- You have to worry about your version of BIM software working with the latest Operating System.
- You use a version of your BIM software that is no longer supported by the company that makes it.
- You know it’s about time to upgrade, but waiting one more year won’t hurt.
- You still don’t know what IFC or OpenBIM are.
- You still think it’s okay to equate BIM and Revit as one and the same.
- You don’t agree 100% with this post and all the comments.
- You are tired of the yearly upgrade cycle and think you might sit on the current version for a while.
- You just don’t have time to learn all the fancy new features. And besides, you really don’t need all of them.
- You don’t think we need a better way to work and exchange data with the rest of the team.
- You still think it’s okay to disconnect the documents from the 3D model. Not every time of course, but you know… sometimes it’s okay to finish the job with just 2D drawings.
- You haven’t thanked your BIM manager in the past week for making your life easier.
- You don’t believe knowledge of BIM is central to the future of our industry.
- You find it easier to blame software, rather than personnel for your firm’s lack of BIM prowess.
Two Warnings
If you don’t see yourself in the list of reasons BIM may have left you behind, you are either working damn hard to stay relevant or lying to yourself. A few of those points hit too close to home for me. I am not magically protected from a devaluing of my knowledge. The specter of obsolescence is always near. The upgrade cycle is endless. The more proposals I write, the less time I spend on BIM. The more proposals that get accepted, the more work I have to do using BIM. The more work I have with deadlines fast approaching, the less time I have to really learn the best way to use BIM. Everyday BIM gets better and I get worse. June 2014 is coming fast.
So that’s warning one. BIM is moving faster than you are, than all of us. Well most of us. My hunch is guys like Rob Jackson might be safe. For now. But you probably don’t have as much time to focus on BIM as he does.
1984 vs 2000
I’m a believer of the 10,000 rule for mastery of cognitive skills. I’ve definitely experienced that threshold. Somewhere around January 2011 I hit my 10,000 hours of ArchiCAD. (5 years of 52 weeks x 40 hours, give or take). At that point I started seeing the program differently. I became much more creative in how I used it. I was really good at using the program before, but there was a shift during that Winter of 2010-2011. It wasn’t until then that I considered myself an expert in the program. But of course, expert isn’t a title you retain for life. It’s an achievement you earn and then need to maintain. As stated above, the progress bar keeps moving. The amount of knowledge to master ArchiCAD (or Revit, etc.) continues to increase and change.
I spent a lot of time solving problems in ArchiCAD 11 that are now non-issues in ArchiCAD 17.
At some point we shift our focus. As young staff we have the time to learn BIM because that’s our job. But as we rise in the ranks we have other duties and responsibilities. We might always do the BIM work, but at some point we get complacent and stop improving. Because we’re good enough. Because we stop seeing the big improvements for the same amount of effort. Skills stagnate or atrophy.
And so here’s the warning. ArchiCAD has been around a long time. There are some users who hit their mastery level in 1989. Others in 1995 or 1999. And then they stopped. They might have 60,000 hours of experience with ArchiCAD, but they stopped adding to their skill set thousands and thousands and thousands of hours ago. Before your BIM program even existed. There are a lot of guys that got ArchiCAD in the early 90s. They were young and forward thinking. But now they are still working like it’s the 90s. 15-20 years later… they are older, set in their ways, comfortable, lacking ambition, and never turned their young gun firms into something bigger. They got to ArchiCAD before BIM was a thing. They now work happily, and if they are lucky still learn a little. But even though they have the foundation for BIM they don’t know or care. Sadly, I see a similar thing happening with younger users. They are learning ArchiCAD, but already use it more like the first version they used rather than the current version. This is our plight and our battle. To use the program we have, not the one we first fell in love with.
I think this is actually part of what is hurting ArchiCAD’s image. We have a lot of diehard users who would never leave ArchiCAD, who might even upgrade every year (though 17 is going to be a shocker for them). But they still think of ArchiCAD and use it like it’s essentially ArchiCAD 8.1 or 10. They skew the perception of the program. This issue is not unique to ArchiCAD, just more apparent than with other programs.
BIM keeps improving; what about you?
The REVIT community is much, much younger. You have your experts. You have your guys with 10,000s of hours. But the most you could possibly have is someone with say 27,000 hours of REVIT use. And that’s being generous. The program is young. The first 10,000ers appeared in 2005, though probably more likely 2006 or 2007. But the major growth in the program was just starting then. Your community has more experts appearing daily than ossifying. But be warned. Your time will come too. Someday, if you are lucky your community will be filled with people who have been using for decades. Soon you will have plenty of users who stopped learning years ago. Who are proficient, but not using half of the new tools. Soon there will be the tiny vanguard doing what they can to drag the rest forward. See the ArchiCAD users who love the program, but don’t really do BIM, and be afraid. Be vigilant.
This problem may be intractable, but it’s not unsolvable. I just don’t have the answers today…
If you liked this post, you’ll want to read these three too:
Could a 21st century pencil be the better tool Architects are looking for?
1984 was a long time ago
Frustrating ArchiCAD Things That Need to be Changed: You
What other signs of BIM leaving you behind am I missing? Leave them in the comments. Subscribe to my blog to read more about the tricky world of being an Architect in the 21st century: Shoegnome on Facebook, Twitter, and RSS feed. And now you can join the LinkedIN group too!
12 thoughts on “13 Reasons BIM may have left you Behind”
14. You don’t value the data equally to the 3D model.
To many people equate BIM to sharing 3D models with no focus on exchanging data.
Troy, yes! I’d love to see a push where we start doing BIM articles and presentations where 3D models are not shown or discussed.
So easy to get in a rut with any software. Just look at all those flat cad users, they spend years in trying to get some level of efficiency out of it, then when their bosses say, here is another bit of software, the resistance to change is immense.
Any software, not just BIM related has a constant learning curve if you want the most out of it. But not everyone wishes to find the time to read the new features list and check those features out to see if they will help their productivity.
Graphisoft has been fairly good in producing youtube videos of new features, which helps those who don’t do manuals, but there is no substitute for reading the manual and trying to get an understanding of what you are trying to achieve.
As far as ‘Experts’ goes, with the publicity surrounding BIM, all of the sudden there are BIM experts popping up everywhere, their work is often clumsy but it displays a nice looking result in the end. Lets relate that to driving a car. I’ve been driving since I was 18, so that’s a lot of years now. But that doesn’t make me a racing driver. Just means I’m proficient in operating the vehicles I’m endorsed to drive as far as the insurance company is concerned.
I learned ArchiCAD from a demo-version 5 in, let me think, 1997 or 1998. I bought a license for 6.0 one year later. I learned quite a lot initially. I skipped 7, but got involved in beta-testing 8 to 12. This is the last version I commercially ‘owned’. I’ve started using the educational version, as I was working in academics full time. But I kept learning. This is largely due to my own urge to want to understand the software and use it productively.
Last week I went to the ArchiCAD Summer School in Cardiff and the best parts (apart from learning some things about the future versions of ArchiCAD) were the user-oriented workshops: just users reacting on other users habits and suggestions. We started with complex profiles and arrived at custom object making.
One member of our group is a long-time ArchiCAD user who often participates in such events, but he stopped upgrading the software quite some time ago. He wasn’t too pleased with the lack of updates in the calculation engine (the lists) and stayed at 9 or 10.
I learn a lot by working with students. They ask genuine questions and don’t buy into the idiosyncrasies of 30-year old ArchiCAD. I often question if arriving in such a deep program is a good thing… There is such a large legacy of habits and workarounds.
The latest features I came to appreciate, where all fairly new additions: renovation filter, teamwork, IFC Translators and the Morph tool. The new sections are such an improvement over the old clipping planes.
I love, love, love when ArchiCAD users get together in a room and share their habits, tricks, and war stories. I also can’t believe that someone has purposely stayed on version 9 or 10. I would love to hear his argument against upgrade.
I started on Vectorworks when it was still called MiniCad around 1995. Grown with Vectorworks and used its BIM component as far as i could. (I say as far as i could, because: “SketchUp is one of the BIM platforms that people are arguing for”, here.)
And now i fell in love with Archicad17.
Im in at the deep end, unproductive at the moment, but excited…. And learning as fast as i can… To be PRODUCTIVE soon.
Thx for hi-lighting the 13 reasons… nuf said.
I find it interesting and illuminating that there are such a wealth of information and range of people blogging, writing, creating videos, etc in the Archicad community, most of them sharing their 10 000 plus hours worth of expertise…
Erich, thanks. Glad to help. And working as fast as I can to get to my 10,000+ of blogging too. Might be a few more years. So out of curiosity, what made you fall in love with ArchiCAD 17?
Great article mate. Lots of good points.
I couldn’t imagine how many hours I’ve put into ArchiCAD, but it’s been a labor of love and I know it pays to have a wife that doesn’t mind sharing me with the program!
Next step in addressing the problem of people who are being left behind is to find everyone who needs to play catch up and provide them with training!
Cheers,
Link.
We’d be nothing without our wives…
I agree. There is a definite need for someone who not only understands where ArchiCAD is today, but where it was in the past so that they can help all those users stuck on old versions or using newer versions in old ways. It helps to be able to talk their language and explain why they need to enter modern times. Hope all is well.
The Software names can be interchanged with several others, what a great laugh it is to share in experiences!
There are major constants though… I like the direction you are taking, now push toward the logical next step…THE ANSWER …even of it changes 🙂
it may all be able to be understood by looking at it with a more removed viewpoint… a socio-psychological bent… I am curious to find if the percentages of all the BIM players’ skills, so to speak, skew with percentages of personality, cognitive, creative, successful, impactful groups of us silly primates… Why do we stop ourselves, who does, to what extent kind of thing…
A great piece! Three thumbs up for content, irony and humor!
Jay, thanks. And I tend to agree. I think there is a huge people aspect to this. I feel like that’s what Randy Deutsch’s book is all about: people over technology. Also why this whole discussion is tricky. There are some amazing people using some horrible tools and doing stellar work. And the reverse…
Revit is a tool liker a spade, a pencil or a drawing board. The 10,000 hours isn’t required to become an expert at using a tool. If it is then there’s something wrong with that tool. The time is supposed to be, to become an expert at understanding what that tool is used to produce. In this case it’s a re-useable model storing disparate kinds of information relating to the model.
The world didn’t just start with Revit version 1.0. Revit built on previous software packages and is just a more advanced version of those software packages (with the paradigm shift of moving from a 2-D flat space to a 3-D space, parametrics, blah, blah…).
There will therefore be some Revit users who have come from other packages who can therefore claim they have more than 27,000 hours of experience, since once you can play a piano expertly it shouldn’t take as long to learn the flute. Providing you have the passion to do so.
However, one of the most difficult things I have found in my 28 year CAD history is to learn the second CAD package, since it’s so easy to reflect that you can get something complicated done in ten minutes in your old ways but it is taking an hour in the new one. When the pressure of a deadline is on it’s so easy to throw in the towel and go back to old ways. But with a little perseverance you can break through that paradigm shift. You just have to have the determination. Learning the new CAD tools is imperative to prevent becoming a dinosaur. You’ll be reinventing yourself till the day you retire. Otherwise you’ll be like many pencil drafters in the 80’s and have to go out and buy a small take-away shop.
There was a great dearth of design talent after the invention of CAD as the new tool forced many experienced designers out of the business. It wasn’t until the late 90’s before drafters returned to investigating the intricate details of the engineering problem rather than children playing with the CAD.
As far as having to “upgrade the software every year”, one of the problems archivists face at the moment is that software vendors keep reinventing the database, so Archivists have to keep translating data into new database formats. One of the intentions of a database format such as IFC is that it is supposed help provide a universal database format that is documented, open, achivable and retrievable (searchable). But Autodesk would much rather you save the data in their native format since it keeps you having to come back for more. I’m not sure Revit really supports IFC to the max, and they use the term BIM loosely to be “Revit”. They tend to want you to import IFC models and then keep using their format.
BTW, I haven’t used ArchiCAD (or Revit, I,m a Civil engineering road modeller). I’m looking forward to the day when Civil design objects are built into the IFC. (I’d better go take a look and see if it has been done.)