Appraising office needs -
One Page manuals -
Onsite training -
Champions and Communities of Practice -
A great deal can be learnt by sitting next to your operators individually and watching how they work.
It brings to light not only ways that they can improve, personally, but ways that the system is letting them down.
Or ways that they are having to work around what is already there in order to achieve getting the drafting done.
Often, I find that they may be going round the houses in order to achieve something simple, and they're simply unaware of the smarter ways of working.
Using commands that achieve everything they set out to do with one click.
Sometimes their techniques simply needs to be sharpened up (eg - using set distances for displacement moving things to the side, they can work on them, bringing them back accurately into position / layer control to simplify what they see on-screen, etc)
And just taking my opportunity to lightly suggest a better way to them, which then becomes their normal work in practise.
Quite often you'll find that your operators are not working efficiently, simply because they haven't been taught better ways of using CAD.
So I'm happy to provide this service.
And in other ways you find that the system is letting them down drawings.
Especially on large projects and large old projects, which have gone through many revisions and come from many consultants are lagging with the simplest of operations.
And it's something that the CAD operators just accepted as being the norm for that project.
Sometimes it brings to attention files which simply need auditing thing and purging, stripping down and having subsidiary software removed because it's demanding processing with every action.
And so the project is flagged up as one that needs attention. Again, this is something that can only be realised by watching.
How the operators move within the drawing.
And as keyboard commands will always beat the button interfaces which AutoCad provides - increasingly cluttered these days - demonstrating the simplicity of typing in commands rather than clicking on buttons, can spur the operator into exploring further and increasing their efficiency overall.
All these factors result in a much more efficient process, which ultimately saves the business time and money, whilst also training your team.
And empowering them to be able to do the job better, which results in less frustration for them.
As much as an office likes to have a massive manual and feel that everything they've got there will be adhered to, it's rarely the case.
Presenting a newcomer with a 100-page manual and telling them to read that for the first couple of hours on their first day is a terrible way to start.
The information is not absorbed and therefore can't be adhered to.
Especially for newcomers coming out of college and straight into the office. It's overwhelming, demoralising., and does little to fast track them to producing drawings.
Better than to present them with all the information at once, it's much better practise to drip feed knowledge to them on a daily basis.
With short concise relevant information as to how relevant parts of the office CAD system works.
Ways of achieving this include one page manuals which are easy to digest, are presented in a captivating way, stimulating.
And to make them easily accessible where possible feeding it to them directly on a daily basis before they begin work.
Even if the information is not fully understood, at least the operators are made aware of the information and it will come to mind at a later date when they encounter the scenario.
The best way to achieve this is Feeding it to them daily, either through emails or on an internal internet Twitter feed.
Or establishing an internal education program which also monitors what learning materials have been read by each member.
All the technology and platforms are freely available, such as Google Classroom, Twitter, Email, and the technology to administer this automatically.
As part of your office's responsibility to educate and develop the skills of your staff, this constant development of skills -all relevant to your business operations - build morale and encourage your staff to develop their skills.
Education increases proactive improvement.
Those members were the drive to improve their skills will often be encouraged by the progress they make and want to further it.
It's possible to identify where their skills and passions lie, be they technical, digital, strategic, or teaching itself.
Both office wide or at granular level for each project.
Members can be loosely allocated roles, which together build the office knowledge across the entire system.
Several minds are better than one ,and it means that all your eggs are not in one basket with one Cad-guru in the office, but the specialist knowledge is distributed throughout members.
This brings everyone into the process of developing the efficiency of the office practise, and emotional buy-in for a commitment of improving, constantly improving the efficiency of the office.
As well as of a sense of belonging to your organisation.
The result is an active involvement, which runs parallel to your work of architectural design, constantly sharpening, the tools with which you work.