by Mark Middlebrook, www.markcad.com.
Developing office CAD standards is like flossing your teeth: necessary but not fun. It's not fun for you because it involves lots of unpleasant tasks: reading boring standards documents written by bureaucratic committees, listening politely to foolish suggestions from bosses and users, writing reams of your sterling prose and then trying to edit it down to a length that someone actually will read, struggling to program around dumb CAD and application program limitations. It's not fun for your company because it takes you away from other work, most of which probably is billable to clients.
Even worse, the job is never done. New versions of CAD programs, industry changes, revised office practices, and the inexorable march of technology that we call "progress" ensure that your CAD standards are never up-to-date. As with the programmer stuck in the shower following the directions on a shampoo bottle, developing CAD standards subjects you to an endless cycle of "Lather, rinse, repeat." The flow chart below maps out the process, complete with endless loops.
This flow chart is part of a lengthy article on CAD standards development that I wrote for the April 2000 issue of Cadalyst magazine: "Build Your CAD Standards". Unfortunately the article disappeared during a reorganization of Cadalyst's Web site.
Return to www.markcad.com.