From There to Here part 2 - The importance of CAD/Drafting standards

In 2012, our first step to reach our goal was to get everyone, regardless of company or discipline, to adopt a set of basic CAD standards that would be the foundation of our solution(s). This involved:

• Identifying every design group by design discipline, across the whole of Transmission design.

1. Physical design – the people who create ‘physical things’ like buildings, ground grids, fencing, foundations for switches, switches, breakers – AKA the stuff that you see when you drive past a substation
2. Protection and Controls design – the people who create the wiring diagrams and design the protection and control schemes for the high voltage stuff inside the substation, who create panel drawings and such for things inside the substation control building.
3. Civil design – they create the property boundary drawings and create the design for how the ground is graded to control drainage or to make sure that there is no uncontrolled runoff and that the roads into and out of the station are designed to allow for the delivery and maintenance of all the equipment in the substation  
4. Structural design – They design custom steel or concrete and steel structures to support the equipment used in the substation when environmental conditions dictate the use of something special that just can’t be bought from a vendor
5. Line design – the people who design the high voltage, high tension power line system that delivers power from the plants to the substations, the backbone of the power grid.

• Identify SMEs (Subject Matter Experts) in each of the disciplines listed above for each of the entities across the organization
• Organize committees for each discipline that spanned across the entities, then schedule and facilitate meetings to gather the who, what, when, where, why and how related to the way they do design in their respective disciplines. This took several months. As you can imagine, getting the experts in each discipline together across geographically distant areas was difficult, especially considering that production work still had to continue, and maintenance was always ongoing. We didn't have the same access to remote meeting technologies at the time.
• Working with the committees, define a bare minimum, lowest common denominator of the things that would benefit EVERY design group across all 4 entities. This also took a large amount of time and patience. Every voice at the table was heard, but in the end we had to look at what was the BEST FOR THE MOST and throw out some things. We settled for what satisfied the most requirements, and when there was simply no way to compromise, we tabled the discussion for a later date when we had better information and better opportunities.
• Determine the areas where state, municipality or other local laws or conditions would force us to deviate some from that lowest common denominator. Groups those deviations into specific addendums for their respective discipline(s). Some of our operating areas require different materials due to environmental factors lie rock or marsh or high winds or hurricanes or ice load or whatever. Some of the states require different steps for Civil design due to state property/boundary laws.
• Create a set of CAD and Design standards for use across the entire organization, and get sign-off from every SME and the leadership in each entity to ensure adherence to them. Getting the sign-off was important because those standards were to become the foundation for our technical solution(s) going forward, and we could not afford to have people deviate from those bare minimums and cause the solution(s) to fail due to misunderstanding.

Our first signed draft of those standards was made available to the users towards the end of 2012, and those standards are still in use today in our organization. The amount of work and time and effort that went into those standards was remarkable, and we were actually quite surprised and pleased to have completed the effort in a single year. Much thanks and appreciation to the SMEs, the leadership, and the work ethic of the parties involved, without them that foundational piece would have been impossible and nothing would have been accomplished going forward.