BIM Collaborate Pro: ACCelerating Distributed Team Workflows

MATTHEW ANDERLE: Welcome to BIM Collaborate Pro accelerating our distributed team workflows. Today we're going to talk about how we can get your team and your next project into the Autodesk Construction Cloud. My name is Matthew Anderle. And I'm a BIM and technology evangelist and have been for the last 23 years using the collaboration platforms that we're going to talk about today for up to 10 years as early as when BIM 360 teams was introduced.

I'm the director of Digital Strategy for AECOM. And I serve as a member of our group that helps to establish new workflows in these types of platforms and introduce these new technologies to our teams. I'm joined by my colleague today Catherine Crowley. And I'm going to have her introduce herself now.

KATHERINE CROWLEY: Hello. My name is Katherine Crowley. I'm a project coordinator at AECOM focusing on our federal and health care markets. I've served as a document controller for a variety of projects sizes. And at AECOM, we were early adopters of what is now BIM Collaborate Pro, which has been proven to be instrumental in managing project documentation throughout the project life cycle.

MATTHEW ANDERLE: So today we're going to introduce our session. And it's really about how your team can approach this technology and approach the cloud to use it for design collaboration. We're going to focus on some of those key modules that represent the efficiencies and provide us these opportunities in the cloud to bring our teams together, especially within our distributed workforce that we have today.

And within that, there's a few learning objectives that we're going to bring forward. One is that we want to share what we've found is our business ROI. We're going to talk about the positive effects that the cloud has had for our teams and how our integration of different key stakeholders throughout the process has improved what our team output and our project delivery looks like.

We want to understand the functionality of a few of the key features so we're going to focus on those within the BIM Collaborate Pro aspects of Autodesk Construction Cloud. We're going to apply some transformational workflows and share those with you, things that we have found to work as a best approach in adopting this new technology, and then employ integrated methods that help your teams to communicate better, maintain quality, and reach your project delivery.

So first up, business ROI. It's always important to evaluate this when we're introducing new technology to a company. So as you see in our society today, we're creating data on an unprecedented level. There's about 23% growth year over year of new data that we're creating. So that growth is going to obviously cascade into what we're doing in our projects. I predict that we're also going to see a 23% growth in our data packages that we're delivering, including asset information and other key components to our digital workflows that become work product.

On average, you'll see that with our current connectivity, 100 megabits per second, we are waiting about 24 hours for a terabyte of information to come down from the cloud or from the internet or wherever you're downloading source is. That kind of delay obviously can be very impactful to what we're doing.

If you broadcast that across the way that our teams collaborate, in a legacy method we used to share information, sending it through file transfer methods, or through hard drives, or other means to share information through our servers and then our teams connected to servers. But that model worked until we started to have more of a distributed workforce or remote environments. And connecting different team members from different locations is important.

One challenge with legacy technology is that VPN has this latency that wraps over the top of our transmission. So when you're trying to save and synchronize information, when you're trying to communicate with our staff, that VPN connection, just in the practice of what that technology is causes some challenges.

So instead of trying to distribute data out to the team, our focus was to bring team to the data. And that's exactly what the Autodesk Construction Cloud does for us. It provides us connectivity from our consultants, from our own staff, from our remote staff, and a lot of different technologies that connect to that data like tablets, and phones, and other internet connected devices. So the way that we want to broadcast our data is that those devices come to the source. And that source is our single source of truth as we work through our projects.

Now the value of collaboration extends to different key stakeholders in the project. First of all, project leaders and the way that they're able to manage now have this single source of information to review, including tracking what the project progress is, looking at the complexities of how the team is coordinating within the project, and that holistic management style of being within that team within that cloud workspace is very important.

Democratizing access for our different contributors is also important. Not everybody has the same connection or the same resources on their side. And so we want to make sure that we have a fully integrated team as we continue through our projects. Now leveraging advanced analytics isn't always a capacity that teams have within their local offices or local server environments, so leveraging the cloud computational approach is also one of the key benefits.

KATHERINE CROWLEY: Now we're going to introduce a case study where our team transitioned to the Autodesk Construction Cloud and BIM 360 Collaborate Pro. Excuse me. Let me redo that. 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. Now we are going to introduce a case study where our team transitioned to the Autodesk Construction Cloud and BIM Collaborate Pro.

The case study that we are using is a new hospital campus that consists of approximately 1 million square foot medical facility, including a 200,000 square foot ambulatory care center as well as a 19,000 square foot regional laundry, a 45,000 square foot central utility plant, and new structured parking for roughly 2,600 cars. Our team was made up of 17 different firms anchored by a joint venture between two AE firms with 15 subcontractors. We created 122 models. The campus contains 12 buildings and four hosting methods were employed as the project evolved, which Matt will discuss a bit further in a moment.

The project team is made up of managers, subject matter experts, and designers, each with different levels of experience in various arenas. ACC offers intuitive and user friendly tools that allow everyone on a team like this one to have a full understanding of the project at every stage.

The 122 models are organized by campus, building, discipline, subdiscipline, and finally as aggregate models. The new hospital campus is home to a large hospital building divided into two wings and separated by a central concourse. The hospital is flanked by north and south parking garages, a combined central utility plant and laundry facility, a maintenance building, a main guard station, a water tower, and several outbuildings.

MATTHEW ANDERLE: One of the challenges we had, like Katherine was saying, is that, over the duration of this project, we had a challenge where we migrated between several different hosting platforms for them in total. And as our progress over the 10 years evolved into what is our final completed design, our collaboration platform had to evolve with it.

So as these new technologies and these new opportunities came available to us, like BIM 360 Teams, BIM 360 Docs, and the ACC, we look to evaluate whether that was something that fit well with our project and, in the end, we actually found that as we spent that time and effort to migrate into these different platforms, those efficiencies made up for the effort to move to those different platforms.

Now we're going to start a little bit into what the features of the Autodesk Construction Cloud and BIM Collaborate looks like. We're going to focus on getting started, knowing some of those key modules, managing projects through the Autodesk Cloud platform, and looking at the ways that our teams collaborate. And to get started, it's best to identify what those differences are.

So looking at a brief comparison of the BIM Collaborate and BIM Collaborate Pro services, we see that in comparison to what was been 360 Docs and BIM 360 Design and the other modules through that legacy platform, now we still have those same functionalities where BIM 360 Docs is now Autodesk Docs and Design Collaboration and those other familiar modules that we've used in the past carry forward with the addition of some added features within each of those modules. So insight and administration, all those have some new integrations that we can leverage and make available for our teams as we go into these complex projects.

It's important to note that BIM Collaborate versus BIM Collaborate Pro is the difference between able to work share within your authoring models or not. So BIM Collaborate Pro provides you access to Revit, Civil 3D, and Plant 3D collaboration methods and cloud work sharing. So that Pro stipulation gives you access into that kind of integrated team.

Getting started, it's as simple as the Autodesk Construction Cloud is your hub and that hosts a project site. Within your project site, then you have a few key modules that come along with what is BIM Collaborate in general. Autodesk Docs is a main staple of the project site, which gives you the document control, document versioning, approvals, reviews, transmittals, those kinds of aspects of the way we control documentation within the project.

And then BIM collaborate has design collaboration and model coordination included which gives us that opportunity to create those packages, look at clash detection, and then as we add the pro feature of that, then we get the cloud work sharing for our design authoring tools. Also included is insight, which gives us some analytics and dashboards so that we can review progress and track what kind of risks or other components of our project that we need to maintain as far as schedule costs and other things through a dashboard concept. Also provides us some integrations to bring in third party cards and other analytics through bespoke solutions.

And then project admin gives us that higher level of organization and management of our project. So the way that we create workflows and assign roles or people to manage those workflows and then also defining access for our team members and then what kind of roles and other considerations that we might have as far as their involvement on the project.

ACC offers a number of functions, the most important being that it serves as a common data environment for your distributed teams. As the industry continues to evolve, the value of being able to exchange, store, and work on multiple file types, all from one platform and without needing to work locally or offline, is critical. All activities are trackable and the permissions feature allows project administrators to control who has access to a file and at what level. Not only that but if a document needs to be rolled back to a previous version, ACC provides that capability as well.

So we're going to review a few key modules, including Docs, Design Collaboration, Model Coordination-- excuse me-- Model Coordination, Insight, and Project Admin. To add members to a project, they will each need to have an Autodesk ID. Autodesk IDs are free through a registration process and allow non-Autodesk subscribers to access your site. Members are added through the project admin module using their email addresses. From there, a company and roles are assigned. The company and role assignments are typically used to establish folder permissions.

Once a folder is created, permissions need to be applied. Permissions are cascaded through the directory tree and cannot be reduced in subfolders. A team member will always receive the highest level of permission granted either by company, role, or user-specific. To refer back to our case study, you can imagine that permissions across a project with 400 team members was pretty important.

Permission levels in ACC have evolved from those used in BIM 360 Design. This slide illustrates the new level hierarchy. If you've worked with legacy projects in the past, you may notice that there are added permission tiers for publishing markups and uploading content. As project teams continue to pursue additional cloud collaboration opportunities, remember to keep document security at the forefront of your project management strategy.

MATTHEW ANDERLE: It's important to know how to get into our Autodesk Construction Cloud and BIM Collaborate Pro environment. And the first is to initiate your project and initiate your models. To do that, you obviously work through Revit to open your file, create your templates, get your model established as far as geopositioning, and then you need to initiate that model into the BIM Collaborate Pro environment.

By using the tools on the Collaborate ribbon, you'll see that there's a Collaborate in the Cloud button. And that allows you then to select the project and location where you want to initiate your models. Note that once you've initiated models into cloud with the Collaborate in the Cloud tool, they'll now become work shared and the permissions that Katie just talked about will apply to those models as far as viewing, editing, linking, and other activities within the website.

Publish settings are also important. So when you initiate your model, the settings that are set through the Publish Settings are what gets published out to the web. And if you want something to be viewable, it has to be selected as part of that Publish Settings content. And if you don't want something to be published, obviously uncheck that and then that content will not be shared.

So as we look at the ways we publish our models, synchronizing with central is not something that publishes your model automatically. Through team collaboration, there are options to do that within the cloud. But within Revit, we also have the opportunity on the Revit dashboard. So if you look at your project and look at the folder structure where your models are saved, then you have the option to check all the models and do a holistic publish of all the files or select them individually and use the ellipsis menu to drop down and publish just an individual model or several individual models.

When you publish models, you'll see that, in team collaboration, you'll have these milestones and availability to create these packages that go through what we're doing as a publishing activity. And with that, it provides us some opportunity in the team to link to that content in different capacities. The first is live linking, which is a preferred method that we use at AECOM, which is to connect to our models in a live regard where changes that are made on a regular basis then are received by each of our other team members in kind, a shared method where if you've created packages and you've published those packages, if I've linked to that shared version of that model, then I will receive the package that you publish automatically.

And then consumed is something where the project teams who are linking backgrounds or other files into their project can choose when the right time is for that information to be updated. That's critical when you're doing load calculations or other evaluation. You might want to freeze the design series as you're running those calculations before you catch back up to live or in that shared capacity.

So the workflow does change. And when we talk about transformational workflows, it's different than the way that we work on our local servers and within our local offices. Because of the fact that we're using a cloud-based collaboration, we want to make sure that we have an integrated team and an integrated process. A few key specifics about how we collaborate and some criteria for our project delivery involves the things that we create in ways that are developed from standards, and are consistent with what our delivery methods are going to be and what the scope of the project is.

And always consider that we should have that delivery method in mind when we're creating and developing the initial files or developing the content for our project. As we evolve that design, we also evolve our process. So we want to make sure that we bring in new methodologies and new processes that focus more on the content, the coordination, the data, and the level of development that we're executing in the project. Quality is always of utmost important for us. And parallel with development, we often have validation process to go through in a cyclical fashion along the way.

And we want to make sure that we focus on what that level of development is along with the validation methods that we're using so that as we increase and evolve that project, our validation includes those additional design criteria, data, or, at the end, we're using it for our end use evaluation and then deliver a comprehensive digital design package extends well beyond construction as we know and often inclusive in our packages that we're delivering is asset management information, classifications, or giving performance benchmarks. And we want to make sure that we connect that information into our design package and deliver that in ways that are useful throughout the entire project life cycle.

KATHERINE CROWLEY: So in going back to our connected team slide, remember that even the best workflow does not eliminate bad practices.

MATTHEW ANDERLE: I agree, Katie. Our digital roadmap is important. So making sure that your team has a plan and a strategy to execute this type of migration into the cloud or even just the next project that launch that you have at the beginning is very important. Creating that contextual strategy based on what your delivery methods are, what your scope is, starting with standards and repeatable methods, something that's been proven, something that has gained efficiency, maybe you've even refined since the last project, and then key integrations. Map what those are throughout the project so you know at certain milestones events are going to happen or some sort of data output might happen, and then draw those connections based on the dependencies because as we create, and develop, and output that information, we do need to have that connected dependency on where that source is and make sure that we're validating from source to that delivery.

And then know what your project goals are because it's always important to back plan from the end to the beginning so that when you're developing throughout the process, you have that opportunity to create and meet your objectives. This can be simplified. And what we're trying to do is show what the complexity can be but it's also simple. Plan, initiate, coordinate, and deliver. So those key concepts and creating workflows around those key topics will help your teams to be successful as you're migrating into a cloud-based platform.

It's also important to know when we're working in a common data environment and authoring in a work sharing method what that means. In some cases, simply just permissions- based file sharing happens. But in the Autodesk Construction Cloud, it is important to note that Civil 3D, Plant 3D, and Revit all work slightly differently in the fact that Revit is working in a shared work sharing space or a confined or isolated work sharing space where the sync was central and the links that you're making appear transparent within the process that you're using, but it is refined in a way that is just isolated to the Revit environment. So Revit as a software talks to that Revit cloud when you're opening models and synchronizing with central in those workflows.

To see that information change on the web, you have to publish your models. That's why we talked about publishing and published sets, why it's so important to check the information that you want to have available online because, through Revit, we determine what is visible within the web. Civil 3D works a little bit differently. It uses Desktop Connector. And it uses the Autodesk Construction Cloud to share and host its files. It uses that for permissions.

So the same permission that Katie talked about earlier applies to the way that we have access to those Civil 3D files. And when we want to link information back to Revit, we use Desktop Connector to connect into the ACC platform into our site and use those permissions that we've been granted to link that information back into Revit. So just note that Revit as we sync with central, we still need to publish that information so we see those changes out on the web.

Now content review is an extremely integrated process within Autodesk Construction Cloud. And then did so, and it's very important for us in the same respect that we use it in the methods that are most approachable, most inclusive, and most communicative. And in that process, we host all of our information, we host our review processes, and we use our comments and dialogue within that site, within the mechanism of review, to be able to share that information universally with our team.

With ACC and some of the new integrated workflows for reviews and approvals, they've added a series of different options for us so now we can integrate a multiteam member sequence. We can ultimately integrate a team member sequence with groups within that process and be able to be inclusive of entire disciplines or entire leaders and then allow them the ability to do page turns, do their comments, do their markups, provide that feedback to our teams, and bring forward that information as we progress through the project.

Now in that same respect, we also changed our workflow for reviews so that we include different granularity of specific LODs. So as we evolve our design, we evolve our review process. And of course, we're doing this and all of these methods with tracking to make sure that we have our risk mitigation covered and we're following through with the validation of what our design is.

Our design coordination review that happens for clash detection is also hosted in the cloud. We use model coordination. And we use issues and markups that are integrated into the ACC platform to be able to broadcast that information out to our entire team. This method with the automatic clash detection, the clash matrix, reviewing models, combining models and aggregating different content in different ways provides us an opportunity to have an organic workflow that allows our teams to access the information when needed, provide updates to those clash detection reports, and then see their change and see the resolve of any clash coordination or challenges that we have in design coordination. What we're using this for in all aspects of our model coordination approach is to make sure that we maintain our geometric certainty, more efficient approach to our coordination, and configure per our scope requirements based on what our project delivery is.

We really focus on the fact that our teams are a distributed entity. And we want to make sure that we have connectivity from all team members and all stakeholders into this process and make that as efficient and approachable as possible. In contrast but similar, the design coordination methods we use for large projects may be complex infrastructure works and things that are in a capacity that become very complicated in the terms of creating those collaboration spaces is to bring Navisworks into the mix. And Navisworks also provides an opportunity for us to bring a variety of different authoring environments into what we're using as our coordination process.

So within the ACC platform using Navisworks and the Construction Cloud as our host, we bring all of these files in together, universally again still bring that issues tracking mechanism and the markups mechanism within both Navisworks, ACC, and Revit so that we have that continual language and dialogue that goes from the source of that information back to the authoring teams and then can use that to influence that clash reporter or resolve clashes within the reports.

So another key aspect of our approach is to maintain quality. And we use some of the features within the ACC platform to generate information and share that information in ways that add functionality to that review process. And for the next few slides, we're going to cover some of those topics, including PDFs, some of the compare tools that we have, marked up issues like we've alluded to, the model coordination tool, and then some communication opportunities that are now available to us.

So PDF sets, as we publish those packages out to the ACC platform, we have an opportunity to break those sets into sheets. And within that method, we can add some added complexity to the ways that we review those sheets because of the way that the system reads that information in. And as we use the tools that are part of the PDF set packages publishing, then we can look at how we extract that metadata and then leverage that for future types of reviews and enhance that review process.

So as you publish PDF sets, you'll see that it asks for you to identify some information about your sheets inclusive of the sheet numbers, the sheet titles, and then in addition to extracting that type of metadata, we can also add additional tags and information to those sets so that as we go for a review, we can filter our sheets against maybe what discipline these sheets are a part of, what types of content that are on these sheets, being elevations, or sections, or plans, and then add other data about maybe what type of package this is, what kind of submittal this is, or, in some cases, maybe with the purpose of this set and why we're distributing this out to the rest of our teams.

As you can see that metadata as we apply it to the sheet sets gets infused into that object into the Autodesk Construction Cloud. And as we go through and maintain our sheet sets and look for these changes and this evolving kind of package as we approach our final deliverable, those key tags and attributes that we use to track with are important for us to maintain that quality and that consistency throughout our sets.

There's some enhanced functionality of PDF sets. And when you publish PDF sheets or if you publish views from Revit through the publish sets and the ACC platform, you'll see that enhanced functionality about the way that we link callouts like section callouts or detail callouts actually shows us a reference to found sheets that match those sheet numbering conventions. So as we publish these sets, we have an opportunity to page turns and improve our exposure into that set to make sure that these views and these columns are linked to the actual correct drawings and the correct details.

There's also a compare tool. And we use that extensively on 2D and 3D content. On the 2D side of it, we can look at PDF sets that were published recently and compare that to previous versions, either as an overlay or a swipe side by side method. Allows you to take a look at the history of a file and compare any version from any time within that history of the file against each other and then show that within the Autodesk viewer.

We also have some advanced analytics that come into effect when we use our team collaboration and our publishing packages. Looking at models as they evolve over time or looking at changes that happen through models are part of those key functionalities of that collaboration platform. And looking at a model as it changes helps our team to identify where focus of future model content or evolution of that design has happened or where we may need to address changes within different disciplines based on changes that have happened across the entire project.

In addition, there's a compare watch group that allows you to select what types of content you want to watch. And so when you see that model come in and change, that watch group will give you some analysis of how many content or how much content was added, how many things have changed, and what kinds of things may have been deleted. So again, a really focused approach on the way that we can look at these models, look at changes, and be more connected as a team. So if we always don't have that right communication, we can use some of the tools and the analytics within the platform to aid in what we're doing.

Also, markups. One of the best ways for us to share notations across our project, make them universally accessible, and make them available for all of our team members to contribute on is to use the built-in markups as part of the Autodesk viewer and provide those either within the sheet files. They could be just sheet views, or they could be PDFs or photographs, or we can use them within the models themselves. And as we create those markups and take those within views, those things will stay connected to those objects as we move forward.

When we look at issues, that's probably one of the most robust ways that we use these tracking methods to share information within our teams. It provides us both that connectivity to models and to sheet or 2D views within the project. And as we tag and introduce information into these issues, categorically we can approach what kinds of issues are relating to what scope of the project that we're working on and use that metadata to filter against the issues so we can find those and resolve those quickly.

Assigning issues, assigning deadlines, of course, are key components of that. And then attaching additional documents, something that's ancillary to what the issue might be, a supporting document or photograph, it could be a spec sheet or something that contributes to that design, all can be applied to that issue and now that information is uniquely available within that issue itself to the team members who are reviewing it and trying to resolve.

Model coordination using the clash matrix-- we alluded to this a little bit earlier. But within the ACC platform, the clash matrix and the autoclash results that we get from our models has some new enhanced features also. So as you look into ACC and you start to approach these types of workflows, look at what kinds of new features are available because we now can create sophisticated clash groups and look at certain types of objects that we clash those together.

And then in addition, we also have access to the issues and then creating some unique views about how we combine models together and aggregate information. When I mentioned aggregating those saved views are available within the clash report, so as we look at our models that have been shared within our collaboration space, you'll see that we can select certain models to pull forward into our viewer and use that as a selection set or an aggregation of the design and be able to review that information consistently and always pull forward those types of models when we're looking to do our reviews.

It's also a note that as we use information in our project, it's prevalent that we're creating attributes and parameters and content that fills those containers that that information carries forward with your model. So as you publish your Revit file and other authoring models into ACC, you'll see in the viewer that you can select those objects and that information that we've applied not only just in the Revit default system types of parameters but shared parameters and other things that we've created will contain that information and be available to our teams. So now you have this opportunity where team members don't have to have Revit. They don't have to have that design authoring package, but they can use the Autodesk viewer now to look into information, review content, and review the way that we're creating and populating that information into the project.

Another new feature that we find very helpful and has recently become available for our Revit users and ACC platform is to create shared views. So within Revit now, you have the opportunity to select a view that you want to share and receive information or comments about, create that view, share it with a link or share it by inviting team members to view this, and on their end they receive information to view this content within the Autodesk viewer, create information, create comments or even markups within that view, and send that information back to the team members that have access to or shared within this shared view.

And on the user side now, we get that information directly in Revit. So as you're progressing through that project and you are receiving comments, you can reply back to the individual who's commented on this view that you've shared this with. You can also resolve that comment. So ways that we can now have dialogues with team members, even just our crossteam members in our distributed work model share views, create comments, resolve comments, and have a conversation in such a digital way that relates back directly to our project.

Another key feature that we use on the communication side of things is meetings within the ACC platform. It provides us that connectivity of teams who are discussing with the content that we're discussing about. And so creating meetings, using their agenda, tools, and templates, and then recording our meeting minutes directly into the meeting that we're having about the project alongside the information that we need to share or attach into this meeting-- it could be ancillary to the project and we attach that in or it could be something that we're pulling from our project site itself-- keeps that conversation and keeps that record of events that have happened throughout the project directly into our project site.

And correspondence, which is relatively new also, being able to create messages, create conversations, and attaching things to conversations. So by sending a correspondence out through ACC, you can select who that's to be distributed to, maybe carbon copying or other ways to copy team members into that communication, and make that either private or something that is available for the project teams to view as a thread. And with that, we can attach content from our BIM or ACC site directly into the correspondence.

And as you see, as team members respond, you'll see a list of communication that has happened over the course of the project. You'll see threads that have developed over responses, and replies, and conversations that happen through that correspondence. And through this method, not only do you have access to this through the ACC platform but you also have access to this through your email. So as you receive correspondence that comes into your email platform, you can respond to it through email or you can respond to it through the website.

In addition, you can also assign status updates to these correspondents. So if there's an open conversation or an open dialogue about maybe a key feature of your project or a design consideration, those things could be tagged and then tracked as status and provide follow up dates as you're communicating back and forth. So if you need answers by certain dates, you can use the correspondence feature now to share information and create some of those tasks for follow-up.

So in closing, Katherine I would both love to thank you for attending our class, BIM Collaborate Pro, Celebrating Distributed Team Workflows. We hope that you've learned a little bit about the platform itself, how our workflows have applied to the way that we've transitioned into the Autodesk Construction Cloud, and some of the challenges that we've had, obviously, with big complex projects and our distributed team members. You can imagine a company of our size-- AECOM is 55,000 plus or minus depending on the day that you look at our numbers.

But a team as distributed as we are, it's become a very focus point for us to be able to bring our teams from all these different locations remotely in the field, remotely from home, and within our offices of course while integrating our team members from our clients and from construction entities that might not be our own into the project and give them that democratized access into our project and project data. So we're honored to speak with you today. And thank you for attending our class.

KATHERINE CROWLEY: Thank you.