I’ve wrritten recently about Robert Green, one of the most authoritative voices in our industry. Here he addresses mobile technologies, collaboration tools, and workflows.
On the surface, it sounds like a good riddle:
Question: When is a CAD manager not like a CAD manager?
Answer: When he or she is busy managing everything but CAD applications.This riddle is no joke, however. Thanks to dramatic changes in workflows, collaboration solutions, and hardware technology, being a CAD manager now requires mastery of a wide variety of skills that have no connection to CAD — that is, until you think about the problem more deeply.
What types of new skills am I talking about? I’ll get into that. But first, in this edition of the CAD Manager’s Newsletter, I’ll explain the changes underlying these new CAD management challenges. Here goes.
What’s Not Really Changing
I contend that of all the parts we must manage to have successful CAD projects, software is the piece that is likely to change the least. Sure we have new software updates, but are they really revolutionary? Is there anything in the latest releases of AutoCAD, SolidWorks, Revit, or MicroStation that is earth-shatteringly different from recent versions? Not really. Software is changing, but it is doing so in subtle ways that don’t require users or CAD managers to fundamentally rethink software strategy.
While there are some new functions within CAD tools that require investigation and training — such as point clouds and reality capture — the basic concept of modeling and documenting designs isn’t all that different than it has been for several years, especially now that most companies are using 3D modeling or building information modeling (BIM) already.
s a m h o c h b e r g - m e t i c u l o u s l y r a n d o m i z e d 