Is Your Design/Documentation Workflow Stuck in 1st Gear?

Imagine someone hands you the keys to your favourite sports car and says "let's see what you can do"! Assuming you know how to drive a stick, would you simply floor it and see how fast you can go in 1st gear only? Or would you shift through the gears and truly fly?

I think it's safe to say most of us would try to break the sound barrier, or at least push the car to the best of our abilities. It's interesting then, that many architects, designers and drafters choose to stick with their old 2D CAD workflow when they could be flying with BIM.

Sure, we squeeze every bit of speed out of our 2D CAD tools by using keyboard shortcuts, writing lisp programs and customizing menus, but we're still stuck in 1st or 2nd gear.

The challenge for many of us is the potential drop in speed if we made a change. We may agree that BIM is a better way to work, but we are just too busy to be able to afford any drop in productivity. Looking back at my sports car analogy, it's like changing gears. There is a brief drop in forward momentum (that drop can vary, depending on the skill of the driver) but ultimately you end up moving much faster than if you had stayed in the lower gear.

With the right tools, training and support, BIM allows us to do more with our time than ever before. It should NOT slow us down in the mid-long term. There's a saying that the best time to make a change for the better is yesterday, the next best time is now. So ... who wants to go for a drive?