Follow the Data: Solving Real Revit Project Problems with Guardian

Josh Kennedy  

The topic today is going to be follow the data. So solving real Revit problems, real Revit project problems with Guardian. Really excited today because Allison is actually going to be doing a fair amount of the talking when we get to the in Revit portion of this call.

Allison's been in similar shoes. I won't steal all of your introductions. I'll let you introduce yourself. But excited to have Allison on our team. She's kind of been in the shoes of a lot of our clients and now been here for some time working with clients. So excited to show you some examples of how we're actually working with firms through some of these problems.

But just a little bit about myself. My name's Josh. I think some of y'all might know me already. I see some familiar names on the call. Director of Sales and Rev Ops. Been here at Guardian for three, going on four years now. Prior to my time here, I was at Unifi. So that's actually where I heard about Guardian, some of the cool things that Parley and the product team were building.

And yeah, I made the switch. It's been a little bit like being strapped to a rocket ship. And nowadays we work with 400 plus firms and have grown our team. So been a lot of fun. I'll let Allison, let you introduce yourself here.

Allison Hawes

Sure. Yeah, I'm Allison Hawes. I am a licensed architect. I was with a firm here in Denver, Colorado. I saw we had some Colorado representation. I was with them for over a decade, kind of working my way through the typical architecture path. Then I moved to the BIM manager side. So really familiar with all the struggles that Guardian hopes to help with. So it's really fun to be on this side now and get to talk to firms all over and work together on coming up with fun solutions.

Josh Kennedy  

So I do have just, I think, 3 slides to get through that just paint a high level picture of Guardian, just in case there's folks on the call who aren't familiar with like, what is even Guardian, what do you solve? We will spend the large majority of the time going through those specific use cases and examples of how to use the data and see what's going on, get ahead of things.

Just a couple quick housekeeping things. This will be recorded. So we'll send anybody who registered the recording after. Also, we do welcome questions and we'd love to see a lively chat. So if you have questions, comments, stories that you'd like to share, we've got our team in here monitoring the chat so they can answer those along the way.

or we can cover them with the last few minutes after we get through today's presentation.

Like I said, just a few slides.

I want to start with just the why, why does Guardian exist? We started back in 2018. Parley started building the tool, really started with the mapping tools, all about like automating standards and creating consistency around properties like line styles, text type, shared parameters, you name it, and keeping projects clean. I believe the mission since the day one has been to help folks like yourselves be proactive when it comes to Revit. So we do a lot today in data and workset automation standards and kind of guardrails in Revit. The big idea though is to help the BIM staff, you know, the project leads and the designers focus on the fun part of designing and not have to worry so much about duplicates in projects or how I modeled on the wrong workset for the past hour and a half. We want to make sure that people can focus on what they love doing and aren't just firefighting or cleaning up things that could have been avoided in the first place.

So how we do that.

Guardian's constantly learning. So if you're not using that already today, a lot of firms just deploy Guardian to their team. It's monitoring from day one. It can show you where content's coming from, what's going into your projects, which models might need some attention, file size trends, things like that. And then really all that data is meant to accompany the proactive tools that are in the add-in. So it's fully customizable based on how your teams, how your projects, how your firm needs to operate and the things that you're trying to avoid in terms of setbacks, automations you'd like to control. And then it all runs on autopilot. So we work really closely with firms to look at the data to get a lot of this set up.

We review constantly throughout the year, usually once a quarter. It's kind of an average. But the idea with Guardian is that it's not something you should be in customizing the settings of or tooling with every single day. You tell it your worksets, for example, you don't have to think about the next thing being placed on the wrong workset. You just get to go back to work.

And I think this is my last slide here. I said a few of these things already, but just as a recap, founded in 2018, the mapping tools is where we got our start, grown to do a lot more. We're working with over 400 firms at this point, 25 plus countries. You know, the time zone today, we probably would have got a lot more football votes if we had done this maybe a different time of day. Some of our European and Australian and Asian clients. But anyways, yeah, working with firms all over the world, Guardian's offered in multiple languages at this point. It's been really, really fun. We're excited to tell you more about it.

As far as the agenda goes, Allison, do you want to just kind of high level kind of talk through what you'll be covering and then maybe take the screen over and start sharing?

Allison Hawes  

Sure. Actually, I could steal it right now because I have the same agenda, but I put it in Revit. We're going to try something new here and keep everything within one location. But yeah, I'll be covering, going over file size and warning trends where you can start to look to find the information out.

Whether it's a hardware, software, or user error, going into our Power BI, different tabs to see where we can find out where those problems lie. Using Power BI for staffing resources, this was an interesting one. And then finally, firefighting, so troubleshooting, but firefighting sounds a little bit more fun.

So yeah, with that, I can jump right in. Getting into the file size and warning trends. So within our add-ins in our Guardian settings, if I go into registered projects, you'll notice these are all the models that are currently registered, and I do have 3 pages worth.

There's also this column here with these horizontal dashes. And if I hover over, it'll actually tell me that this file size has remained stable over six weeks. But we do also track if files are starting to grow. And then rather than trying to go through 3 pages worth to find the information, we can set up a tab that looks for that directly.

So if I go to create a new tab, I already have one added, but it's very, very easy to make a new one.

By default, it's the same view that we had before. So if I go up to my filter and go file size filters, I could start to look by size range. That's another tab you could add. But I'm looking into the trend. So rapid and gradual increase and save that up here. So now this will automatically start to capture any files that have increased in size. So this one's 12% over six weeks.

From here, I can go into the Project Central, and if there is activity feed, this is an older model, so I'll go to one that I do know has some recent activity from our last webinar. But from here, we can start to see what's been happening in this model that maybe contributed to that larger file size.

I can see some families were added. Maybe those came in with quite a few properties, and if those got copied around, that could definitely start to bloat that file. So all of this is a nice way to kind of immediately jump in to try to figure out what's going on.

I also have a timeline.

And if I sort over the past three months, I can see on June 11th, my average was 5.3 mbs. And then the very next day, it went up to 9.4. So that's a pretty drastic drop or increase in one day. So again, this is kind of your first clue into, all right, I can dial in on this exact time zone or time frame and start to see what may have contributed to that larger file size.

So from there, I do have some screenshots from our Power BI backstage, but I'm going to focus on a couple of the tabs in particular, starting with our project overview. So since I have the model name, I can start to sort by that model. And then I can look within the users at a glance, you know, one person's

triggering 953 warnings in this example. This is a compilation of different things, but this person's taking 16 minutes to open a file. This person's taking six hours in between syncs. So all of this kind of helps you determine what is going on and then helps you go to

All right, where's the next page where I can start to get even more information? Maybe we want to focus on the warnings.

So we have a warnings all and a warnings detail page. And I do like that we start to track the medium, high, and low warnings. So you can sort by the priority, focus on those high priority warnings. These 2 pages are a little bit, they've captured all of the warnings. Maybe they don't exist anymore. So we could go into the warnings snapshots.

which is a little bit more accurate read on what's currently going on in that model. But we'll start to see those top warnings, the number of them, the failing elements. All of this information is tracked within the Power BI.

I also brought up maybe a family was loaded that had a ton of properties. So in the family loading tab, we can start to see how did that family come in in the 1st place? Did it come from your standard content management system or a super secret desktop location? So we start to get that information as well as seeing how many properties are coming in with those families.

You can imagine if a family has 6,000 and is loaded 11 times, that might start to add up.

Then we can go into our Properties tab and...

specific family, we can filter by that family. It'll start to show us what are the properties within there that have been added, modified, or deleted, showing you more details on the properties of these families.

Anything you want to add there, Josh?

Josh Kennedy  

There's a lot that I could add. Just a lot to, I think, you know, what I see a lot is a lot of firms find a lot of value in being able to monitor like file size trends, warning trends, open and sync time trends, any type of trend data that can give any clue that something's starting to go off the rails, I guess, before it goes off the rails.

So a couple of the pages that Allison had covered previously, it could be warnings, it could be anything, but going back to maybe the project overview if you don't mind real quick.

Allison Hawes  

Mhm.

Josh Kennedy  

On the left, there's some of these charts, you know, track those open times, sync times, file size. So we have it in Revit, we have it here. Those can be some good indicators as well as the registered projects, great ways to see those trends and monitor. I guess maybe just one story to tie this back to kind of getting ahead of these things. A couple of weeks ago, I was on the phone with the firm, they noticed this, they reached out to us during a trial, so it was a perfect use case. Guardian was in a monitor mode. Someone had reached out, it was taking 45 minutes to open the project all of a sudden. And so we were able to use this dashboard. We specifically went to the commands all page, because we were able to pinpoint that somebody had actually copied a bunch of links around the project, and that's what was starting to bloat the file size.

All of a sudden it was taking 45 minutes for everyone to open. And so it was helpful, of course, to like quickly troubleshoot that. But I think the more important thing is that where you were going before Allison, under the settings and then project configurations, we were able to quickly create a rule around mirroring to specifically prevent against links being mirrored next time.

So, whether you guide that or prevent it, you could, you know, just give some best practices or outright block it and kind of force the conversation before certain links are copied around. Yeah, I think the really nice thing for them was that they didn't have to worry about it happening again tomorrow.

Allison Hawes  

Since we're in here, I'll just also bring up our loading family rules so we can start to track, you know, larger families that are coming in, start to direct people to go to content catalog or whatever your content management system is.

Josh Kennedy  

Yeah, that files, that kind of family loading example you gave earlier, that's a very, very common one, whether there's three mb or five mb or whatever the threshold is. Again, you can just monitor for it. You can have an e-mail notification sent directly to a project lead if that's triggered, you know, without interrupting the user or anything, but just being able to get ahead. You know, that example of like taking 45 minutes to open the file, what we were talking about on that call at that client was like,

Well, it should be taking like 3 to 5 minutes. So how many weeks has it been like growing before it became 45 minutes?

Allison Hawes  

Cool.

All right, next is the hardware, software, or user error. So I've heard this from a couple clients actually, that a user will come to the IT department, or if you were a BIM manager wearing multiple hats and you’re IT, asking for a new computer because their computer is running too slow and they can't get their work done.

So it may be a new computer issue, but maybe it's as simple as a software update or looking into user error that certainly not malicious, but we could maybe focus on some training that would improve the speed of their model. So let's see, if I get into installs here,

I can start to see who's got which Revit versions and desktop connector versions. And this will show you kind of everyone in the firm what versions they have. If I go back to the project overview, let's say I sort by that user that's asking for the new computer. I can see which model they're on. So now I can look.

specifically within that model and start to come down here and see which version that everyone on that model has. Because we know if one person is out of date on desktop connector especially, that could cause some major issues. So these are some older screenshots because I think we're up to 27 now for desktop connector. But this lets you get the idea that, you know, if everyone's on one version and we've got one user who's far behind,

Maybe it's as simple as we need to get them up to date, and then their machine will start, or the file will start running a little bit better.

For user error, it's really helpful to look into the sessions. Maybe there's not syncing happening frequently enough, or maybe people are leaving the model open for large amounts of time, which you can start to see here. Maybe they're even leaving it over the weekend. We can see here this person left two weekend sessions open and was only syncing every six hours. So again, something as simple as let's just take a look at your habits within Revit. Maybe we can go to our sync traffic control and start to use some of the remind features to help people get a little bit better with their syncing habits.

start to take a look at what commands they're doing in there. So really focusing on the training aspect. And if it's as simple as we get you up to date on that desktop connector, we get syncing more, get you the training that you need, you know, that's a win-win because your firm saves money on not needing to buy new computers that you may not need. And your user is happy because they can now quickly get their work done and don't have to worry about that slowing down anymore.

Josh, anything to add there?

Josh Kennedy

I think just to kind of, yeah, reiterate, this is just something that we hear about a lot. You know, we do have a lot of calls where IT is on the calls and IT loves having access to this type of information. Yeah, leaving the model open for several days, a week, multiple weeks, we've seen it all on our side. Like I said, I work with hundreds of firms, so we get to see all of the best and worst habits and help kind of shed some light on them and help firms do some training. If you go, if you don't mind going quickly back to that project overview page one more time.

You know, one of the things I talk about often is, you know, someone saying it takes a long time to open or sync. You know, this can be a quick way to compare side by side with their peers, right? Ask a couple quick questions like, are you working off Wi-Fi? Are they working remote, right? Like, okay, not everyone in the file is experiencing these same things.

You know, you have as good or maybe better of a machine than them. So I think, you know, IT really likes that, the data, I guess, to support the case, right? We don't need necessarily to get this person a machine. That's really expensive. Let's tackle these first thing, these few things first, and make sure that we're solving the root of the problem.

Allison Hawes  

Yeah, I like this also because maybe you have a very vocal user that is asking for the new machine and they're on an earlier version of desktop connector. But this starts to capture maybe the quieter people that are still struggling with maybe longer times to open their model, but they haven't said anything yet. So now instead of waiting until you get that, oh my gosh, this isn't working e-mail.

we can try to get a little bit in front of it and just remind them we need to get you updated here.

All right, staffing resources. So this was a new one that I heard of that I thought was quite creative. This is coming from a group that was using our labels within the registered projects. So if I go back in here, you may have noticed this for the first time I showed this. So you've got different labels here that you can start to add.

And if I go into my manage labels, you know, I can set up different building systems, building sectors, if you want to track different consultants, the office locations. So if I'm here in Denver and I'm staffed on a project in Bozeman, that Bozeman label can be added to those projects and then that label can be sorted in Power BI.

So now I can easily see who are my team members that are working on this Bozeman project, even if they're not within that local office. So lots of different examples that you can add here. The one that I really liked was, you know, you've got different project managers that are responsible for a group of projects. And so they can very quickly add that label, add Team Taylor here. So now I can add that label to any project. And if I click on it, it'll filter by that. So maybe I want to create additional tabs that are Team Taylor, Team Allison, Team Jake. And so again, I can very quickly start to see what are those projects that he's responsible for.

If I reset that, I do just want to point out, you may have noticed some of these have a chain link sort of icon. And that means that this is actually smart tied to a shared project information parameter within the model. So you can see here, it's really helpful. You know, you're constantly updating your project template.

Models are starting on these different versions and you're not sure which one has your most up-to-date content. So this is a really nice way you update the project information parameter within your file and that label will automatically update. So you can see, right, these projects need this latest content that I added to my most current version of of my template.

Another way that this was being used, and this is not from that firm, this is just kind of a compilation of examples, but they were using the heat map for syncs. So dark red shows kind of the most common sync times. But you can see we've got all the days of the week and all the hours showing that this model basically doesn't sleep.

which is kind of cool if you've got, you know, offices across multiple time zones. It just shows that this model is constantly being worked on. But what this firm was kind of focused on was if someone's syncing at 11 P.m. on a Sunday, what is that story telling us? Are they maybe not feeling like they're getting the best use of their time during that 40-hour work week? Are they needing some training on how to maybe work a little bit more efficiently? Maybe the project needs to be staffed more. Maybe they're understaffed. So all this information is really helpful. And I really liked that they were concerned about seeing these numbers and wanting to make sure that their users were not getting burned out by working late hours.

They wanted to help them. And so using this heat map was a really nice way for them to kind of get insight into how their users were working.

Anything else there, Josh?

Josh Kennedy  

No, I think you covered it well. I think we...

I'll let you go right to the next one. We have about 5 minutes left. Firefighting's a fun topic.

Allison Hawes  

Okay, awesome. Perfect. All right, firefighting, yeah. So my time as a BIM manager, I was well aware of getting to my desk in the morning, excited to work on my to-do list, and then inevitably I'd have a frantic e-mail or ticket asking someone to help them put out a fire. So the ones that kind of came to mind right away were...

I had stuff in there yesterday, now I can't see it, or my model just straight up crashed and we need to restore to a previous version. So before Guardian, that was kind of a trial and error. I was just kind of guessing. I didn't want to go too far back because then we'd lose work that other people had done.

But if it was as simple, like we needed to just go back a couple versions to get the content to copy over or whatever, it was just, yeah, trial and error, just kind of guessing. It took a really long time. And so with having our registered projects and getting into Project Central,

I can quickly go back and see, oh, Allison deleted some elements on 7/13 at 2:39 and 2:36. What happened there? So it'll start to give some of that information and that helps in your first step of troubleshooting rather than doing all this testing. Let's jump right into this was the day and the time that this happened.

You'll also see this model in place and copy in place families as an activity. I want to point that out because this Project Central, I can't access this from registered projects without being in the model, but I'm missing a section here that's only accessible if you open up Project Central from within the model. So I'm going to do that.

You'll notice now I have model at a glance, but you see the two activities are here. So from here, I can start to see what's been going on in this file. I can start to go right to different elements. It'll tell me some of the reasons why.

This helps with the file size. Maybe you've got a bunch of groups or in place families copied around. So really helpful to look at this model at a glance. But this was also great for a recent problem that we heard of was, I think it was grids, like they were changing every day and we couldn't figure out who was doing it, what was happening.

So we can start to look in our commands all, look for specific commands and see what's been going on. Delete elements, I brought that up earlier. So the commands detail tab here actually will start to show like before and after screenshot. So which active view did this deletion happen in?

which elements were a part of that. It gives you the element ID. So again, for troubleshooting, this is a really nice quick effort to start figuring out what happened. And then you can take the information from here and start to go into your project configurations and hopefully limit these problems happening.

in the future.

Anything there, Josh?

Josh Kennedy  

Yeah, I think just a few quick things. Yeah, when it came to that grids example, that was a call that Allison and I were on yesterday. A firm reached out. They have Guardian set up in monitor mode, and they're like, we can't figure out every day we come in here. And these grids, they're moving, they're disappearing, they're changing.

We need to solve this today. So we jumped on a call and for them, pin protection went a long way. So just starting to use Guardian's pin protection to monitor when someone's unpinning and starting to make some adjustments to things. We also, Allison had some creative ideas around grouping and applying protections to certain groups.

So it's just really cool to be able to jump in and help them with like a real world problem. We get to do it kind of every day, so it's fun.

Going back to one other thing you said in Project Central, I just wanted to highlight the reason that model at a glance is only available when you're in the project is because as soon as Allison clicks that little drop down, it takes fractions of a second, but Guardian queries the file that's currently open to see if there are some things that might warrant some attention. That's why you're only seeing a few things on here with numbers next to them. There are, I think, several dozen other things that we're checking for as well. But if we're not finding them in the file currently, like at this moment, then we're not going to show them on this list. And that's why it requires that you have the model open, specifically to use model at a glance.

Allison Hawes  

Which I do like, but I love that you can access it from without even getting into files.

Josh Kennedy  

Yes, that is, yeah, super popular. Yeah, terms, it's fun to show folks that on the for the first time. Like, wait, I don't have to open them. It all takes like 15 minutes to open. I don't have to open it to see what's going on.

I know we're at time. I think one just last use case that I was just going to highlight is, I don't know if you have in here the usage screenshot. It looks like you don't, which is fine. Oh, you do have it. Okay. I was just going to highlight

Allison Hawes  

I can open it up.

Yep.

Josh Kennedy  

really specific case, but I was working with a firm a couple weeks back. They use, so some firms use the tokens, some firms buy the full licenses for Autodesk. I've seen these user totals down at the bottom left be really helpful for firms, I guess, on both sides. So one, if you are able to sort this by sessions, processed, commands.

properties being added. And you can start to use this to see like who has maybe those full Autodesk licenses that maybe doesn't need them. Maybe being on the token system would actually be more beneficial and more cost effective for certain folks. And on the flip side of that, going back to the sessions page, this particular firm had I think well over 1000 Revit users. And so the cost savings was really high for them. But they had a significant amount of people that were leaving the models open over the weekend. And so just being able to get ahead of these people who they were consuming tokens on Saturday and Sunday was going to like more than 5x the the cost of Guardian for the entire firm. So just a lot of really interesting ways. I've seen both like the BIM managers, the project leads going to use this data to troubleshoot firefight, as well as the IT teams using it to get ahead of some of those things and save some money.

I don't know if you had anything else that you wanted to cover, Allison. I see you shaking your head no. We're 2 minutes over, but I'll ask maybe someone on my team just quickly if there's any questions in the chat that we didn't get to or that we should elaborate on. I know that I could see the chat moving, but I can't say I've been following it religiously.

Chris Shafer  

Hey Josh, at this moment I think the team's covered all the questions.

Josh Kennedy  

Okay.

Chris Shafer  

But if anyone has any more questions, feel free to add them to the chat now.

Josh Kennedy  

Yeah, maybe just in closing off.

See if I can share my screen back out. I'm sure you all know how to find us, but in case you don't, getguardian.tech is the website. Yeah, feel free to reach out if you have questions that we can help with. If you're not using Guardian today, happy to take the time to show you how it works and see if it'd be a good fit for you.

I appreciate everyone joining us today and the questions in the chat along the way. That always makes it fun.

Uhh...

Can I quickly answer Nathan's question here? It seems Guardian can be very helpful, very useful for firms with mature standards to processes. Can Guardian help new friends using Revit? Absolutely. I work with a lot of teams who are transitioning to Revit. Usually they kind of like bring on somebody who's familiar with Revit and that person's responsible for helping do a lot of the lift. I think Guardian is a great training tool. It helps build people's confidence in Revit because you have these guardrails, right? There might be half a dozen ways to do a certain task. And I've heard a lot of really positive feedback from the users who are more confident and jumping into Revit, I guess, faster because they know that they're going to kind of be trained in the moment with some of those project configurations and protections that we have alluded to and showed some examples of earlier on. Yeah, absolutely, very common use case there, Nathan.

Yeah, I agree. A white paper on the topic would be helpful. I've got our marketing team in here somewhere, I believe, hopefully take a note. If not, we'll make sure to talk about it.

Awesome. Well, with that, again, thanks everybody. Thanks, Allison, for walking through some of those examples. Yeah, forward to seeing you. I hope you have a good rest of your day.

Allison Hawes  

Thanks, everyone.

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