New BIM Managers Startup Guide

CHARLES BERTEAUX: I'm a minute earlier or so, but we're going go ahead and get started. Before we actually jump into the presentation, I'm big on demographics and analytics and stuff. So many people this is your first AU? Oh, wow. Quite a few. Good. Congratulations, you've all made it to the right room. Welcome to AU. How many people are CAD managers in here? How many people are BIM or VDC construction? And how many people are other? What do you do, sir?

AUDIENCE: Just a computer [INAUDIBLE]

CHARLES BERTEAUX: Anybody else that was the other? What do you do?

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

CHARLES BERTEAUX: Cool, cool. So this class is basically me taking my 20 plus years worth of experience in the AECOM field and throwing it into an hour. I have 352 slides. Just kidding. But I do have quite a few slides to go over. I hope that a lot of it you guys will find very useful. I'm kind of taking all that guesswork out of trying to become BIM managers and what it takes and giving it to you today.

Why are you here? By the year 2022, the BIM market is going to be worth about $11.7 billion. Right now in the industry, our market is completely tapped with resources. There are not enough BIM managers, or CAD managers that are willing to become BIM managers, to fill all the needs that are out there.

Right now we have five generations worth of people working out in the industry. And like I said, there are not enough people to fill those types of positions. So thank you for coming and attending this class, because you're going to be one of them. That's a bit nauseating.

So a little bit about me. Like I said, I have 20 plus years of industry experience. I have done everything from track homes to multimillion dollar homes to petrol chemical plants, semi-conductor, you name it. I have design content and provided automation for every single discipline out there known to mankind. I also have about 20 years of graphic design in digital media publication experience. So you'll notice my presentation has lots of cool pictures and stuff.

On the forums, which we'll talk about a little bit later, you can see my avatar right there. I think Autodesk actually switched it to that one. So you'll either see my picture or in some few places, you still might see me as that. I am Autodesk certified in a few things. I am also a member of the Autodesk Expert Elite.

And I belong to something you guys may hear at the keynote called Autodesk Service Marketplace. Basically it's something brand new that's going to start this year. And basically it's a place where anybody out in the field can go to enlist services from people like me at a cost.

Class summary, I think we all know why we're here. Want to talk about the handout really quick. Like I said, I'm providing you lots of links and stuff so you guys don't have to go out there and do all the legwork yourself on what I'm presenting. There's, I don't know, five or six pages of this.

And then there's also three additional pages worth of links that are just my regular go-to stuff for BIM. Some of them are fun. Some of them are not. Some of them are more technical. But lots and lots of resources. So when you get home, make sure you download both the handout and the presentation.

So what are we going to learn today? What is BIM? There's 10 key terms that basically are the underlying backbone of what BIM is. We'll talk about that. We'll go into some roles and responsibilities. Salaries, I know that's kind of a hot item. But it seems like the way a lot of companies now are going, they are not keeping that type of information close to the chest anymore. And they're making it a lot more public.

Even within the organization itself, salaries are a lot more open, and people are talking about that. So I will be talking about salaries. How to integrate with managers and those people that don't want to do BIM. Standards and templates are always important. Training is important. I'm going to give you a lot of my little tools of the trade that are the bread and butter for what I do every day. And then eight steps to help you guys market BIM within your firm.

So what is BIM? If you go out onto Google, you'll find hundreds, if not thousands, of these really pretty infographics. And they all kind of tell the same story. But what is BIM? BIM is a way for us to design our physical world and transfer that into data that is easily read by many applications. One of Autodesk's big things over the last year has been trying to get all their softwares to talk to each other seamlessly. So that kind of plays into this.

10 key terms. Project phasing. So this isn't like your SD, CD, IOC. When it comes to BIM, there's a few other choices. 2D flat data. CAD, god. I know we have some CAD managers in here, but I can't stand CAD. Sorry. But it's still required. There are tons and tons of people-- this was the backbone of Autodesk. And it's not going away anytime soon. But it is a part of BIM.

You have your phrases that I talked about. CAD layouts, basic measuring sketches, photos, all that is considered all your 2D stuff. Then we get into what people are really pushing today, what people consider BIM. Your existing conditions, safety and logistics, animation renderings, pre-fab BIM, spooling. Is there anybody that's doing fabrication? Anything? Good, good. How about laser and point cloud? Yeah, that's really big. It is the perfect way to get your existing conditions.

4D, your scheduling. This has to do with a lot of how you get the stuff from your drawings onto the physical site so that it can all be constructed and installed. 5D, that's all your cost estimation, putting a dollar to what it's going to cost to build or erect that structure. A lot of that can be mined from your BIM if you put it in.

6D has to do with sustainability. We're starting to see lots and lots of more applications and add-ons for the different softwares like Revit, AutoCAD, that allow you to track lead and sustainable stuff for Green Building Council, stuff like that. So definitely look for those if that's something you want to pursue.

And then 7D, this is where everything actually gets turned over to the owners. And it's for facility maintenance, how you go out there and repair the stuff that's out in the field based upon the BIM that you give them. Usually for big facilities and stuff, there's a big book that you have to turn over to them and a certain set of models that have certain amount of data into them so that they can track all this stuff. Not so much your little schools and stuff like that, but usually you're bigger, more high tech clients. Somebody has to turn that kind of stuff over to them.

Model types. So in our industry, there's basically two different types of models. There is your PIM, which is your project. That's were the actual designing of what is to be built happens. And then we have our AIM, or asset. I don't know why that winds there. I couldn't get it to combine with anything else to save my life. So we have this little triangle here that is going to be our design, where we have our briefing with the clients, finding out what they need, what they want.

Then we get into some conceptualize designing. Hopefully it's massing so they can be easily transferable over into your BIM. If not, 2D AutoCAD is fine and still used, like I said. Getting into more of the definitions of back and forth, back and forth, is this what you really want? Iterative design, stuff like that. And then you go out and actually design it. And then there's the building and commissioning of it.

A lot of that stuff is still on our side, especially with BIM. Because a lot of the focus and attention and information that you need is pushed up to the front of the project where it can make the most impact instead of handing being handled through construction where it's all change orders and RFIs. And it's very expensive. And then you have the close out.

And then on the other side, we have documentation, non-graphical data, and your graphic model that we end up turning over, like I said, the manual that you have to give a lot of high tech companies that are very BIM savvy. And they want it for the operation, the in use, of how to maintain their facilities. So these two sections represent what is considered your PIM and your AIM.

And if you're really savvy, hopefully you'll throw it into something called a Common Data Environment, or a CDE. So what is a CDE? Basically there's two portions to any sort of collaboration design environment. There's what you keep internal that you share with only your staff, the people that are designing what you have, your engineers, stuff like that. And then you have the side that's all external, things that you share with your clients or the trades, the people bidding on it, contractors, all that kind of stuff.

It is possible to get all of these people, even the owner, in the same environment so they're all looking at the same information at the same time so there's less churn, less paper, less a lot of waste. And it's called the CDE. So this is an example of what we use internally at SSOE group. That's my team of BIM people up there. But it's all hosted on SharePoint, which is accessible through every Microsoft application that's out there. It's very easy to use. It's basically an internal web page, if you will, for everything.

And I can't really read it all that well because of these cruddy screens. But we have a calendar. I have a section that's for tips and tricks, lunch and learns. When I'm able to go inside the factory, which used to be something called Autodesk Gunslingers, I posted all that stuff there. All my Dynamo tips and tricks and all my plug-ins and stuff go there, anything I get from Autodesk University, BIM Roundtable, which I'll talk about here in a few minutes.

I have a ticketing system for help and needs and wants. Because people's stuff is always breaking, and it's up to me and my team to go out and resolve and find out what's wrong. 95% which is user error, right? And then I have a page dedicated to each discipline. In our company, we have every discipline in-house. At my particular office, the only one we don't is landscaping and civil. So those aren't represented.

And then there's a couple of pages for various client standards and stuff. But this is what we use right now. Where everybody is pushing, including Autodesk, is the cloud. The cloud is the next buzzword. What we have out there today. I'm sure many of you are familiar with a lot of these types of platforms. They're all good at what they do. They all do something a little different for marketing purposes and to say they're better than everybody else.

But at the end of the day, these things are nothing more than a glorified FTP, some place for you to store information, and somebody else can grab it. And that's it. In today's industry, this really isn't enough, especially with the amount of data that is within the things that we're designing. So because we're at Autodesk, I have to talk about Autodesk products, not because I want to, but because I like it, and they have good products.

So this is what Autodesk's solution is. I'm going to tell you right now that this slide is going to be out dated after the keynote, because they're introducing new technologies that take this and throw everything together, which I'll talk about also here in a little bit. But right now, they have A360, all their 360 or their cloud technology platforms, BIM 360, A360 Teams, 360 Docs, Field, Glue, all those things.

It is a very, very good platform. You can mine data out of this thing like crazy. You put in a search, doo doo doo doo, and it starts pulling up, not only the documents, but information that's in the documents if it's a known format like PDF or Word or Excel. Very good. Permissions, all that stuff. Very well designed. So check it out if you can.

Model detail, level of detail or development, LOD. Personally, I think LOD is a pile of crap. The world we live in is 3D. I mean, we can look at a chair, and we know exactly what that chair is. So why would we not model it just like that? Granted, we don't need maybe every screw that's on that chair unless you need it for a clash detection or something else downstream.

But we know what the objects are. Why not just model it? With today's technologies, computers, cloud processing, there's no reason why we can't. I'm on a daily basis dealing with Revit, BIM, Navis models, point clouds that are terabytes in size. There's no reason why we can't do it. So what is the LOD? Basically it states that for every phase within your project, you are to tell what object is supposed to be represented in what way. Silly, right?

But the only place I see this useful is for like our company, we do fabrication also. We've gotten into that. I'm a huge advocate of single source of truth. We can take a Revit model all the way from schematic design all the way through fabrication. On the projects where we don't do that, that is when I pull out this document and basically state that us during design, up until IFC, we will be modeling at, say, level 350 or 300.

After that, when we have those contractors on board that will be doing the spooling and shop drawings and all that stuff for us that we elect not to do ourselves, then that's where I put in this document. Hey, it's your responsibility, it's all part of the contract, so we know who's doing what. But other than that, I don't know. One of those things that's just out there, and a lot of people use it, and nobody ever looks at it. They fill it out, and it never gets looked at.

So like I said, because of BIM, all the information needs to be handled more up front. So engaging all of the people up front will give you better decisions so you don't have to worry about any of this BS. Like I said, we live in a world where everything around us is 3D. Model it.

Contract documents. How many people from here in the US? Whoa. And outside? Here in the US, we're kind of governed by the AIA, American Institute of Architects. I don't know. But essentially there's three documents that govern BIM here in the States. It's going to be your E202, your G201, and the G202.

The E203 is kind of like your-- what's a good term? It's like your project execution plan, if you will, in just regards to BIM. The Project Digital Data Protocol is basically how you're going to use the information that you're building. And then the third one is for the roles and responsibilities, who takes ownership of what elements at what time and stuff like that.

When you get overseas, the only thing I put in here was the UK's. They're all governed by BIM level 2 now, which was mandated earlier this year. I think everybody knows. I'm not too sure what's in these documents. But I just wanted to make you aware if you weren't. I personally don't deal with too much outside of the US, except for Canada every once in a while or Mexico. But it's all good things.

A lot of documentation that I have gathered over the years are loosely based on a lot of this stuff, because they're so far ahead of the game. I personally believe that the US needs to standardize this stuff if we're ever going to get anywhere and fill the needs that are coming for that $17.5 billion worth of value to the industry. Non contract documents. You'll hear it called either a PeP or a PxP project execution plan.

So what it is, basically, is there's four main sections in this document. The first one goes over what are the goals and uses for your BIM, things like, I don't know if you can read that over there, cost estimation, phase planning, design authoring, lighting analysis, site utilization planning, basically how you're going to take your BIM models and what have you and use them.

The next one is the execution. Basically they're all flow charts that you come up with that basically tell you at what stage of the project you're going to take this bit of information, export it or transfer it to this party, and how they're going to use it, and how you get that information back when iterations are made. Then there's the information exchange requirements. So this is very much like that LOD document that I talked about.

Any BIM execution plan that you pull off the web, Penn State is probably the biggest one that everybody uses, either that or the Army Corps of Engineers, they all have this embedded in it. Supporting infrastructure for implementing BIM. Basically what your strategies are going to be for delivering, communication, your technology if it's not up to par with what you're trying to do and model quality is all in that.

IPD. So Integrated Project Delivery. This is what the heart and soul is of what BIM should be. There's basically eight key steps. The first one is you want to valve all team members, doesn't matter who they are, contractor, owner, get them all in the same room talking the same language so that you can come out with a quality product at the end of the day with less RFIs, less change orders, less confusion. If everybody is on the same page from the start, there'll be less issues.

Then you're going to want to start building your BIM models, facilitate collaboration, set up contract mechanisms that enable open collaboration, minimize paper by having some sort of CDE that hopefully everybody plays in, and then you want to exchange information with them and get iterations digitally, create a culture of trust and sharing, and then communicate the design through 3D visualization. How many people are using any sort of 3D visualization? VR? AR? What do you got? What are you using?

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

CHARLES BERTEAUX: HoloLens? Yeah? Our company, we use HTC Vive. Pretty cool stuff there. IFC. So this is basically the common language between any product that's out there. Anything that's considered mainstream should be able to export what's called a IFC model, Industry Foundation Class. It was produced originally by Autodesk, believe it or not.

And then many years ago, back in, '95 I think it was, '95, they got together with a bunch of big industry leaders for architecture engineering and construction. And basically this new group was built called the Building Smart Alliance. So what is inherently in IFC models? So the black box represents your model. You have all these objects that have the property and the relationships that are built around them. And that's basically it.

It'll tell you all the characteristics, size, color, length, all that kind of stuff. But it's read by many, many, many different products. The major mainstream BIM applications are, of course, Autodesk, Bently, ARCA:CAD if you use that, I don't know, Allplan. There's a bunch of ones for structural that are pretty mainstream. The one that I'm most familiar with is Tekla and InterCAD.

If you're getting into the building services side, there's some for those. There are a few just viewers out there that will allow you to open a IFC model and just look at it. If you're getting into the database side for trying to mine those models for information, it's mostly used for the people who are doing take offs and stuff. There's these ones. There's some dictionaries that talk about it.

And then there's even some building code ones now. One to look out for is the [INAUDIBLE] They might have a booth here this year. I haven't checked it out yet. But they have a pretty good product. And then the Army Corps of Engineers, they have a product that is due to be released, I want to say, second quarter of this coming up year that is supposed to just knock everything to shreds. So be looking for that. I'm not sure what the name of it is yet. But it's out there somewhere.

COBie. So this has to do with all the information that the owner needs out of our NIM models and BIM technologies so that they can operate the building. And COBie was started by the Army Corps of Engineers. And now it's its own entity. And the last one, data manager. So what's that? That's you. Or at least it is now after this class, right?

So roles and responsibilities. Many of the BIM guidelines and documentation that's out there talk about this kind of a setup, where there's some sort of BIM managing director that is directly plugged in with your executive boards or high level management person. And then if the company is big enough, the people that develop this do have construction on their site or at least partner with construction companies.

It's split up into three buckets basically. You have your strategic, your design, and your construction. One thing to point out is that you'll see that clashing is on both the design and construction. And that's very important that both parties know what is clashing. Because a lot of times what you as designers or we as designers design doesn't mean it's always necessarily 100% able to be built or installed out in the field.

So client facing, basically that's the person that goes and talks to the clients and gets them engaged in BIM. How do you want to use it? Oh, these are our new technologies. This is what we're using. Come see what we're doing. Come check out our VR. That kind of stuff.

Business development. They're the people who sit down with our technologies, the company's game plan, and come up with what the long end goal and roadmap is for the company. And then legal, got to have legal. There are people being sued every single day over BIM and people not delivering what they promised to be delivering.

It is a huge business right now. Make sure you have legal people that review your AIE contract documents, your-- any contract that you have, you should have legal people looking at them. Design. So you have your employees, and basically they're doing all of the design. That's what this one slide means. Nothing big there.

Project support, this is more of the whole team thing. Like I said, we have five generations of people out in the market today. Baby boomers are about to hit the door. We have Generation X, Xennials now, and millennials. And then there's a new group that I didn't update the slide for, but they're very soon to be coming out on the market.

[LAUGHTER]

The issue with these two generation of people, there are not enough of these people left around to pass down information by word of mouth. Because like I said, they're all out the door. Anybody from here down, they know the software. There's no problem with that. Autodesk has been giving away free software for years. They have flooded the market with software.

Any student can go out there and get it for free. They know the software. They have no clue how to put a building together. So there's a huge gap that we have to fill by catching these people before they get out the door to try to teach and pass down the knowledge. Because these people are not very good at documentation.

[LAUGHTER]

They're all nice people, just not very good at a few things. Project support. So this gets more into your smaller companies, mom-and-pop shop, architect engineering, MEP firms, stuff like that. So the positions that are usually within these type of companies are there'll be some sort of design BIM, VDC type manager. There's usually job captains. If you have multiple disciplines like MEP in your firm, you'll probably want some sort of champion for that discipline.

Then you have your BIM technicians, which are the people designing everything every day. And then if you can afford it-- oop. Sorry. Too many clicky clicks. If you can afford it, you'll want to spend extra money to get somebody to just do clash detection. That is a full-time freaking job. Maybe not for small mom-pop shops, but with the type of models and data that I'm pushing out every day, it is a full-time job.

Their job, basically, is just to make sure that the models are compiled and issues are identified. They go to meetings and issue resolution and make sure that people know who's in charge of fixing what and what model by what date so that you can get a deliverable out the door. And then that all comes back, and it's this nice little circle. And hopefully at the end of the day, you have fully coordinated models.

There is no such thing as a clash free model. I know a lot of people say that. There is no such thing. What's a good example? Pipes. Pipes going through architectural walls. I'm not going to sit and punch a bunch of holes in a wall so I can have 50 million pipes running through it. It's just a known clash. I hate that term. I prefer something called adjudicated. You've taken it as far as it can go.

We have this little report that we have that we do when we go to these meetings that has every known participant on it. And there's due dates and stuff like that. And this gets handed over at IFC to the contractor so that they know what has been taken care of and what hasn't.

In my company, in my little neck of the woods up in Portland, Oregon, this is how my group is set up. There's me at the top. We basically have two main groups. A lot of the high tech stuff has a base built. And then we have diversification. These are the type of skills that my people are able to handle.

When I put out resumes, like I said, our market is tapped. I've had a wreck open for two or three months now, and nobody's answered it. The few people that have have been from overseas, and it's just too much of a hassle. But they need to know the software basically. Communication is key to our business. And they need to have some sort of basic understanding of how to put a building together. Sorry.

And then duties and responsibilities, they lead and facilitate, helping the designers, asset the apartment management. There's tons of stuff that we have our fingers in, including IT. We provide input to the project managers, project execution plans, like I said, kickoff meetings, all sorts of stuff there.

And then, like I said, for this slide, what we want to look at is that BIM champion. Like I said, we have every discipline in-house, except for landscaping and civil in my particular office. And basically once a week, I get all these people together, and we have what's called a BIM round table, where that's my chance to push out all the technologies and stuff, make sure standards are being followed, all that kind of stuff.

And BIM manager. Tada! So this is what my job title really is. Role of the BIM manager is what? It's pretty extensive. I'll let you guys just read through this. But we deal with software, all the standards, the management of people and talent. We provide support, training. We're a project interface. Marketing of BIM services, if they don't have somebody dedicated for that.

Definitely get involved with your industry organizations, Autodesk University, obviously, you're here, any local user groups that you have, AUGI. And then there's a huge list of qualifications. And you have to know the software expertly. Coding. I'm sorry, but in today's world, you have to know some language of coding. If not, then hire somebody that does.

Coming very soon, we're not going to have software. It is the goal of Autodesk within the next 10 years to not have any software that you can download. If you go out on the internet and try to pirate software, Autodesk, Adobe, and Microsoft are the top three pirated softwares. It'll all be cloud hosted, which you'll get a taste of at the keynote. But you'll basically have a thin client that just reads the cloud.

So these are the preferred ones that interact with all the Autodesk software. I haven't quite gotten into Forge yet, but that one is going to be the key. So this is what the future is going to hold. So you're going to have Forge, which is going to talk to all the BIM 360 applications. Forge is going to be our plug and play piece, like LEGO bricks, to pull pieces out of all these different applications, to build the solution that is perfect just for us.

And at the end of the day, when you master all that stuff, this is what you look like. Salaries. See how I'm doing on time. So I divided this up by low, middle, and high, and then a master, which is anybody considered with 18 years of experience. The place where I got all this information was over there.

AUGI does a salary survey every year. PayScale, Glassdoor, and Indeed are probably the top ones. Up in the Pacific Northwest, that's what people are going for. And then the little blips like that, that's where it was the highest out of these states. So Pacific Northwest, Southwest. Now, some of you may be lower or higher. Don't take offense to this. But this just shows you what the market looks like right now.

And it's kind of crazy the spread. Right now it seems like everything's going gangbusters on the West Coast. So the average a year for a BIM manager with eight to 10 years of experience is about 73 grand a year. Integration with management and non BIM people.

Like I said, it takes my team and all of these people to bang the heads of all those non BIM people to get them to comply. This is really my full BIM team. What's missing out of this? Management and non BIM people.

[LAUGHTER]

So what is organizational culture? An organization doesn't change until the individuals within it change. You can't change people until you change the workflows and prove it to them. Those people who are most adaptive to change are going to be the people that succeed. If we can't teach that to the people that we work with and keep them from holding on to all their legacy crud, we're never going to get anywhere. And I think this one has been said in a few pass AUs.

Basically what needs to happen is we need to empower the people to drop their traditional ways for these new approaches. So how do we do that? We structure a process of engagement that leads to sustained organizational change. Step one, you need a clear definition of the objective.

Step two, get employees involved. If they're not involved and they're kept on the sidelines, they feel less important, and they'll be more combative with the change. So get them involved. Give them a task to do. You have to build blocks for three weeks, whatever. Step three, you need to get that constant feedback as you're trying to get this stuff done so you can make it better.

So during the process, we managers train, mentor, and build communities in order to align traditional workflows with new approaches. We're going to take a lot of people out of their comfort zones, but that's OK. You just need to know that as long as you keep them engaged, they're more likely to help and follow suit.

And then there's always a disconnect between what the corporate BIM thinks they should be having and what we can actually execute. And it's our jobs to bridge that gap. And then there's the client. They're another aspect. They all say they want BIM. Who said BIM? What is BIM?

There's a lot of clients out there that have no clue what BIM is. They just know it's the new buzzword, and everybody is asking for it. So they're going to ask for it. It's our job to educate them on what it means and what actually we can give them. Understand the reasons, engage key decision makers, gain trust, provide the value, because we're the specialists.

Be clear about your responsibilities and accountabilities. Don't oversell. That's the quickest way you'll get into trouble. Make a business case out of it of how you're going to execute it. Then plan and execute. Demonstrate that it's not just overhead, but it can be your company's platform for innovation. And then documentation is key. And then just sustain it.

Standards and templates. Oof, 10 o'clock. There are tons and tons of standards out there. See, do I have them on here? Penn State is probably the biggest one. That's the one most people go to, or the National Institute. But I put links to all these on there. You can grab all of their BIM execution plans.

Penn State has a 325 something page Bible that goes along with what BIM should be according to them. Lots of good information out there. It's free to download. I strongly suggest you do it and keep it by your bedside. It makes great night reading. And then there's also all these other governmental organizations that have BIM, you just don't know about it unless you work with them. National parks and services, that's a crazy one. Building huts our in the forest.

So basically, what do you get when you get all of these standards together? You kind of have to sift through the weeds and come up with what your company's BIM execution plan is. Then you need to take your contract documents and make sure the language in those align. If you don't, that's where you can get into legal issues. And then tada, you'll have your BIM production manual out of all this, or be able to make one.

So this is a high level look at what our production manual actually looks like. It goes over things like roles and responsibilities, which I kind of covered. If everybody's on the same page, you know who to go to when things screw up. The directory structure of how it looks on our Revit servers and network, how we name our models, work sets, importing CAD, linking and inserting into files, keynoting.

The best way to go through all this stuff is to first look at Autodesk's Help. They have a huge dictionary online for every product. And start playing pieces of that into this as your backbone. And then from there, start filling in all of your contract document language and custom tailoring it to you in conjunction with all the other information that I've provided you out there online.

Then you need templates. If you don't ever set up templates, things can get squirrely really quick. Basically they provide a level of consistency across all projects for any given client. I strongly suggest if you have multiple different clients or key facets to your work, then you probably need a template for each one. Because they're each going to require different things.

So what do you put inside templates? All this stuff. This is the backbone at a minimum. These are the types of things that you need to adjust within Revit. That's what we primarily use. Like I said, a single source of truth. But you have to go through and set all this stuff up to even get started. And then there's a little cartoon down there. I hear that a lot.

What not to put in your templates. I would suggest don't put details. It's fine if you have a model that is strictly dedicated to details. And after AU, I didn't have a chance to upload it. There's this great class I was offered, I want to say it was in 2013, on making a Revit model as your detail library. And then you're able to push and pull that stuff into other models.

Right now currently, if you have it a detail in a detail view, that's nontransferable between models. There's a trick around that. And this guy gave a really good way to do that. So after the class, I'll be uploading that as well. Also for all the families and stuff that you start using, don't get overly detailed. Like I said, you know what the chair looks like. Model it. There's no need to get every nut and bolt or anything like that. That will never be seen.

Worksets is another big one. Worksets are not layers. You don't need one for every single object that you put into a model. Naughty, naughty. Training. So there's lots of good things out there. All of these companies here offer some sort of BIM management certification programs.

Other than Autodesk here in the US, there's not a whole lot of use that I see. Trying to go and get one of these certifications doesn't really get you anything more, unless you're go into a really, really big company. Internal, there's lots of good tools out there. Lynda or LinkedIn, that is becoming huge. Pluralsight, that's another good one out there.

Eagle Point, they have something that if-- I know they're here, you should go check out their booth. They have something that is like plug and play for all the Autodesk softwares where you can add your own training materials and on demand video, all that kind of stuff. And it's just a little dashboard that sits on your desktop.

And then always, you'll probably want to have Lunch and Learn, stuff like that. Make sure you record it yourself. I use Welcome FlashBack or Screencast. And then always, like I said, document it. Put it on SharePoint, OneNote, Evernote, Internal Wiki if you have one. Tools of the trade, the bread and butter.

So Autodesk does have an app store. Do you guys all know about it? The only requirement for a lot of stuff is that you have an Autodesk account, which I'm assuming all of you do here, because you made it through the door. They have a lot that are free. Some are trials, some do cost. Like you can see down there, $324 a license. But there's lots of good stuff out there.

Autodesk also when you install their tools, if your IT hasn't blocked it, they have a desktop application that will tell you about new things that have come up. I would say don't play around with site designer. If you're going to get into site stuff, get into InfraWorks or something like that. That is a horrible, horrible piece of equipment. And then there's Dynamo and Dynamo Studio.

So that one that I showed you that costed, I use this every day. This has so many amazing tools. I can take one of my one terabyte models and strip it down to 350 kilobytes in seconds. I mean, it will pull everything out of that model except for a 3D view and all your modeling elements. Maybe not kilobytes. So I can take that model and very easily transfer it over to marketing or somebody else who doesn't need all that superfluous information, because they're never going to do anything with it.

Tons of stuff, families, parameters. I use these tools every single day. A lot of free tools. The other ones you have to pay for. BIMcollab, this one is really cool. We've just started testing and playing around with it, but I really like what I see so far. Basically it is a in Revit manager that will allow you to track conversations and changes and iterations to objects within the model.

It gets exported. And there's a dashboard on the web so that your client can look at it and interact with your models also. Very cool. We primarily are testing it out right now for Navisworks and Revit. That's an example of what the web interface looks like. Ideate, they're another good one. BIMLink and explore. BIMLink basically is a way to push information to Excel you can manipulate in Excel and push it back into Revit.

If you have Access database, you can also take Access databases and plug it up with this for things that it's exporting back and forth and get lots of good information. Sticky, It's kind of cool. It just takes junk Excel and paste it exactly how it is. You can't really manipulate the data once it's in, but it's kind of cool just for a quick down and dirty.

UniFi, families, this is the way to go. I don't care what other tool you have out there for managing families and content, go check out their booth. This is it. And they have just made it freaking dirt cheap to own. You get this handy little web interface so all your content families can just be-- as long as you have internet connection, you have access to this tool.

These are all programs that it interfaces with. They're adding more almost every month. And almost every single type of document that you can think of, you can put up there as well. So if you have specs that go with this certain family, you can link all this stuff up together. Like I said, if you have internet connection, you have access. They have nice administration dashboards that are painless, very easy to use.

The other thing that I like is the forums. How many people know about the forums? Yeah. These are gold. So I mentioned that I'm part of the Expert Elite. We're the people who manage the forums, escalate things when there's issues, stuff like that. The one thing I did want to point out though is the submit an idea.

There used to be lots of wishlists out there. AUGI has one. That's all crap. All the developers, except for maybe AutoCAD I think-- AUGI and AutoCAD are like this-- but this is where the developers are looking for their next big idea to implement, minus all the bug fixes and stuff like that. The higher you vote something up, the more likely it will be implemented.

So if you have a large organization, send out an email, hey, I have this great idea. All of a sudden, you have 100 votes. Just want to show you, and this is just, not this last week, but the week before, I had a bunch of ones that were implemented. And you can see that one actually got through with three votes. That's kind of crazy.

But they do look at this stuff. And they do implement it. If you have a good idea or a fix, this is where you go to get it done. Out there in front of the exhibit hall, they have a booth dedicated just for this platform, ideas, anything. You can throw anything up there at them. A lot of things.