Level Up Your Collaboration: A Multipractice Engineering Firm's Migration from BIM 360 to ACC

BEN AKADA: Welcome, everyone, to our presentation on leveling up your collaboration. Today's case study explores the strategies used by Thornton Tomasetti while working side by side with Autodesk, where we were able to design, develop, and implement an effective training program. It also examines the key factors that contributed to the program's success, including tailored learning approaches and continuous support and feedback. By analyzing the lessons learned and best practices created, this case study aims to provide valuable insight for other organizations looking to train their staff on new programs or technologies.

Our hope is that you're able to lead today with actionable takeaways to help you and your firm achieve a smoother transition and unlock the full potential of the Autodesk Construction Cloud.

STEPHANIE CATALINA: We're about to begin the presentation, and I'd like you to please read the message and take note of the Autodesk safe harbor message on the screen. Thank you.

BEN AKADA: Our agenda for today, we will introduce ourselves, and after introductions, we'll start us off by discussing my company, Thornton Tomasetti. However, I will not go into too much of our firm's history, just enough to get a feel for our firm's size and explain the type of work that we do. I'm going to cover our firm's past, present, and then the future for how we work in the cloud.

Next, Stephanie will explain the training content created specifically for Thornton Tomasetti, both, the benefits and the change management communication plan. Then we'll circle back and give you some thoughts on where Thornton Tomasetti is planning to take ACC into the future and then do a wrap-up, including some closing thoughts.

Hello. My name is Ben Akada. I am Thornton Tomasetti's Corporate BIM Manager. I lead the Revit and BIM program for Thornton Tomasetti. In a future slide, I'll go into a bit more detail about myself and my team. But essentially, my group is responsible for Thornton Tomasetti's various digital design initiatives, including administrating and managing the company's approach to cloud collaboration.

STEPHANIE CATALINA: Hi, everyone. I am Stephanie Catalina, a Business Consultant with Autodesk. And I lead the strategic migrations from BIM 360 to ACC. And I was assigned to work with Ben at Thornton Tomasetti through their consulting services in their concentrating on their BIM 360 migration with a focus on training.

BEN AKADA: Thornton Tomasetti, who are we, and how did this case study come to be? Before we get going, I need to point out that if you see references throughout this presentation referring to, both, Thornton Tomasetti and TT, they will be interchanged quite a bit, but both are referring to my firm.

So as mentioned, my job is managing the digital design initiatives at TT. So part of my job is to build training for our staff. I also build practice templates and work with my group to provide other various rubber content. Earlier that spring, we noticed more and more of our clients began inviting our teams into ACC, bypassing BIM 360. Questions from RPMs, BIM leads, and other office leaders started to mount, and it became clear to me and my team that we needed to have a game plan on ACC adoption.

Having been through the BIM 360 adoption from a couple of years past, I knew the ACC campaign was going to take a lot of planning. Thornton Tomasetti is an enterprise business partner with Autodesk. And one of the perks of being an enterprise partner is that we have access to their technical consultants. In my case, it's Stephanie here. Stephanie and I partnered together, and we built the training needed for ACC.

Essentially, she's the Autodesk technical expert in ACC, and I'm the subject matter expert for TT when it comes to our revenues. Near the end of our engagement, as we were wrapping up our work, I realized that our efforts we took on training and how we created the materials and how we game planned for the ACC's rollout may be beneficial for others to hear. So I put in my proposal earlier this spring for this case study. It was accepted, and now here we are.

Who is Thornton Tomasetti? Let me begin with explaining who we are as a firm. TT is an international multipractice consulting engineering firm that provides a wide range of services for the AC world. Our firm is known for its expertise in areas such as structural engineering, facade engineering, forensics, applied science, transportation, sustainability, resilience, and many more.

We work on projects across various sectors, including commercial, residential, sports, health care, education, and infrastructure.

TT's locations-- how large is our firm, and where are we located? We are a firm of approximately 1,700 employees. We operate through multiple offices across the globe. We employ a diverse team of engineers, architects, scientists, and sustainability experts, with an emphasis on innovation, technology, and sustainability with our approach to engineering and design solutions.

CORE studio. Next, I want to briefly touch on Thornton Tomasetti's CORE studio. CORE studio is TT's firmwide research and development team. It provides a valuable interface among our design and construction teams. We develop new workflows and processes that promote collaboration and enhance building design. Our work includes digital design and delivery, app development, and computational design modeling as well.

There are five departments within CORE studio, and I'm a member of one of those departments called CORE Design. There are four of us on my team. We have a wide range of expertise, covering various levels of BIM. We assist with project work such as project BIM planning and strategy. We help with BIM model coordination, BIM execution planning, then kickoffs and bid contract reviews.

We also work with offices by performing staff training, including direct interaction with BIM, modelers and various other Revit users. And we also partner with our practices by creating and rolling out practice-specific standards, workflows, content, libraries, and templates.

Our journey. Before I explain our road to the ACC adoption, I want to start by taking you through TT's larger journey with cloud collaboration. This is the path that TT has taken to get us all the way over to the current ACC environment.

Although our local network is still an option, it is only a viable option for smaller projects and/or projects that do not require working Revit by multiple designers. Once your project needs multiple designers and if there are multiple offices involved, you'll need to move your collaborative model into the cloud.

Early on, TT used Revit Server as that option, up until COVID. And during the height of COVID, we made the move to BIM 360. Our work has mainly stayed at BIM 360 until this year. There were highs and lows moving our firm into BIM 360. I'll be discussing some of those lessons learned throughout this case study.

So TT's adoption of BIM 360 was not very well executed, and it did need modifications along the way. At that time, we were not sure of the exact audience that was needed for the training. We were also unsure how the different practices had planned to use cloud collaboration. As the days and months went by, we saw some immediate areas that needed improving and acted swiftly to bring corrections. I will discuss some of those corrections soon.

Now, after three years of using BIM 360, we do have better data on showing how it is being used. And because of this data, we can better predict on how ACC adoption and its future use will go.

So the Revit use at TT. Now that we've seen how we work in the project-- now that we've seen the work in project teams in the cloud, let's talk about how we use Revit at our firm.

As I've just covered, TT has many practices. And within those practices, we have many ways on how Revit is being used here. With our Autodesk licensing structure, we consume tokens. The tokens correlate to Autodesk products and their usage times. Because of the tokens, I'm able to pull that information for better data gathering. Take a look at our use numbers for Revit in this case.

These are the numbers over the last 12 months. There are over 35 offices that use Revit. We have over 1,000 peak monthly Revit users, 4,600 or more active models, with an average of 1,290 hours of Revit use per day.

Where do our models live? Again, taking into account the last 12 months or so, we pulled that data. We found that we currently have 2,383 Revit models actively being accessed in the cloud. Notice here that we have more projects and models outside of our internal hub than in it. That leads to other variables that we cannot control. I'll circle back to that topic in a later slide.

BIM 360 migration highs and lows and lessons learned. So now that I've been able to show you who TT is and how we use Revit and workshare, I have a few items to cover on what we learned from our BIM 360 migration, including those tweaks that we had to make before we moved into ACC.

First up was roles and permissions. Who needs access to what, to where, and how? Let me discuss how we set up our folder permissions. Early on at the onset of BIM 360, we knew our work was just for internal use. And because of that, there was no need to use companies for the permissions, so we focused on using roles for permissions to control the access.

Since we do have engineers, structural, civil, and MEP, we also have architects, scientists, contractors, designers, modelers, and more, we decided to build our roles around all of them, an entire playbook on roles, 45 of them. We covered all the bases to be safe.

Well, that concept started to show some signs of misuse, wrong permissions or our project admins guessing on titles, et cetera, when setting up jobs, along with other issues, such as, Which role was attached to which employee? Do you have multiple roles? Who's responsible to manage the model? And who just needs to review it? Messaging on provisioning roles was not very clear or consistent.

Also, since I'm the BIM 360 account admin, I'd get questions revolving around team members not seeing models or not having the correct permissions and then PMs not aware of even why. I'd investigate these issues only to find out the wrong role had been provided to the people with the wrong permission set.

So being that I'm the account admin, I took this issue with my director and explained that we needed to rethink the roles concept and come up with a better way. In the end, we took 45 roles and condensed them down to just the six that you see here. So in the end, you're either an admin, a designer, or a reviewer, period. This turned out to be the winning method on how we at TT needed to assign our roles for our teams internally. So what my advice here is build your custom roles for your custom company.

Let's talk about working with docs at TT. I do want to touch on this and how we are working with BIM 360 at present mixed in with some ACC and then plan for fully into ACC for the future.

As I explained earlier, the majority of our Revit work for all of our offices and practices is done on our internal hub or our clients hubs when required. So we planned early on that our approach at the time on how to best work in the cloud would be to be as basic as possible. The main point of messaging to our teams was that we are not invited into and, working on our clients tab, we only need to use our client's models as backgrounds here.

By working this way, we have the freedom to work within Docs without the need to enable design collaboration, essentially treating our project's main worksheet cloud model as if they were just central models on the network, a workflow that our groups already knew of.

Another perk here is less required training on the design collaboration workflow. It'd only be needed for those that interact and engage with external hub Revit work. Getting our users trained with the basics and up and running in the cloud, working together as easily as possible was key.

Let's talk about the training now. So since we had an understanding about who are the Revit users here and how we're working with Revit at TT as a whole, we knew that we could build better guidance revolving around responsibilities and duties for every Revit user. We can build a multitude of training methods to meet our users on their level of need.

Let's talk about the lows of the older training that we had for the original BIM 360 adoption that I had alluded to earlier. It was not as successful as it could have been. The time was late 2020 and into early 2021, and there was a bit of a perfect storm starting to brew, our Revit server shutting down, COVID still not over, offices emptier, employees working from home, and a plan for the return of the office was not here at this point.

So a stopgap retraining was done. We had general basic training, but the messaging wasn't well received or implemented. Besides just the challenges to learn BIM 360 basics, learning to navigate the new user interface and the new workflows, project admins weren't even sure of their duties, and our end designers were unclear of their role.

I knew I needed a better approach and a better overall campaign for ACC adoption. I had a lot of concerns. Where do I start? What is it going to take to reach our various Revit users at TT? Who needs training and when? I knew this task was going to be quite the undertaking. This is where Autodesk Implementation Services came in. I knew I had these EVA perks, so it was time to take advantage. So with that, let's welcome Stephanie. She's going to take it from here.

STEPHANIE CATALINA: Thank you, Ben, for the lead-in to my presentation. From here, I'll begin to explain what TT has accomplished for their training needs. Starting at the very beginning of your transformation from BIM 360 to ACC, you should always communicate, and you definitely need a communication plan for you and your team. Don't leave it to the end. Communication should always be in the forefront of your entire transition.

A communication plan is a well-thought-out plan on how to inform your employees that the change is coming. For some, this can be a very scary thing, and you want your team to know you're taking care of their needs.

You need a communication plan because you want your team informed and prepared in advance. Bring awareness way in advance. I can't stress bring it in advance enough for the transformation from BIM 360 to ACC.

Who needs to support the communication plan? All project team leaders and executive management need to support this change. This will ensure a much success higher rate much sooner. Who delivers the communication plan? And what medium provides the communication?

Multiple project leaders and executive managers are to deliver the transformation message through various delivery systems. This will be achieved by verbal communications and meetings at the global, regional, and local levels through various online platforms. Many companies have many internal websites where the message can be hosted. And of course, email is always the first to go but always not read. Employees sometimes skip past those HR emails. You definitely need to use the email still, but use it more consistently. Repeatedly send that message.

You need a communication plan that will deliver the complete message. Do not leave teams feeling stranded, abandoned, and with many doubts and questions. Here's a quick, simple, and short delivery of where, what, when.

Next, they need to know for what projects they're going to be transforming for. So is it all new projects? Then they need to know when the new projects will start in ACC. For example, they're going to be starting September 22, 2025. Now the panic is setting in. They don't know what ACC is or how to use it, and the date is approaching fast.

Next, they need to know, for example, training sessions will be provided to you, and calendar invitations will be sent out. Then employees say, great, we get training, but what about project support? Then you inform them, for example, team members have already been trained and are familiar with the product and will provide project shadowing and support.

All BIM 360 to ACC migrations are very different. I have not experienced one that is the same. Not everyone has the same resources, budget, time, workflows, or processes. So don't worry if your communication plan is different. That's OK. The most important thing is that there is a clear and consistent message and deliver that message in advance and repeatedly, and I mean repeatedly.

You can even take it one step further and provide a link to submit questions and concerns. Maybe you'll learn something that you didn't think of that needs to be addressed sooner rather than later. Remember, transitions are not made in a silo. They need a very well-thought-out plan, training and communication plan, that works for you, for your teams, for your single office, and your multi-office or global office.

From here, I'll discuss the training content I created specifically tailored for TT's ACC workflows, standards, and processes. There are three different training types delivered. One is a consolidated training guide with a cover sheet, table of contents, multiple topics with step-by-step directions. The second is a one-page quick start guide with a single topic. And the third are videos.

One of the most important features of the training material is that they are TT branded and developed specifically for their standards and workflows.

The first document created is the consolidated training guide, again, with the TT branding, something all users are familiar with. It contains a cover page, table of contents. The table of contents are hyperlinked to the topic. Then the ACC step-by-step training material with imagery follows. We did not cover all of the ACC tools in the consolidated guide. Ben hand selected the items that would enable the end users to become more fluent in their new ACC responsibilities.

The topics selected are the Project Admin Settings covers feature setup. Moving on to Docs, involving managing folders, uploading, deleting, sorting, subscribing to folders, comparing documents. Next, Desktop Connector. It includes items like the version of the product, how to install it, best practices, FAQs.

Then Model Coordination, how to create coordination spaces and the TT coordination workflow. And finally, Design Collaboration, how to share packages and bridge them to other teams. You too can create this content. Simply select your company-branded template, or download one from online and modify as needed.

Select the AC topics you and your end users will get the maximum use. Think of things that are different from what they do now or items that will save them time later. Finally, write the step-by-step directions. Keep it simple and short. Try not to use full sentences. Do not make it like a novel. No one likes to read them. And keep the training very short and to the point.

The second training material created are what we call quick start guides, and simplicity is key. What is a quick start guide? It is all about the name. It is quick to learn, and the user can start using this knowledge immediately. The purpose of the guides are to provide clear, step-by-step instructions for the end users. They're concise, precise, and lack unnecessary details.

The end user's experience should be able to follow the guide while working on their machine. Instructions are click by click. The user can complete the task from beginning to end without confusion and frustration. The quick start guides gets users up to speed lightning fast.

You can also create these guides on your own. Mine are created on 11-by-17 sheets. I added a title block. It includes the topic, the software, the duration to achieve the action, the company logo, the date the content is created. You want to include the date so when standards processes change or the software receives an enhancement, you'll have a better idea if your content is still up to date.

At the top of the page, you can add a description of that particular training topic. For the body of the training, include step-by-step clicks for the user. Remember to keep it simple. Add bold headers for each area where the training content is changing. Include tips, tricks, and notes that the user will find very helpful. Add images with the steps numbered so the user can visually see what the text is telling them to do. I cannot stress enough, do not create a novel. The less words, the better.

Finally, I created training videos. They are very popular. Everybody loves them, and they're very easy to create. A wee bit time consuming, but overall, very easy to learn, even for me. I never thought that I would be making videos and editing them, but here I am. The videos are approximately five to six minutes long.

Again, they have the TT-branded colors, logos, fonts, and, most importantly, they describe the specific way TT does things, their standards, their processes, meaning it's not just another generic video off of YouTube. It is specific to the TT production environment. These videos either mimic or they complement the quick start guides and the completed full guide.

You, too, can also create these videos. First, start by writing the script. You can use the help menu within the software to get a basis for your script. The help menu is a bit wordier than what you will want in your video, so you need to trim it down. Use less words. Again, get straight to the point.

Record the script. Use the editing tools to remove any blips that you'll make. And believe me, you're going to make blips. Don't be surprised if you change the script when you read it out loud. How we type and how we speak do not exactly always work together. Edit the script so it stays concise with what you're recording. This document can be reused in case you need to change it in the future.

And lastly, open up ACC and record the hand movements of the script. To do this, you're going to play the narration and record your screen movement. Don't forget to hit record once you start playing the narration. And do as the narration states. You want the audio and the visuals to align.

You can edit the recording of the screen to cut out the thinking symbols or other glitches that will happen. Here is a tip. Don't forget to use a great microphone that has the highest quality for your audio.

Ben and I also traveled to a few on-site site meetings. We collaborated on two different slide decks to present to the Fort Lauderdale and Miami, Florida locations. The first deck consisted of a BIM 360 to ACC comparison slide deck. The slide deck taught the on-site teams about the ACC user interface differences, along with some of the variations between the two products, including new features and functionality.

The second deck is a high-level overview of ACC, what modules are available and a few of the capabilities of the tools and features within those modules. The great benefit of meeting with the teams on-site allowed us to answer open-ended questions from individual users. It provided Ben the opportunity to enforce standards and processes. We also learned where additional training and workflows were needed.

Before creating content and delivering it to on-site teams, where you may be a remote employee, review with the team in advance to make sure you are addressing pressing challenges that they are exhibiting. This will allow you to gain a stronger relationship and trust among the team members.

Next, I will discuss the training style advantages and benefits. Using different training styles provides multiple benefits. The slide on the screen describes a few of the advantages of those specific items. However, training in general provides these top three benefits.

Enhanced engagement-- different training styles keep learners engaged by varying the approach. This can prevent doing the same old thing and maintain interest throughout the training process. Improved retention-- mixing training styles can enhance the retention of information. For example, combining visual and sound can reinforce concepts and make them more memorable.

Inclusive learning environment-- utilizing a variety of training styles can create a more inclusive learning environment that accommodates individuals with different abilities and backgrounds. Overall, using different training styles can lead to a more effective and efficient learning experience, benefiting, both, learners and the organization.

The training sessions created are designed to equip both new hires and current employees with the essential knowledge and skills required for their roles. The comprehensive program ensures that every participant, regardless of the tenure with the company, can swiftly transition into fulfilling their job responsibilities. This approach not only accelerates the onboarding process of new employees but also refreshes and enhances the capabilities of existing staff, ensuring employees are up to date with the latest practices and procedures.

The comprehensive benefits derived from the training program are multifaceted and highly impactful. First, it empowers your team to commence their tasks more rapidly, reducing downtime and increasing overall productivity. This expedited readiness is crucial for maintaining the momentum of ongoing projects and meeting tight deadlines.

Second, the training emphasizes precision and accuracy, which translates to a higher quality output with fewer errors. This improvement in work quality not only enhances the organization's reputation, but it also reduces the need for rework and corrections.

Lastly, the program instills a greater sense of confidence and competence among employees, allowing them to operate with minimal supervision. This frees up management resources and fosters a more self-reliant and motivated workforce. In summary, the training is a strategic investment that yields faster operational readiness, superior results, and a more efficient supervisory structure.

With the training complete and the communication plan delivered, you'll need a one-stop location to store your training materials for user access. Currently, TT uses the Eagle Point platform to house their training content for all of their user software training needs. Eagle Point is a learning management system designed for the AEC industry.

Utilizing this platform enables TT to upload three different training styles-- the training guide, the quick start guide, and the videos. It also enables TT to create their own learning paths, created specifically for end users, giving them direct access to what they need to provide a better output.

Thornton Tomasetti can assign training to users by giving them a role, either as admin or designer. The current training available for users is on-demand and optional. However, in the future, training may be assigned to the user, and the practice leaders can track the metrics of the user's performance by using the Eagle Point dashboards and reporting.

The benefits of using a centralized resource management system to store your training materials is that it provides the following. A one-stop shop for trainers and trainees to access the resources. Two, it ensures users have access to the material, and it is the same material. Three, providing a consistent message to everyone. It also offers customization, and it is scalable.

Next, Ben will conclude the presentation with TT's future outlook of ACC and the final takeaways.

BEN AKADA: Thanks, Steph. Now, let's talk about the future of ACC at Thornton Tomasetti. We have taken the first steps, but there's still a lot to come. What is the future of ACC at Thornton Tomasetti? Well, we're looking ahead to see what's coming after this initial rollout.

A lot will ride on-- a lot is consolidating our cloud work, into one cloud where we can. We have automation ideas in the works, such as a project start-up for better project creation and Revit setup. With automation, we can have a consistent model set up and folder structure.

We can also run model health checkers when we have our ACC data available to us. And along with project startup, we'll be building a project closeout. Having a consistent archiving method is always needed. And with ACC files and folders consistently named and consistent guidance on the workflow, we will be able to archive a project consistently as well.

Other ideas will include incorporation of other ACC modules like the Model Coordination. Rolling out Model Coordination with ACC is something that has been requested by many here. We hadn't been using it in BIM 360 at this point. My hope is when we have our teams up and running and comfortable, we can roll out that Model Coordination module.

There was also a push for us for the ACC build portion versus our current PlanGrid offering. That will be another large lift but will be worth it in the long run.

Now time for some closing thoughts. Is the juice worth the squeeze? Moving to ACC and creating all this content and training was quite the lift, but we do believe it was worth it. We all know that-- we all knew that BIM 360 has been around for quite some time now. We know it's an old technology and that ACC is what Autodesk is promoting as their future.

I wanted my company trained on these latest offerings. And as a consultant, we need our teams up to speed on all of these new products as well. And there's the fact that any future integrations from Autodesk will be focused on ACC and not on BIM 360. We also feel that bridge integration is going to be a game changer, the ability to bridge from our internal hub back and forth to our clients hub in the future-- back to our clients is the future for us.

This point ties back to one of my earlier original slides showing how many of our files live outside of our hub. We want as much of our property as we can back on our side of the fence, where we can control and manage the product.

And that's our presentation. We've attached our LinkedIn contact information here, so please reach out and connect with us. Thanks.