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Your New CAD Management Plan
22 Sep, 2010 By: Robert GreenWith economic recovery in sight, now is the time to develop strategies for budgeting, growth, and user training.
Special Alert: CAD Manager's Survey 2010 Opens Thursday, September 23
This multiple-choice survey shouldn't take more than 10 minutes to complete, and your information will be held in strict confidence. All questions have a "Do not wish to reply" option so you can skip sections that don't apply to you. Thank you for your participation!
Let's face it: the last couple of years haven't been easy for anyone, let alone CAD managers. Chances are you've spent less time on CAD management and more time supporting projects, all while stressing about possibly losing your job. This type of "just get it done" CAD environment doesn't lend itself to proper CAD management planning, does it? Well, sooner or later the economy will have to get better, and we'll all wish we'd planned better for our futures.
In the next few editions of the CAD Manager's Newsletter, I'll share some strategies and tips to help you plan for the new CAD management realities we'll experience as the economy (hopefully) starts to recover. Here goes.
What's in a CAD Management Plan?
In a word: Everything. All the factors related to utilizing CAD in your company are issues you should be thinking about and planning for.
In years prior to the recent economic recession, I would have listed major planning areas as follows:
- Creation or modification of your budget
- Creation and delivery of a training program
- Staff development and evaluation
- File and data management concerns
- Evaluation and deployment of software upgrades
- Upkeep and modernization of CAD standards
- Upkeep and modernization of CAD-related hardware
- Delivery of normal technical and production-related support tasks
- Minimizing last-minute disasters via planning.
CAD managers must certainly still worry about all these issues, but the recession has added other concerns to the list, including:
- Increasing productivity 2 to 3% per year with no staff hiring
- Minimizing software costs via creative licensing techniques
- Maximizing remote staff work sharing via cloud or network file sharing
- Minimizing CAD management costs by being more billable
- Creating a plan for soon-to-be-adopted technologies like BIM (building information modeling).
Planning ahead for these new CAD management realities should help you emerge from the recession in as good a shape as possible. So how can you best do so?
Organize and Prioritize
Once you have to plan for all these tasks, how should you prioritize them? After all, you're pressed for time and want to be certain you're working through your list in the right order.
Based on the feedback I've received from CAD managers, their companies, and business owners, I've prioritized the following groupings of specific tasks as follows, starting with the jobs that should be tackled first.
Make projects run better:
- Minimize or eliminate last-minute disasters via planning
- Execute normal technical and production-related support tasks
- Minimize CAD management costs by being more billable
- Keep your current hardware and networks running efficiently.
Build a faster, cheaper CAD infrastructure:
- Increase productivity 2 to 3% per year with no staff hiring
- Maximize remote staff work sharing via cloud or network file sharing
- Minimize software costs via creative licensing techniques
- Standardize software deployment.
Improve CAD standards to reduce errors:
- Target your training to emphasize standards and methods
- Evaluate staff in a way that emphasizes these metrics.
Plan and budget for the long term
- Plan for file storage and management issues
- Plan for new IT items like servers, plotters, etc.
- Create a plan for soon-to-be-adopted technologies like BIM.
Document your plan
- Keep budget documents up-to-date
- Explain your plan via e-mail, formal write-ups, and conversations.
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