Organizing Workset

[Anonymous]

What are some of the ways of organizing Worksets?

What are some of the differences of organization between a housing project and a hospital project?

What is the best practice of Workset organization for a 300 bed hopital project done as renovation of an exisiting building with 3 architects working on it?

[Alfredo_Medina]

About worksets, there is not a specific recipe for any project. It all depends on the circumstances.

The list of worksets depends on several factors:

1) The number of people working on the project (you need at least 1 workset per person), and their roles and responsibilities in the project.

2) The size of the project (if the project is too large, you may need to create more than one central file, and put everything together with links. Worksets help in opening just portions of a large project, not everything at once.

3) The configuration of the project (low rise, high rise, one building, multiple buildings).

The most basic approach for the architectural model is:

• Shared levels and grids.
• Exterior (landscape, site, parking, etc)
• Shell (exterior walls, windows, curtain walls)
• Interior layout. (partitions, casework, fixtures, furniture, etc)
• Worksets to host links.

However, for any of the divisions mentioned above, depending on the circumstances, you might need to break down that scheme into more divisions, to allow for more simultaneous work at different places, such as levels (vertical divisions) or areas (horizontal divisions).

You need to follow some kind of naming convention to name your workses, to keep things in order. One recommendation is to name the worksets following this format: WHO-WHAT-WHERE.  WHO is the author of that part of the model, WHAT is the contents, and WHERE is the level or zone of the contents in the model.

For example:a workset named such as "ARCH-FURN-LEV1" gives the idea that the content is part of the architect's responsibility, that it is about furniture, and it pertains to level 1, only.

The topic is very broad. If you are under subscription, I recommend you to look at Autodesk University's handouts. There are several classes that talk about these topics. I can recommend this one:  Class AB4719-P "Connect the Dots: Architectural – Designing the Body", by by Marcus Kim.