Discover how to improve your CAD management skills by adopting a different approach to problem-solving and aligning your goals with the expectations of senior management. Learn how to effectively support software, manage projects, and train others to ensure your company's success.
Key Insights
- The article encourages CAD managers to think differently about problem-solving, rather than continuously fixing the same issue. It emphasizes the importance of understanding the root cause of problems and exploring various solutions to prevent them from repeating.
- Alignment with senior management's expectations is critical for a CAD manager's success. Managers are expected to keep software and hardware infrastructure running optimally, support projects, manage CAD standards, and be involved in resource and technology planning.
- Over the past decade, the software support burden of CAD managers has more than tripled, with managers now expected to handle an average of 5.7 software types. The article suggests that gaining a strong understanding of various software and project management skills can help CAD managers excel in their roles.
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Let's go ahead and get started then, and I always like to put a picture of Albert Einstein in anything that I do because he makes me think. If a guy can figure out how the universe works, surely I can figure out how to get people to plot correctly. Although, I've been dealing with that for 23 years and not so much.
So, let's use Albert as our inspiration today and let's promise ourselves that we'll do the following as a CAD Manager. We will always think about what's going on in our environment. And we will try to think differently about how to solve problems.
We won't simply walk around fixing the same problem over and over. We'll think about why we're having the problem and consider possible solutions to fix those problems. My goal is to save the company money and to get management on my side.
Because at the end of the day, the only way I've ever been able to achieve anything as a CAD Manager is if my boss likes what I'm doing, backs me up, and gives me the authority to be successful. Would you in the room agree? So, we're going to concentrate on some strategies like that. And I pulled a quote from Albert there.
He says, "We cannot solve our problems using the same thinking we used when we created them." That's prescient advice. So, as we move into the presentation, let's think about just how we can look at problems in a different way and try to propose solutions that might work for us.
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Now, to me, the job starts with actually understanding the expectations and the duties. What does senior management expect us to do? And you'll please notice that I'm looking at this from their perspective. Not what I want to do, not what I would like to do, but what does my management want or expect me to do? And I found that if I meet management's expectations, things tend to go better for me. That's my motivation.
So, let's just go ahead and kind of look at the feedback that I get from senior management teams when I go into companies and work. Here's what they're telling me. I expect my CAD Manager to keep the software and, for some of you, the hardware infrastructure running optimally so that work can get done.
Now, it doesn't matter that 10 years ago we had AutoCAD and that was all. Now they expect us to support AutoCAD, Revit, visualization tools, internet-based tools. Actually, in my surveys, 10 years ago, the average CAD Manager supported 1.4 pieces of software.
Do you know what that was in the last survey? 5.7. So, in 10 years, our software support burden has more than tripled. So, if you're experiencing this in your environment, you're not alone. Everybody else is seeing this as well.
They expect us to support the CAD tools. They expect us to support the projects. They expect us to keep things between the ditches and running so that the work goes out.
Everything else is secondary to that. Would you agree? I have never had a senior manager tell me, "Hey, here's a big stack of money and some software." Go over there and play with it for three months, and if you find something cool, let me know.
That simply doesn't occur, right? They expect me to make their stuff work. They expect me to be in charge of CAD standards, but they do not empower me to enforce them, typically. And this is something that I hear very commonly from CAD Managers all over the place.
They expect me to be on top of resource and technology planning, which almost means by necessity that I'm going to be involved in the budgeting process. They expect me to keep track of the files, the archives, all the pertinent documents that it takes to keep projects flowing. They expect me to manage people, even though I'm not their boss, and they expect me to train people.
Now, given all those expectations, does this job sound easy to you? No wonder it's tough—it's tough because it is tough. We have to figure out a way that we can make management understand how tough it is.
We'll be talking a little bit about that as we go through it. I just wanted to go ahead and cover this briefly because I wanted you to know that you're not alone. This is what all of us are experiencing.
These are the pressures that all of us feel. If I had to pick a set of skills to emphasize, I would say learn all the software that you can so that you can be most effective at support and be as strong in project management as you can so that work goes out. Everything else kind of seems to be secondary.
So given that and given the expectations, what kind of tips, tricks, hints could we use to most easily excel at our tasking on a day-to-day basis and get maximum results? A reasonable question, and it's something that seems to change over time as technology changes. So let's just go ahead and throw a few ideas out there, and let's see what makes sense to everybody.
