Best Of

This year I am focused on:

• Force multiplying the benefits of Bluebeam features like Studio Sessions and Sets through office wide adoption and
• Improving our coordination effectiveness and efficiency with more defined workflows and best Bluebeam practices rather than forcing hard copy habits into PDF reviews.

Studio Sessions has become our go-to coordination and review tool for progress sets and consultant sheets. Bluebeam webinars share some great ideas I am implementing. Having a session "playbook page" is my favorite. Adding that cheat sheet to the session gives all participants a starting point on how to best markup the set, including callouts formatted for each discipline that they may click to SET AS DEFAULT or ADD TO TOOL CHEST as they begin their review. That page is reviewed in a Session kickoff meeting and each team leader is asked to introduce the playbook page to any new team members that might join after the kickoff.

Workflows centered around the markups list have been a bit more difficult to implement. People are still inclined to use the yellow highlighter to mark through comments they have addressed (had copy habit). This practice, along with multiple markups for a single comment (like an arrow and a text box rather than adding a leader) clutter the markups list and make it less useful. I am encouraging people to set status of markups to complete and use markups list filters to screen back all markups that have been completed. It surprises me how difficult it is to try and change these habits. I think it is because I am trying to do it on the fly rather than holding a training session as part of a more structured effort.

We are using Sets for CA Record and Markups - there is another post on that I will link in a reply comment.

Thank you @Darbie @Brandon Costlow and @Shaya Birnbaum for sharing YOUR Mad Skills!

One of the first things I do when new drawings come in is add a standardized header and footer to every page. I created a custom template in that includes the project name and the date the drawings were received. This helps keep our files clean, consistent, and easy to reference, especially on fast-moving jobs.

The best part? Bluebeam has a powerful feature that lets me apply these headers and footers to multiple documents at once, even if they aren’t open! The option to select a document, an entire folder, and even choose to include subfolders, is a huge time-saver when dealing with large drawing packages.