on training and actually doing a training class.

So the takeaways as we wrap up, we don't need no stinking standards. Yes, you do. Creating standards is so easy even a caveman can do it. So effective a 9-year-old can use them. And enforcing, maintaining, and teaching is easy and fun. No, it is not. So with that, are there any questions? If not, you guys, we are done for today. And you got 10 minutes of your day back. So thank you.

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