Refining Revit Standards: Defining and Standardizing at Scale

Josh Kennedy: This is really the first of a small series that we're doing where we're diving deeper and deeper into Guardian's mapping configurations and the standards side of the tool. I think I'm sure we have people on this call who are familiar with Guardian and I'm sure a handful who are less familiar. So today we're kind of kicking it off by starting a little bit more high level.

We're definitely going to show some examples of how you can use these tools, and we will start to get into the weeds today. But on the next session, which I believe is happening next month, we'll notify everyone, of course. We're going to invite some of our clients. We're going to hear from several of our clients on exactly how they're using these tools in practice at their firms.

So look forward to continuing this series here.

As far as the agenda for today, we're going to walk through just a couple slides, just an overview of kind of Guardian as a company, make sure everyone's familiar with who we are, who's on the call, and what we do overall. And we're going to spend the most of the time, like I said, in the product, focusing on really two specific dialogs and a couple of workflows all around standardization.

And we do only have 30 minutes blocked off here. I'm sure we can go over a few minutes if this does go a little long with questions, but we're going to try and cut the demo a few minutes before the 30-minute mark so we have some time to answer those questions along the way.

As far as objectives, we want to make sure that things that you can take away today are some low-hanging fruit, some easy wins that can help you buy some more time. We talk to a lot of firms that are juggling multiple priorities and initiatives, and we want to help you save some time today or in the very near future with some quick wins, and then learn how you can use these tools to identify, define, and automate your standards.

So that down the road, there's less and less cleanup, more and more consistency in your projects.

And how you can also use those rules to protect your templates. Really, we talk a lot about using Guardian as like an insurance policy or an immune system for your templates and your projects going forward.

So just a couple kind of housekeeping items. This session will be recorded. So we'll share that with everyone who registered. We usually send the link within about 24 hours. So you can expect to see that. We do encourage questions along the way. Like I said, our team is here. We've got a couple of people other than Parley and I who are monitoring the chat and the Q&A. So if you have questions along the way, please feel free to drop them in.

If we don't get to them while we're talking, then we'll try and make sure we can answer them at the end of the call.

As far as presenters today, we have myself, Josh, I'm the Director of Sales and Revenue Operations. But what's more important is what I get to do all day, and that's really sharing with firms how others are getting ahead of their same issues. So I get to hear a lot of firms having very similar issues as the last people I was on the phone with.

So I'm excited to share some of those wins with you today. And we have a really great product that makes my job a lot of fun. People are always really excited to hear about these tools when we have a more interactive, you know, one-on-one conversation.

So if you haven't talked to us during one of those demos before. We definitely encourage you to sign up and we'd love to get your thoughts on the tools outside of these 30 minutes today too.

But I'll pass it over to you, Parley.

Parley Burnett: Sounds good. Thanks, Josh.

Yeah, I smiled a little bit there because Josh gets to do the fun part these days. He gets to talk to the firms and get their first reactions when they see Guardian. That used to be me. But anyway, hi, everybody. I'm Parley and currently leading the business here. And founded the business back in 2018.

But yeah, quick, quick background on myself, more of a Revit nerd than anything else I have to say. I really.

I really believe in the promise of Revit. I have since the beginning, from the transition from CAD, it was just, that still kind of lives within me. And in our team, in fact, who is primarily made up of BIM managers from their past. And, you know, we're all trying to just make things work better, make Revit work better for you and your team.

But currently in Bozeman, Montana, where we're headquartered.

Yeah. Thank you, Josh.

So just a little bit about the business and kind of where we've been and where we're going. And, you know, founded in 2018. This was a very small operation at that time.

This was really just founded from a lot of ideas that I had from my management experience, but also while working at Unifi, Unifi Labs, now Content Catalog, of course. And during that time, I had been, you know, customer success director and product manager at different times, which gave me a lot of opportunities to talk with firms all over the world. And we would, of course, lead the conversation with the topic of content management.

But the...

conversation often kind of got diverged to things like standards. And often their implementation would be delayed because of ongoing efforts with standards. They didn't feel like they could put content elsewhere until the standards were established.

And so really when we got the chance to create something new and exciting, that's where we started. And, you know, it really was initially a mapping engine, but now we've grown into a much more of a BIM management service, where the idea is to put a digital copy of yourself, so to speak, in the co-pilot seat next to your users.

And if you could imagine being able to spend all day with a user side by side, guiding them, helping them do things properly.

Things would go a lot smoother, right? And that really does take us to the next slide. We're trying to avoid mistakes, protect the standards, and train users. There's a lot of different ways we do that, but essentially...

Guardian is just that federated service that connects it all. We do have a data reporting component to this and a controls component to this where you can always adjust things on a project-by-project basis. But it's really exciting to see what firms are doing.

I think that's the funnest part of our of our job is working with folks that we we truly see as friends in the industry, so...

It's been exciting.

Back to you, Josh.

Josh Kennedy: Yeah, thanks, Parley. Yeah, we just to wrap up the last couple slides here and then transition to the demo in Revit. Yeah, we're working with about 385 firms today or so. So come a long way since 2018.

And I agree with Parley. The best part is getting to be on the phone with people whether it's on the new sales side and just seeing people's reactions, hearing about Guardian for the first time or working with them in the weeds after they've been having these tools for some time now.

But yeah, at the end of the day, really our mission is to help firms get ahead of things before they become an issue and focus less on the repetitive tasks and more on the strategic initiatives that can really drive the business forward and make everyone, you know, that's part of their team, better at using Revit at the end of the day.

So how this works in case you're unfamiliar and kind of how I see a lot of firms roll this out and help a lot of firms. Really, I work with firms their first few months mainly with Guardian, testing it out in a trial environment, working with our Client Success, our onboarding team. So I get to see a lot of implementation.

Um, gonna see how they're doing things today and how they're transitioning.

A big part of the tool is that it starts out in this monitor only mode. So you can deploy Guardian to your team. And it's constantly learning in the sense that it's instantly reporting on model performance and user behavior. And you can gain a lot of insights into how your team works in Revit and how your models are performing. So you can start to get ahead of things right away.

And then all that data feeds our add-in that we'll look at in just a moment where it's completely customizable. So depending on, you know, your firm, your discipline, your clients, right, you can make this extremely custom depending on the project needs as well as the firm overall. So we'll talk about how you can really scale and grow into the using the tools.

And then the beauty of it is it all runs on autopilot, right? You teach Guardian something once, hey, I don't want people importing CAD, I don't want people copying links around, whatever it is, you know, I don't want to see those old text types. You tell Guardian once, you don't have to worry about seeing that thing again tomorrow or next week. And that's, I think, really the beauty of the tool.

And then this last slide before we jump into the demo.

Wrangling Revit standards, you know, I wanted to have some fun. I think this is an old Super Bowl commercial, if I remember correctly. But really kind of what I hear a lot of firms telling us about is, you know, sometimes they don't have time or they feel like they don't have time because they're so focused on the problems of today and getting projects out the door, of course, but they have a hard time focusing on the templates, the content, whatever that initiative is.

And in my experience talking to these firms, it tends to take a lot longer than they wish. And that's really why we wanted to have this demo and focus on this topic is there's a lot of ways that we've seen firms kind of get ahead of some of those quick wins, right?

And make decisions along the way, like, you know, for focusing on line styles this week, right? We might not have enough time to build a whole new template, but if we can make a few decisions, we can at least condense the problem down and have less to clean up tomorrow. Same idea, whether it's work set automation or modeling in place or whatever it might be for your team.

And then there's just this constant need, right? You're constantly probably bringing people on your team. I imagine, you know, most firms are growing or adding new people periodically. So you've got to train people on your standards as well as your client standards. So that carries over into just existing staff as well.

Yeah, this constant training and kind of retraining, right? Maybe feel like you told someone a few times already. So a big part of Guardian we'll talk about for just briefly is how you can kind of intercept and train people as they work.

But with that, I want to transition it to you, Parley, to get into the Revit side of this webinar.

Parley Burnett: Awesome.

Yeah, in my experience, firms often look at standards efforts as kind of isolated projects where they block off several months, kind of go into a room in the back, come up with a standard, and then they talk about rolling it out.

But the reality is the standards are never done. I've seen that time and time again, talking with so many firms. They're just never done. And then when they are done, it's a problem of implementation.

You know, you of course are on board with it, but your users, frankly, don't have the same interests as you, or they don't see the effect of these things as much as you do. So our goal is to really just make some quick decisions and move on and make improvements as you go.

I'm going to share my screen out and just get right into a little bit of functionality so we can have some eyes on what this looks like.

Okay, so we are found in the add-ins tab. We're really trying to be behind the scenes to your end users for the most part. But for admins, once you're activated, you'll see several more buttons for Guardian than your users would see. So that's what I'm currently today. I've got a settings menu, and then we can actually go into like model properties menu, which we'll talk about here pretty quick.

Just to establish a couple things about how Guardian works.

There are some key areas here where we are able to configure from within Guardian how it works for your end users. So this is all connected to the cloud. And as you go into these dialogs, make changes, that's pushed out to your end users.

These 3 are the main areas, mapping, project and workset configurations.

We'll talk about mappings, but just to quickly go into project configurations, this is where you can set up things that you might still consider a standard. Things like, well, don't copy in place families, right? Or don't explode CAD files. Those are often written into standards documents.

Today, we're mostly talking about the naming conventions and the baseline standards that you've set up in your template and trying to maintain that over time. So we're not going to talk about this, but this is a very popular part of Guardian where you can control a lot of different aspects of things going on, including a sync traffic control feature, which is really great.

And then there is a workset management system where you can define your standard worksets, even build rules for those.

And then as things like levels and grids, for example, are drawn, those just automatically go right on the right workset.

So again, standards in a sense, but not really the focus today.

And then we'll jump into mapping configurations.

So this is really the behind the scenes dialogue. And Josh, if you have anything to add to this, this is really the behind the scenes of where these rules exist.

And we're looking at some basic property types like patterns and object styles. And the rules themselves are pretty basic. We're just looking at one thing as an original and then it gets moved into a destination by name. Okay.

Now.

There is an add button here where you can add rules manually. But what we'll show you is how in your normal processes, these are going to be populating in an automatic way.

Anything you would add here, Josh, while we're on this dialog?

Josh Kennedy: I think just to add quickly again, this is where you kind of manage your configuration. So to take a step back, you can build out as many configurations in Guardian as you might need for your different project types. A lot of firms, as they're starting out, just focus on, you know, a company standard, right? And that's where the majority of your rules might live.

But then you might create a duplicate of that. And for a certain client, they might have their own text or shared parameters or whatever it is that they might use. And so it becomes really easy to manage. But this dialog here is not the best place to create rules, but really the best place to manage them.

I think the next dialog Parley is going to is where we can talk more about creating.

Parley Burnett: That's right.

So I have a very lightweight model open. It could represent a template for your firm. And when you go to the model properties dialog, this is going to display a list of all the different standards in your project from line patterns to object styles, shared parameters.

And it gives you a lot of tools for consolidating those things where you might have duplicates or perhaps things not even being used anymore. Okay.

And so I just want to call attention to these two columns, usage, and duplicates. It's very handy. You can select a property here and scan it for where it's used. And that's going to tell you in this usage column where that's used. 32 times. And we can also scan for duplication where it will help you identify, well, okay, these two properties are the same, so they're worth considering combining. And we can do that across all of these different tabs.

There's a lot more here that we'll go through on future webinars. But the idea is, if we map something here, I think the, if we do a search for concrete.

We're going to find several different concretes and any project is going to have likely some duplication here, just name different ways with a hyphen or a space. But if we combine them, we can just do a mapping like that by double clicking, and then it's when we review those changes and process them, that's when those rules drop into that configuration for this project, right?

And zooming out a little bit, conceptually that basically distributes those rules across your whole firm.

So anytime concrete lightweight shows up in my project, it's going to recognize it and map it in the background for your users.

Josh Kennedy: Yeah, if I could just add here, I'd say.

A lot of times what I see firms do when they start to use these tools in Guardian is like start in their template, right? Usually it's fairly clean, but not perfect. And so that's oftentimes a good place to start.

And then we talk about, to steal a term from one of my colleagues, Jake, mining for mapping rules. So I see a lot of firms do this and they'll go into, you know, a popular project. It could be a finished project from the past, but they know that a lot of their team goes there to grab content.

And so they'll go and they'll go through the line patterns and styles and text types, et cetera, scan for duplication, and basically use that to just teach Guardian what should and shouldn't be the standard going forward. And you don't have to process it and clean it up in that old file.

But you can still teach Guardian from those older projects and store those back to your mapping config.

Parley Burnett: Exactly.

That's what it's all about, is just making decisions on the go. And we find that those configurations just kind of populate over time.

It's that immune system like Josh was talking about.

So we look forward to going to more details on how to use this. I'm going to close that dialog quickly and just show you a very quick snapshot as well that you can kind of go to the individual property dialogs like patterns or view filters of Guardian and upload those to your cloud of Guardian and then keep those synchronized across your projects. It's a really cool set of features.

To just quickly, I'm looking at the time, I'm going to show just a quick demonstration of something that happens a lot likely at your firm where users are just kind of mindful of their last project, maybe some details there that they want to reuse on their current project.

So they'll open that up, they'll copy/paste something from that project and try to paste that into their current project.

Here actually is just a quick view into another kind of protection that I was hinting at near the beginning. But it's basically saying, hey, here, let's try to not copy views from old projects.

And the comment here is kind of trying to steer the user towards the content management system of the firm. I'm going to click OK on that.

And then in my other file here, I'm going to paste. And this will spin for a minute here because Guardian is recognizing a lot of new things being added.

And it's a little bit of an extreme example where there's a lot of duplicated families coming in, a lot of patterns. So that took maybe a couple seconds longer than you'd normally expect.

But as an admin, if we click this option here, we're able to actually see everything coming in. If we kind of collapse some of this, you'll get a better idea what's going on. We have all of these families with a one at the end. And Guardian is actually recognizing that those are duplicated families and automatically mapping those to the families already used in this model.

So that alone reduces a lot of confusion to your users. And then down below, we see a lot of rules actually being applied because they exist in that configuration. So when we hit process, that's going to go ahead and just go through the detail and really kind of do a big conversion on this. So it's now brought up to our current standard.

Josh Kennedy: I think one thing that's important to note is for the everyday user, right? There's no option, there's no decision-making necessary. This is just happening in the background to the user, if you're allowing them to, you know, copy and paste or bring in these families or details, right? Guardians just doing all that cleanup.

Parley Burnett:

Yeah, yeah, this is actually changing its look and appearance pretty dramatically, more for demonstration purpose than anything. But if we kind of compare these side by side,

Um, I window tile this.

You'll see it looks much cleaner.

K.

It went into all the families, swapped patterns out, very powerful set of tools.

Okay, I'm going to stop sharing. We'll go back to you, Josh, I think, unless there was something else you wanted to show there.

Josh Kennedy: No, nothing necessarily to show, I think.

I can share my screen again and just give us at least a background here for if there are any questions and a couple other resources.

I was just going to add though, you know, we talked a little bit at the beginning about, you know, so basically the ways I see firms use this is, you know, cleaning up their templates and building that immune system, teaching Guardian from old projects.

And then there's the cleaning that can happen as you're working, like Parley was just showing. Another kind of thing that we help a lot of firms with is this content cleanup. We talk about a content car wash, or we have referred to it as that in the past. And this idea of using that engine to basically load in batches of families into your template, teach Guardian.

And we didn't highlight it, but there was an option at the bottom of the dialog Parley was showing last, that we can save those families back to where they came from when you're bringing them in from outside. So I see a lot of firms use this engine to quickly clean up their families, get it to a standard, upload it to, you know, content catalog or whatever the approved library source is. And now it's kind of a win-win because you have the cleaned-up content as well as the rules saved to your mapping configuration.

But I was curious if anyone had any questions.

Check the chat here.

I think there might have been.

That was Chris typing in. Yeah, no more duplicate families. See a lot of firms talk about that. Break line one, break line 2, et cetera. Guardian just takes care of that out of the box. So you don't even have to teach it to do those things, which is really nice.

If there are no other questions, maybe we'll end pretty close to on time here and I'll just share. If you wanted to learn more about our tools, our website is this top link. It's just our getguardian.tech.

Our team's also taken the time to do a lot of like short videos on the different features of Guardian. We talked really about like a small handful today, but sync traffic control, pin protection, you know, workset automation.

A lot of really popular tools that we didn't talk about today. And there's short videos for all those on YouTube. So just another place that you can learn a little bit more if you're interested.

Yeah, just scratching the surface. Parley, not sure what else you might add here. Scratching the surface for today on some of the mappings and how that engine works.

Next month, if you want to join us again, we'll bring some clients on. We'll dig deeper into exactly how they're using it in their environments.

Parley Burnett: Yeah, there's a lot of scenarios that we run into that really kind of open and expand the vision of what this can do, this concept. So broad strokes can do a lot here.

Cool.

Josh Kennedy: Well, we can wrap it up. I appreciate everybody joining us today and yeah, let us know if we can help you in the future.

Thank you, everyone.

Parley Burnett: Yeah, thanks everybody. See ya.