Home Sustainable Land Development Today January 2005

This Year’s IT Resolution

Written by Donald Broussard

Sunday, 02 January 2005

Another new year, another set of resolutions. I’ve never been very good with my personal goals. We’ll leave that discussion for my therapist. I’m much better with my professional ones. Each January my staff and I decide on a general theme for the following year’s efforts.   Three years ago CAD Standards was the victim. That task turned out to be much more involved than any of us expected. However, we succeeded in implementing a great set. They are still working very well today.   Two years ago we tackled digitizing our endless piles of paper. Today we’re a lot closer to paperless.   Last year we consolidated our data stores. Information that used to be tracked and duplicated in literally hundreds of places is down to just a few. Hopefully, we’ll continue to improve until it’s only a couple.   This year we’re getting back to basics. We’re going to devote our attention to the end users’ (our fellow employees) use of our licensed software. The primary focus will be their use of CAD. We plan to dramatically improve production. We’ll attack the issue on several fronts.The most significant is the streamlining of existing processes. We’ll accomplish this through the extensive customization of our CAD software.   Customization of our software involves templates, prototypes, style libraries, and hundreds of custom tools. Our primary CAD platform happens to be AutoCAD® but I think these ideas apply to almost any application you may be using.   In this simplest of examples, the enduser’s job becomes dramatically easier. His quality of work is improved. He is much faster.   I observed a designer as he placed water laterals in a drawing. I easily recognized several steps that were repeated over and over again. I know that ten other designers are duplicating the same cumbersome steps almost daily. On every basic macro saved in a toolbar button accomplishes my goal.   ^C^C-layer;make;WATER-LATERALPR;color;RED;;;line;_ins;\_per;\;   The details of the macro aren’t important. What is important is a significant task just became a tiny amount of work. Our actual implementation of this tool is a little more involved and accomplishes much more. That will have to wait for another day and another article.   Be warned, there is a downside. We have hundreds of tasks that deserve this same kind of improvement. I have a lot of work to do. This also leads to moretraining. The upside is that my nonbillable CAD support effort directly improves the overall performance of our production personnel. Isn’t that what we should have been doing all along?   Hopefully, my staff won’t be too discouraged if they get a chance to read this article. It will be the first they’ve heard of our New Year’s Resolution! SLDT