BIM managers are busy people.
They often juggle multiple projects, each with multiple Revit models. They manage their teams and strive to peacefully coexist and collaborate with clients, consultants, and other BIM teams throughout the firm. And if they get a little extra time, they work to improve processes and make life easier for their teams.
Keeping up with all those projects is especially challenging — and Revit, unfortunately, doesn’t make it easy for BIM managers. That’s why Guardian includes Registered Projects and Project Central™ in our Revit add-in. Both features give BIM managers and other firm leaders deep project visibility through in-Revit dashboards that provide actionable intelligence to solve problems and build strategy. Here’s how both features work:
Registered Projects
Registered Projects delivers an in-Revit dashboard that shows data and statuses of all models registered with Guardian. You don’t have to open an individual model to try to get this information, and you don’t have to jump from model to model to get comparative data.
The dashboard of Registered Projects surfaces a trove of information, including:
- File size trends: This indicator shows if a model’s file size is ballooning, is gradually increasing or decreasing, has drastically reduced, or is remaining stable. It’s a great way to quickly see if, for example, a model is bloating from too many introduced elements.
- Opened models: See quickly which models throughout the firm are open and who is working within them.
- Add and filter by metadata: The dashboard can be customized to filter by a range of metadata categories, including location, Revit version, labels, and project groups.
Registered Projects acts as the “something is off” layer of BIM management — it reveals concerns and drives BIM managers to open Project Central to investigate further.
Project Central
Through another user-friendly in-Revit dashboard, Project Central offers more advanced information on the activity and health of the model — in real time. This access builds an early-warning mindset, empowering BIM managers to catch a model going sideways before problems reach QA.
Among the capabilities of Project Central:
- Seeing end-user activity such as sessions, properties, commands, Revit warnings, and more
- Model at a Glance, which shows elements users have allowed into the model that may not be exactly correct, and from which you directly access the elements for further investigation, or you can rename the elements such as group names to Group 1, Group 2, Group 3, and so on.
- Viewing sync info from Sync Traffic Control™, including who’s actively in the model and who’s up next in the queue or when users last synced
- Data showing file sizes, time to open, time to sync, and more
- Messages that can be sent to project teams and to the entire company (depending on the access given to the individual administrator)
What’s also impressive about Project Central is that you don’t have to be in the model to access these metrics. You can launch Project Central directly from Registered Projects and view live insights for any registered model in your firm.
In-Revit Dashboards, in Real Time, in Action
The feature sets of Registered Projects and Project Central show the potential these features can bring to your firm. A practical, real-world example shows you even more.
Many BIM managers can relate to this scenario: You start your day to discover a Revit model is missing work or straight up crashed. You may need to restore a previous version, but it’s not easy to find out how far back to go — and if you go too far back, you might lose a lot of the work your team has done. It becomes a trial-and-error exercise, with plenty of room for additional error …
Enter Guardian. With Registered Projects, you can quickly access the model in question, and with Project Central, you can dig into the user activity that can help you decide how far back to go and what might have caused the issues (e.g., unexpected deletions) in the first place. Also, with the help of Model at a Glance in Project Central, you can copy families that had been placed since the point you decide to restore so that they can be easily re-introduced into the updated model.
So, through the in-Revit dashboards, you’re able to troubleshoot the problem, rein in file sizes, and get the model up and running again. And with the intelligence you gained, you can adjust settings and best practices so the temporary chaos doesn’t happen again.
A Winning Combination
Project-level visibility tells you what to do about the model right in front of you. Used together in one data flow, Registered Projects and Project Central spot Revit problems and diagnose the details. Maybe you need to implement additional Guardian protection? Maybe someone just needs more training? Maybe something else is causing issues? With real-time in-Revit dashboards, you gain the intel to troubleshoot and solve the problem, saving you time to effectively manage QC, deadlines, and your team.
Want to see how Registered Projects and Project Central can help you and your firm? Book a demo and let us show you all the capabilities of these features.
