Inside the System

Big News

So it's been quiet over here in Inside the System of late, and that's because there's been some changes in the role I'm playing here at Autodesk, hence the Big News title.  With the changes for me comes dual duty for me in the short term, and unfortunately a decision to not allocate as much time time to my blog.  This wasn't something that I enjoyed having to do, but in the end was required to keep my sanity.  I'm glad that there is a growing network of MEP bloggers to keep you all informed over the past few weeks.

So, back to the big news...I've decided to take a new role at Autodesk, in which I'll be focusing on Sustainable Design across our AEC division.  The formal title is Product Manager, AEC Sustainable Design.  This is an exciting role for me, which will allow me to follow my passion for combating Global Climate change, as well as developing more sustainable buildings.

New Focus

With the growing adoption of Revit as the tool of choice to support the BIM design process, as well as our recent additions of Green Building Studio, Carmel Software, and Square One (ecotect), we have a lot of work to do integrate of all this functionality into the design workflows already existing in the marketplace.  There's a lot of skills and time required today to understand the Built Environment's impact on the Earth, and that's an equation we hope to change at Autodesk.  This will be my focus moving forward, and I look forward to working with many of you in the AEC community towards this goal.

You will all no doubt be hearing more about this down the road, as I transition fully into this role.

Transition

But what about my current role?  I am still fulfilling the Revit MEP Product Manager role, and will be handing the reigns overs to Stephen Roth and another Product Manager we are currently looking to hire. 

I'll start with Stephen.  Stephen came to Autodesk from the acquisition of Carmel Software earlier this year.  As somebody that ran a successful analysis software business that focused on the HVAC industry, Stephen is very knowledgable in our discipline.  In the long term Stephen will be focusing on the Revit MEP business and strategy.  In the shor term he'll be focusing on all aspects of the product.

The other role is what we call a Technical Product Manager.  That person will be responsible for executing on the Product Strategy defined between that person and Stephen.  That role is very demanding, and from personal experience, incredibly fulfilling.  You can read more about this on our website, where the open position is listed.  I would highly encourage any of you in the audience interested to apply for the position.  It has been by far the most interesting, diverse job I have ever had.

In the interim, I will be working with Stephen to define the scope of our future releases, and making sure things get out the door as scheduled.  You'll be hearing about those "things" in the coming weeks.

What About the Blog?

Inside the System isn't going anywhere, although It will morph a bit over the coming months.  Once I get back to doing just one job, I'll start regularly posting again on various topics.  Most likely we will also start introducing some additional authors to keep the content coming.

Closing Thoughts

The decision to change roles was very difficult for me, and in the end hinged upon the just a personal desire to help advance the industry on a subject so important to our lives and our descendants.

For those of you I have interacted with over the past 2 years, I am sincerely thankful to have such a great group of engaged folks who are passionate about the advancement of the MEP Industry towards a more efficient construction process.

I look forward to working with you all in a different focus in the coming weeks, months, and years.

[Request for Feedback] Pipe Naming Conventions

I wanted to solicit your participation in a survey we have developed involving Pipe Fittings, and how you as users think about them.

Pipe Fittings are a complex beast when it comes to describing them in a short concise manner. Many aspects about them, such as Material, Class, Type, Connection Type, etc., are factors for selection in a design.

We'd like to know more about what is important to you as users, so we can define a convention that best reflects that feedback.

With that in mind, I ask that you please fill out the following survey to provide us your perspective on this matter.  It shouldn't take more than 5 minutes.

For those of you who are CAD Managers, I would request that you ask your end-users to fill out the survey, as they will most likely be the folks most directly impacted by choices that we make.

Thanks in advance to all of you.

Looking for New Members of the Autodesk MEP Team

So I'm going to change gears today to something not product-related....well not directly.  We currently have two important roles in the MEP Marketing team that are open for hiring, so I wanted to let everybody know about them.  I am linking to the actual job postings, so I'm just going to summarize them quickly here.

MEP Industry Marketing Manager
This highly visible, strategic role is responsible for defining the marketing messaging for our MEP products.  The successful candidate will apply market experience, market research, and new media to determine effective messaging for the different MEP market segments.  This is done in collaboration with the MEP Product Management team, and has a high level of interaction with the rest of the Autodesk marketing teams.  Strong interpersonal skills a must.

MEP Technical Marketing Manager
This highly visible, tactical role is responsible for consuming the marketing messaging for our MEP products, and producing and presenting the marketing deliverables that are distributed to our sales channel and customer base.  The successful candidate will apply product knowledge, domain expertise, and new media to create effective marketing collateral for our MEP products.  Delivery of technical training and sales readiness activities require strong presentation skills.

As you all know from my bio, I love my job at Autodesk, and we have a great MEP team.

Vote for AU 2008 Classes

Autodesk University is the best event of the year to better your collective skills on our applications, get to know the Product Teams, and network with peers.  Hands down.  I love it myself, as it's a great resource for me to gather customer feedback and requirements.

In an effort to make the event even more valuable for attendees, we have created a survey for people to help us decide what classes to offer.

The survey can be accessed here.

Hurry, the deadline is May 3rd.

P.S.  I am not dead, I have just been a bit silent (and enormously busy) lately.  Expect some new content very soon.

Dusting Off the Backup Drive

Update: Due to popular demand, I have also added a Zip file that contains all of the videos I link below.

***************************************************************************************************

And now for something completely different.

I had fully planned to make some more videos over the weekend, but a trip to Vermont to see my family this axed that plan.  Alas, all is not lost.  I'll be diving back into new features and workflows for Revit MEP 2009 soon enough.

Today, in response to a thread on our discussion forums, I decided to dust off the 'ole backup drive and spead some AutoCAD MEP goodness.  As most of you know, before becoming the Product Manager of Revit MEP, I was a Product Support Technician specializing in our MEP products.  It was during that time that I became acquainted with Camtasia (the software I use for video capture), and began making videos to explain solutions to support cases.

I started out just solving the specific issues that were raised in the support case, but that was not a very scalable effort.  The videos contain the datasets sent by the customers, so I couldn't send that video to other customers with the same issue because of privacy concerns.  So, when the opportunity arose I made more generic videos on concepts that could be sent out to anybody.  I ended up making a lot of these videos and sent them out whenever a pertinent support case came into my queue.  It was then that I really began to understand the full value of using video content to deliver concepts and training.

Of course I'm no longer handling support cases, so those videos have sat on my backup drive not really helping anybody.  Not all is lost though, as the folks on the support team do have them at their disposal.  Nonetheless, I thought it would be a good idea to post them up on my blog for all to download if desired.

You all can feel free to download and do what you want with them, I only ask that you please credit me when using them on other outlets.

The vast majority of these are for Autodesk Building Systems 2006 and 2007, and many are not as refined as my more recent work, but they get the job done.

AutoCAD MEP Videos

All Videos in a Zip File

AutoCAD MEP Display System (Three Part Video)

Part 1 - Display Representations

Part 2 - Display Sets

Part 3 - Display Configurations

AME Objects, ACAD Solids, and Hidden Lines

Adding Eccentric Round to Rectangular Transition

Automatically Generating Wires

Automatically Populate MvPart Information to a PSD

Block-Based Parts with Service Clearances

Changing Routing Preferences on a Large Scale

Controlling RiseDrop Symbol Layer

Controlling the Size of Label Curves

Creating a Custom Device Tag

Creating a New Size of a Block-Based Part

Defining the Image of a Block-Based Part

Display Through Xrefs Explained

Exporting to gbXML from AME

Grouping in Schedules

Labels with Property Set Information

Migrating Tool Palettes Between Releases

Migrating an MvPart from 2006 to 2007

Modify View Block of an MvPart

Modifying 2006 Version Pipe Layouts in 2007 and Later - Conversion

Modifying 2006 Version Pipe Layouts in 2007 and Later - Revert

Modifying the View Block of an MvPart Existing in a Drawing

Modifying the View Block of a Diffuser Existing in a Drawing

Pipe by Size Display - Explained

Transition Justification

Using Block Images for Electrical Devices in Schedule Tables

Using the Search and Replace Tool in Catalog Editor

I'll try and field whatever you questions you might have on these, but much of this knowledge is a bit rusty on my side these days.

 

I'll be back soon with 2009 New Features and Workflows, it looks like I'll have some time tonight to cut some more videos, get those RSS Readers ready so you don't miss out.

MMMMMMMM....Pancakes

On a totally non-MEP related note, but an equally, if not more mouth watering topic, I wanted to alert all of the Inside the System readers of a matter of utmost importance.

Today is IHOP National Pancake Day.  Yes, you just read that correctly, no need to re-read.  This testament to the sheer awesomeness that is a short stack of pancakes can be yours for free at IHOP today only.

That's all for now.  But there's some big news coming up....get your RSS Readers ready.

Have No Fear...

I hope everybody had a good Holiday season and New Year.  As I mentioned in All Quiet on the Blog Front, my holiday season has been consumed mostly with family and preparing for my Wedding, which successfully happened on New Years Eve.  It was really a perfect night, and everybody really had a great time. As you might expect, the stress level has subsided now for me now that everything has been completed.

I'm now getting packed to head south to Costa Rica for my honeymoon.  This should be a really fun, relaxing time, and I look forward to not thinking about Revit MEP all day.  I'll be back on the 22nd, and expect to hear from me during that week with MEP-related goodness like before the holiday season.

I have a post all set up to go live during my absence, so go ahead and get your RSS readers subscribed to my feed so you'll know when it goes live.  I wouldn't want you to come back to the site only to be let down with the tragedy of no updates.

I'll talk with you all of you in a few weeks.

All Quiet on the Blog Front

First, I realize it's been quiet on the Inside the System blog lately, sorry bout that.  Here's why:

Becoming a Better PM
I was in training much of last week, which was really valuable for me.  It was a course called Pragmatic Product Management, which covered an organized approach to the Product Management process, including marketing, documentation, support, and all of the other necessary items to make a product successful in the marketing.  It really helped to provide an clear view to the swirling vortex of terror that can be my working life these days.

Stop to Watch and Listen
Among the many action items that came out of the training for me was the need for more user observation and interviews.  I already do a whole lot of interaction with customers already, through the forums, this blog, and customer briefings, but I probably don't spend enough just sitting down and watching people do their jobs.

One of the things we try and avoid doing at Autodesk is to develop solutions based upon our experiences.  Just like all of you out there, as people with industry experience we tend to think that the solutions that worked for us are the solutions that work for all customers, and it's those things that customers are really looking for in future versions of our software.  With those blinders on you rarely end up looking at the workflows and finding the real customer problems.  Rather, you end up finding the problems that need to be solved to support the workflow that you used in your experience.  This is no way to produce innovative software that allows an industry to break free of inherently inefficient processes.

When you sit down and watch people do there job it allows you to remove your own personal attachment to the process, and just look at the task at hand and how people complete those tasks.  In that environment you can try and find the true customer problem.

When people log requests or Wish Items, this is why I always ask that people explain the task they are trying to do and the problem that exists first; then they can go ahead and provide their proposed solution.  With that sort of a request we can better understand the broad customer problem, rather that the solution to a particular user.

With this all explained, I plan to do a number of these sorts of on-site visits during the coming year.  For those of you out in the audience that would be interested in participating in such an exercise, shoot me an e-mail (a Mail Link is in my Bio).  If you happen to be in a locale that has a close proximity to great skiing (Tahoe, Wasatch, Cascades, Rockies), you get preferential treatment. :-D

Shoveling Out from Underneath the Mountain
All of this training is good and all, but unfortunately it doesn't stop the e-mails from flooding my inbox.  As a result, and have been catching up a great deal since.  With our development process coming to closure in advance of our next release things are really crazy for me.

But Wait, There's More
Add on to that the fact that I'm getting married in less than two weeks, the blog had to be put on the back burner.  I'm putting my Product Management experience to good use in planning for this, treating it like a product release, to my fiancee's chagrin. Regardless, there's many balls that are being juggled right now, hopefully none of them hit the ground.

On the marriage note, I'm going to be off the grid for the first 3 weeks of January on Honeymoon in Costa Rica.  Aside from maybe a picture or two, I will not be posting anything during that period.  My fiancee will probably beat me to death with my BlackBerry if she sees my using it.  I'm not even bringing my laptop.  Hopefully I can achieve a bliss-like state where I will actually stop thinking about work and enjoy surf lessons, zip lining, and scuba diving.