Nugget 2011 - Day One - A HUGE Success!

Wow! Day 1 of Nugget 2011. If you weren't here, you missed it! A great keynote from John Miller, author of QBQ!, on the transformational power of personal accountability; a high energy look at What's New in Eighth Edition of the Newforma PIM solution with Allen Preger; a trip down memory lane with Ian Howell; a great panel discussion with Ron Heims of RDG, Brad Horst of EYP and Susan McDowell of Haskell that prompted lots of questions and discussion; and great in-depth sessions by Newforma Services team members that also prompted lots of questions and discussion, all presided over by MC Dan Conery.

By far for me, though, the best part is the great interaction that is going on with and among our customers. More photos are available at: http://bit.ly/kGlUFG

Nugget 2011 - Day One, T -1 hour and counting!

April 27, 2011 – Slept in – recharging my batteries – up at 5:30am. It’s going to be a big day today. Before I head out this morning, I thought you might like to see the view from the hotel.

The tall building is the Trump International Hotel and Tower. The black slab tower to its right is the headquarters of Perkins & Will and just to its right you can get a peek at the iconic Marina Towers Condominium complex. It’s a gray day here in Chicago today, but we’re all going to be so busy with Day 1 of Nugget 2011, no one will know the difference. Pre-conference sessions sessions begin at 9am. Onward!

Nugget 2011 - T-1 day and counting

April 26, 2011 – Well, it was an exciting day, even before Nugget 2011 began. Today was a travel day with 23 Newformants converging on Chicago in preparation for Nugget 2011. Unfortunately, the continuing rough weather throughout the Midwest made for lots of travel delays and an accident at Midway caused a number of flights to be diverted from that airport. Fortunately, no one was injured in that accident and none of our Newformants were on that flight, although Tony Page was originally scheduled to be on it! Hopefully, none of our customers were on it either.

But the stories abound…. Aaron Kivett and Rick Saladino were diverted to Milwaukee. Dan Conery and Renee VanDyne were diverted to St. Louis and drove from there. Google maps says it’s a 5hr 13 min drive; Dan says it’s 4-1/2 hours – you decide! In true Newforma tradition, all of them made it to Chicago in time for deep dish pizza at Pizza Due! A few people are still unaccounted for at this writing, including Ian Howell and Chris Burns, but we have every confidence everyone will make it in before we kick off the product validation sessions at 9am and the opening lunch at noon! Right, Ian?

The Newforma Add-in for Autodesk Revit

We admit it: We’re fired up to see the excitement caused by the announcement of our new product, the Newforma Add-in for Autodesk Revit.

The Newforma Add-in for Autodesk Revit adds a toolbar to the Revit ribbon menu that provides access to key functions connecting Newforma Project Center to Autodesk® Revit® Architecture, Autodesk® Revit® Structure and Autodesk® Revit® MEP.

Two bloggers have voiced their anticipation of the product. (Its release will coincide with that of Newforma Project Center Eighth Edition, coming in the second quarter of the year.)

The first blog post we spotted is from Clark Morgan’s “NavisWorks and Design Technologies,” a blog for the discussion of NavisWorks and collaborative technologies used in the world of BIM.

Clark is the BIM integration manager for Newforma customer BergerABAM.

Following Clark’s blog post was a mention in Steve Stafford's “Revit OpEd” blog.

Steve consults in Revit training and implementation as the CEO of AEC Advantage, Inc.

Thanks to Clark and Steve for the shout-outs!

Why it’s exciting

The Newforma Add-in for Revit connects Newforma software for project information management – PIM – with Autodesk software for building information modeling – BIM.

Why is such a connection important? Because it provides a superior method to manage the information inside the model, while also unlocking it from the model for use by the broader project team to drive adjacent or downstream processes.

For example, space planning staff can develop room programs using spreadsheets that are tied to elements in the model without having to interrupt Revit modeling staff. And everyone else on the team can tap this rich spatial data through the Spatial Index in Newforma Project Center for use with punch list, action items and more.

Another example concerns document control and revision management: Using the Newforma Add-in for Revit, sheet information and PDFs published from Revit can be linked to the new Document Control activity center to render order from the chaotic flood of drawing deliverables on a typical project. If you’ve ever wondered who got what version of a sheet, when, and how, the Document Control activity center has you covered.

Sort, filter and search through thousands of elements from multiple models without using Revit

Newforma Chief Product Officer Allen Preger has been exploring the possibilities of syncing WHOLE building models with Newforma’s new Building Information Management activity center. He synced the MEP, structural and architectural models of a project. Allen says it took about 15 seconds, but then he could sort, filter and search through 17,000+ elements from three models – from within Newforma Project Center!

Allen could also add and edit properties associated with any of these elements and sync them back into the model.

The screen shot below shows a grouped view, with a piece of equipment highlighted that has an Action Item and Supporting Document related to it:

Want to see for yourself? We’ve produced three animated overviews of what you can accomplish using the Newforma Add-in for Revit in regards to the management of sheets, spaces and related items. Select one or all of the videos from the Newforma Add-in for Autodesk Revit overview page.

SharePoint and Newforma Project Center: managing information, curating knowledge

Part 2: Why not use SharePoint to manage project information?

A conversation with LMN Architects Director of Information Technology Tim Rice, AIA

Read Part 1, "What's the Difference?" here.

Note from Allen Preger, a Newforma founder and the company’s chief product officer:
“After talking about the different applications for Newforma Project Center and SharePoint in our last blog post, I asked LMN IT Director Tim Rice why he isn’t using SharePoint for more functions.”

ALLEN PREGER: With its flexibility, why hasn’t SharePoint been adopted for project-specific information management or collaboration?

TIM RICE: There would be way too much overhead involved in making SharePoint dynamically flexible enough to manage project-specific information. To give you an idea, we have over two terabytes of active, project-specific data currently being managed by Newforma Project Center. This data all resides in project-specific file shares, which, by the way, supports the way our teams work with CAD, BIM and other graphics-intensive tools to create all that information. I couldn’t fathom changing the process by which we manage the project information we create and consume.

Conversely, we currently manage less than one gigabyte of data on our SharePoint site. As a 100-person professional services firm, I don’t see how we could support scaling our SharePoint site to manage all of our project-specific information and processes. While Microsoft is to be commended for designing SharePoint to be highly-customizable, thereby providing a high degree of flexibility, someone has to provide that customization. It’s a great collaboration platform for ad hoc sharing of project knowledge, but I could never imagine building out SharePoint to support the file types and work flows of our industry.

ALLEN: On the topic of collaboration, have you considered using SharePoint as a project portal for external clients, consultants and agencies?

TIM: As I mentioned, we like the way SharePoint fosters internal collaboration, but I would not be comfortable opening it up to external companies and trying to manage permissions and accounts.

Out of the box, Newforma Info Exchange does everything we need it to do in terms of file transfers and collaboration with external teams.

We have over 1,900 external Newforma Info Exchange accounts, each one created and managed through Newforma by our users. External team permissions and notifications are all handled by Newforma on a per-project basis. Password generation and reminders are all automated. I can count on one hand the number of times I have had to walk someone through the process of adding a team member or downloading information from the site.

Managing 1,900 external SharePoint accounts would be a logistical challenge, to say the least. And even if we could administer this, I am not sure how we would provide the 1,900 SharePoint client access licenses (CALs) for these people.

Click to read Part 1 of this conversation, “What’s the difference?”

LMN Architects Director of Information Technology Tim Rice, AIA, has been an architect since 1979, managing CAD and IT systems since 1988. He has provided firm-wide leadership for the firm’s BIM initiative and is responsible for implementation and integration of new technologies into all aspects of LMN project delivery. LMN has been a Newforma customer since 2006.

SharePoint and Newforma Project Center: managing information, curating knowledge

Part 1: What’s the difference?

A conversation with LMN Architects Director of Information Technology Tim Rice, AIA

Note from Allen Preger, a Newforma founder and the company’s chief product officer:
"I recently caught up with Tim Rice to discuss how LMN Architects uses Newforma Project Center and Microsoft SharePoint. Here’s the first part of our conversation."

ALLEN PREGER: Could I ask you to summarize how Newforma and SharePoint are used within your firm?

TIM RICE: For us, the distinction is very clear. To manage project-specific information or processes, we use Newforma. On the other hand, SharePoint is the platform for our intranet knowledge communities where employees can post and share knowledge of a more general nature or access basic resources like Design, Sustainability, HR or IT.

ALLEN: Can you give me some examples of “project-specific information” and “general company knowledge”?

TIM: Project-specific information includes everything that is in our active and archived project folders. It includes drawings and other documents, as well as project email. We point Newforma at these project folders to manage all of our project-specific information, and rely on its AEC industry specific search features to quickly locate project information. We also use it for project management since it has tools we rely on to manage existing processes for action items, RFIs and submittals. Our project managers and contract administration staff in particular have found it to be indispensable, and beyond the initial configuration of company and project settings, we utilize it as an “off-the-shelf” application.

Lastly, we have been able to replace our existing FTP server with Newforma Info Exchange, which provides a managed web environment that everybody in the firm can use to communicate and exchange files with consultants and clients.

Our knowledge communities in SharePoint are used to manage other categories of company information. As our intranet platform, it provides a repository for company policies, procedures, forms and the like. There is a company news section that is regularly updated, as well as a number of themed sections where people are encouraged to share interesting project stories or technical information on various topics like building performance and materials. With its integration with Microsoft Office, it’s easy for users to contribute content and our graphically-oriented designers like its presentation style.

Shown: A user-uploaded project case study from LMN’s SharePoint-based Intranet site.

We have also used SharePoint as an aggregator of information from other systems. For example, many of our project managers or senior principals are uncomfortable navigating through our accounting system to review project budgets, billings and costs, so we built pages and queries to present that information in SharePoint.

Shown: A project financial summary accessed through LMN’s SharePoint-based Intranet site.

ALLEN: Have you got any examples for us that demonstrate the complementary nature of the project information you manage in Newforma and the company knowledge you manage in SharePoint?

TIM: Sure. We have a master project list on our SharePoint site that is fed from our accounting system and provides links to Newforma as well as a SharePoint page containing general information about the project. Recently, we have begun collecting energy use data for our completed projects. The goal is to compare actual energy use with what was projected during design and in so doing enable us to design better buildings. For that to happen, this information, which is project specific and therefore resides in the project folders managed by Newforma, must be readily available. This is an example of the sort of project data that we want to be able to surface through SharePoint in the context of our master project list.

Next: Part 2 of Allen's conversation with Tim, who tells why he's not using SharePoint to manage project information.

LMN Architects Director of Information Technology Tim Rice, AIA, has been an architect since 1979, managing CAD and IT systems since 1988. He has provided firm-wide leadership for the firm’s BIM initiative and is responsible for implementation and integration of new technologies into all aspects of LMN project delivery. LMN has been a Newforma customer since 2006.

Why project administration needs to be easy

Highlights from a recent conversation with Cromwell Architects Engineers Chief Operating Officer Daniel K. Fowler, AIA

If you’ve tried in vain to institute strict project administration procedures at your firm, you probably know the simple reason: Your colleagues would rather be doing their “real” work.

This reality was driven home to us in a recent conversation with Dan Fowler, the chief operating officer of Cromwell Architects Engineers in Little Rock, Arkansas.

“Our CA managers spend their entire days doing contract administration,” Dan said. “That’s their job, so they follow the procedures we set up in Lotus Notes. But everyone else has to do actual project work, and they consider administrative tasks to be secondary. We found it difficult to get project people out of “doing mode” and into a mindset to use the tools for data management we had developed.”

Dan’s remarks pretty much capture the sentiment we’ve heard in scores of AEC firms, which may be summed up as, “We got into this business to design, engineer and build things, and that’s what we come to work to do. We don’t want to spend our days filing emails, logging transmittals, responding to RFIs, tracking submittals and generating reports.”

The exception occurs when filing, logging, tracking and reporting are super-simple to do

“Newforma Project Center grabbed us right away because it has core components that have been specifically developed to help firms like ours,” Dan said. “For example, file sharing – Newforma Info Exchange – is great right out of the box.

“We had been struggling with our FTP site and the way we exchange files with clients, business partners and government agencies,” Dan said. “FTP was cumbersome and hard to navigate by us, let alone by people outside the office. The demonstration of Newforma Info Exchange made everyone say, ‘Let’s get it just for that.’”

Dan had similar things to say about Newforma Project Center’s contribution to filing email, finding information in any file type, managing files and more.

“One reason the Newforma software has been so easy to adopt is because it provides an immediate return on effort and allows us to continue using our existing work processes,” Dan said. “For example, we use the same processes to file email with Newforma Project Center that we used with Lotus Notes, which is to either put a project email address in the Cc line, or drag and drop the email to a project folder in Notes. Nobody has to learn a new process.”

And that’s how you get project workers who are not full-time managers to do the “paperwork” that every job demands. Make it so easy that it doesn’t seem like a distraction from the work they woke up that day to do.