Client requests 'poor' drawings?

[ZombieHorseFlogger]

Greetings all - it's your resident whinger again 🙂

So last year I had a bit of a rant about the attitude and work ethic of my colleagues, things have progressed a bit from that situation:

One guy has left - gone to work on a project where mistakes could potentially render a large part of the countryside uninhabitable (vague, to protect the guilty).  The other guy has shown a significant improvement in attitude, still bitching about pay & treatment, but is starting to make more an effort to get things right. Small mercies eh?  

The upshot of this is that along with an increase in workload, there's now 2 people doing the work of 2.5 (the other guy spent about half the day asleep at his desk). It's been like this for over a month, our boss has been dithering on getting a replacement, and has now decided that we'll be getting agency staff to 'help out' during our busy times. Not ideal, given the specialist nature of our work, I'm dubious anyone outside our industry could hit the ground running. Anyway, I digress...

We're bidding and have almost (letter of intent, no contract yet) won a large international job. I've recently been handed a bunch of documents detailling their 'information management policy' and  CD with some drawing borders on.

Oh boy.

The drawing border files are over 4Mb in size. There's about 20layers, a dozen textstyles, referenced image files, 'cut-n-paste' block definitions, colour dependant plot styles (with the wrong plot style table sent), Missing fonts. All borders are consistently too big for printed media (4mm margins??) the A1 titleblock is 200mm wide and contains the name and address of every consultant who's brown envelope was fat enough by the looks of things. They've not even included an A3 titleblock.

Its pretty poor, IMO, I'm hoping you'll agree.  I'm certain it's the product of a committee - probably one that's never actually done cad, and then given to the saturday-boy to draft up.

I've highlighted my concerns to the project manager in an email, his response was that he was going to take advice from his boss and my boss, rather than engage in a a dialogue wit the clients CAD team. The two bosses in questions are probably the least suitable to make decisions on a field in which they know nothing.  The way I see it, I've got a 3 choices:

1. 'Fix' the supplied borders on the sly so they're not so inefficient and fit on the page.

2. Offer to redesign their borders and hope someone grows a spine to tackle the client on this issue.

3. Suck it up and be prepared for massively inefficient working, 5 minute tasks taking all morning, missed deadlines and more stress than I think I can deal with.

I'll probably do 1. regardless, 2 is my preferred but is mostly dependant on other people being uncharacteristly good at their jobs. 3 will probably see me in an institution by the end of the summer, things are stressful enough around here with the workload vs staffing levels.

Due to the nature of this job, and its percieved importance, all contact with the client is being carefully controlled, hence I doubt I'll get the opportunity to actually start a dialogue myself, things could thaw, but thats the impression I've been fed so far..

So questions..

What would you guys do in the above situation? Is there another option I'm missing?

Is the above situation common? It's new to us, but we've not long started international work.

Am I, once again, being unreasonable?

Z

p.s. My CV is updated and online, thought it was about time I had an exit strategy..

[AllenJessup]

I would tend towards trying 2 and resorting to 1. Just a note on "Fixing" the sizes. Different plotters will work with different sizes. Despite the poorly created TBs. I'd think that they'd have a border they can print. We just got a new printer (same maker as the last one) and I've had to tweak the border size and placement. So you might want to think about creating your own TB & border for in-house work and replacing that with the original before turning over any drawings.

Hopefully you will find someone who will cooperate with you and avoid the issue.

As far as this being common. Unfortunately it is.

Allen

[Mistress0fTheDorkness]

You'd THINK they'd have a border they can print.
You never know, though. 😄

Zombie, I have always worked on the post-occupancy side. And, it's amazing what my colleagues tell me that our various project managers have told them. It's also amazing that they (the PM's or their leadership team) ask for people's opinions who are NOT qualified to give them, but, they're too far removed to know that.

My advice? Check out linkedin or any local users groups to see if you can actually make contact with the cad person who will be USING the files.

Trust me, the PM's don't look a the electronic submittals, they just pass the CD's on to facilities (whether there is anything on them or not, let alone whether it's 'compliant' with their crazy standards).

I can tell you I've gotten some crazy questions from folks who have contacted me and I can tend to clear up any confusion about what is ACTUALLY looked for and truly needed at the end of the project, saving time on both sides of the aisle, and the project management teams for owner and design firm are none the wiser, because they don't need to be (or don't want to be ;-p).

Just for a little light reading, here's an article I wrote after doing a panel discussion with one of our PM's:
http://mistressofthedorkness.blogspot.com/2012/09/what-does-owner-want-with-bim.html

For example, I chose not to provide title blocks, because I don't care what they look like. I do say, keep to ANSI (and ARCH for the archie firms) sizes, because that's what the mechanics and I are used to. We didn't do that much 'to scale' plotting, though, so paper size was not at all important, neither was text size or style. The PM's specified it! but, I told folks not to waste their time. It wasn't important and no one would be checking for it.

[AllenJessup]

I worked for a firm doing some design work at the Bronx Zoo. We submitted the drawing and they had their Design Dept. review them. After a couple of rounds of rather strange questions and suggestion. My boss asked for a meeting to go over what they were looking for. It turned out that their Design Dept. was the Graphics Design Dept. that designed all the posters and pennants for the Zoo.

Allen

[Mistress0fTheDorkness]

~FACEPALM~

Wow.

See, now people like THIS are how Owners get a bad rap.
😄

[pkolarik]

4-5 years ago, we had a good sized project where we were "partnered" with a large-ish national engineering firm. They got the lead on the project and we were told we had to use all their standards. They had an incredibly convoluted mess of blocks, titleblocks, page layout rules, colors/linetypes/lineweights, etc., etc., etc. (including their own .mnu file we had to load whenever working on their stuff)

In the midst of all this, their titleblock was, shall we say, less than optimal for use. I realized I had the same options 1 and 2 that you mentioned in your OP. I took option 2 first to our project manager. He briefly tried to chase it up the other firm's flagpole. All that got me was a phone call from their head cadder guy and no resolution. So the PM told me to fix it on my own. Not a problem...... until about a month or two later when the lead firm sent us new/updated titleblocks to replace the old ones. (this was also part of their standard procedure on projects, to replace the titleblocks at every important project phase) All my changes were gone.

I wasn't about to make them again, which turned out to be a good thing since they sent us new titleblocks 2 more times on that project. <sigh>

Short story longer;  be careful making changes to their "standard content". You may find yourself making them over and over and over.

[David_Knight]

went back and found your first post.

10/10 would read again.

good luck!!

[Anonymous]

I have resorted to option 1 sometimes.

I also have done the option of making a dummy titleblock with the fewest lines possible on a non-print layer and "color" inside the lines for my design. I copy the dummy over & over in model space. Then in my view tab model space I just pan around until I find what's needed on the page.Use this as a TB for check prints until it is absolutely necessary to print the final one. Beg the owner of the drawing for the right CTB and then use their (totally illogical and probably architectural) color and linework scheme. Be open to new possibilities here (all the PINK colors)?. Yes, it happened.

Beware of Bentley-generated linetypes. Make up some linetypes or use the following Lisp to help you out: New-lin.lsp, by T-square graphics. The code's available online. It looks at the linetypes in a drawing and writes them out. Be careful where you stash the output & change its name so you can find it again.

If you try to duplicate their TB, make a title block in SSM with plenty of updatable fields, such as plotdate or filename that you can use. This is a very good solution for different phases of a project. Try passing it on to your client-they might like it.

Be kind; architects are not geographers. As you know, 12 is the magic number.

I had a job where the agency completely reversed the styles for existing vs. new drawing objects. Old was bold and solid, new was dashed and light. Huh? I changed it to our local standard so contractors would know what was going on. The drawing are for them to use; they are not Art, even though you put out your best effort.

Good luck and hold yourself to drafting standards and best practices.

[sonny3g]

I once worked on a project for the city of New York.  Those people DO check everything!  I mean right down to getting a micrometer out to measure the line width of the border of a drawing that was printed on an inkjet plotter.  Some places people go to extremes to justify their jobs and they don't care how much havoc they cause anyone else.

Scott

[ScottHodges]

I too have received inappropriate borders. Once I offered to fix them up, and the client was extremely happy for me to do so. One of my recent projects however, the client insisted on all borders to be A3 sheets & other badly thought out requirements. I almost placed a standard note informing that "The drawing is in complete conflict with Australian Standards", but was stopped by one of the other drafters who made me calm down a bit.

[Anonymous]

Unless given a specific CAD standard to follow stating "Thou shalt..." my procedure has always been to take what I was given and "clean it up" prior to generating the very first line on the project.  I never asked for approval or direction from the P/M or P/A.  It wasn't their place.  That was just part of my responsibilities, as I saw it, to ensure that I created a quality product from the very start.  It also, in the long run, made it easier to generate our work efficiently with a high degree of integrity since we weren't starting everything with garbage.

I have never seen a client chastise us because we moved a border line in their title block a millimeter or two to allow the sheets to plot correctly.  Their major concern is always the accuracy of the design or product.  That should be the basis for your decisions.

Good projects need team members with good integrity to be successful.  You sound like one of those.  I say just fix, clean up, correct what you need to to ensure that only a quality product comes from your work.  They won't fault you for that.

[pkolarik]

>>I say just fix, clean up, correct what you need to to ensure that only a quality product comes from your work.  They won't fault you for that.<<

Unfortunately, some companies will fault you for that 😕

A few years back we worked with a large national firm whose standards we had to follow. We were chastised several times during the life of the project (and the duration of the record drawing phase) for making what we thought were insignifcant changes/deviations from their company standards.

We had to go back and change each of them.

This particular company had a "qc team" for each project they do;  one part of the team went over the drawings for design content, one part of the team went over the drawings (both in cad and the printed result) to make sure everything adhered to their standards.

[skintsubby]

Yeah, but look at it from the clients side... if they've got a 2, 3 or more differnt contractors.. and they all made "insignifcant changes/deviations from their company standards" then the drawings wouldn;t really be to a standard now would it?

Even if you did do it for the right reasons.

[pkolarik]

Oh I agree 100% Skintsubby. I was just pointing out to the previous poster how making those little changes (for the right reasons or not) can come back to bite you depending on the company whose standards you're changing.

We've also worked for large clients who sent us 60 page standards booklets and piles of standard blocks to use in their drawings, but when it came right down to it all they cared about was us putting the drawings on their titleblocks.. 🙂

[Anonymous]

I have arguments for both why you should or shouldn't.  I've been on both sides.  In the end it's not about the "drafting".  It's about the integrity and accuracy of the design.  Whether a layer name deviates from the client standard because an uppercase "T" was used instead of a lowercase "t" makes not one iota of a difference.  However, there will always be CAD Managers out there who would state otherwise.

[Hammer.john.j]

Least

Credible

Scope

[caddude1]

In my case, when given that situation and material to work with, I will attempt a solution as follows:

1. Open and edit one of the title block only drawings.

2. Time how long it takes to open, edit and save one file.

3. Send an e-mail to my manger detailing the time required for the abve tasks.

4. Include in the e-mail an estimate of the time for just the basic tasks performed multiplied by the number of drawings.

5. Produce a cleaned up copy of said title block and repeat 1 - 4, thus showing time (and money) savings.

This covers your bases and puts the issue in front of the mangers in question. They then can make an educated estimate of the cost vs. return on their choice of actions.