As a CAD / BIM manager, there is one vein of questioning that I just hate.

It’s not so much the actual question, which is a variation of:
“Why isn’t this working right?”

It’s the answer that angers me:
“Because you’re not following the template.“

These questions drive me crazy. I’m a tactful person, so I’m typically nice about it, probably too nice. But I just want to scream sometimes:
“Look you are wasting my time, your time, and your client’s money. I’m not going to make your solution work. I’m just going to make you follow the damn template.”

There are tons of reasons for following templates. I recently wrote a blog post about templates and teams. I expanded that post in an article I wrote for the Q4 2011 issue of ArchiMag that was just released in early December. In addition to making team projects manageable, templates WORK. As in if you follow the template, you shouldn’t have errors or ugly drawings. Your window labels will function properly, your drawings will have nice line weights, changes will be easy to manage, printing won’t be a guessing game; the list is nearly endless. ArchiCAD and other BIM applications are complex programs, a template is a way to navigate that complexity. Sometimes a standard is developed to circumvent a glitch in the program. Other times it’s designed to mimic a previous method of production or to solve a problem caused by the template itself. That last point is a sad fact. The standards are developed for whatever reason and to make them work certain other rules that seem arbitrary must be followed. You can use object A, B, or C, but not D. Because if you use D, it’ll cause an error with process E. And we HAVE to use process E because of boss X. Sound familiar? I don’t want to spend my time fixing a problem for someone that I’ve already solved within the office template.

Here are some more of my thoughts on templates and office standards.