CAD Standards

When the time came to diversify to meet an expanding market, management did not hesitate to dive in and go for it.

Unfortunately, the company had become comfortable with its signature product, leaving corporate life at the status quo. Reusing existing documentation regularly, seen as the best plan, became an issue.

The company had a lot of long-term employees that “knew what they had to do.” Management did not worry about what to them was not a problem.

When these people started moving on to retirement or other positions, managers faced another reality: untrained personnel and no infrastructure to support training new people.

First, there had been little investment in the corporate network for quite a while. The IT manager maintained things very well. He never had anything happen he could not cover.

When the requirement for training new personnel came up, there was a challenge that no one had previously seen. As the IT manager was used to things going his way since management was satisfied, he balked at the request to have a newly appointed CAD manager request changes.

The new CAD manager, having no power to enact changes, became frustrated and scheduled a meeting with all parties involved.

As expected, things could have gone better for the new guy. Management needed to see the value in redoing what had been working for forty years and did nothing to back his requests.

The IT manager, for his part, was skeptical at best. Is a new guy trying to change the system? It would take his time, and he would lose some of his authority.

As the managers were focused on high-level issues, the subject of standards, let alone a newbie being involved, was dropped. The CAD manager (or so his title claimed) did what he could to try to set things up. People were using multiple outdated versions of AutoCAD, set up as they saw fit. Ten CAD users, ten styles of work. As the CAD manager brought up every issue, the response was, “We need to ship the product; we have no time for standards.”