Drawing from Experience: CAD Management Is More Than Being a CAD Expert

RICK ELLIS: All right. Good morning, everyone. I think we are still getting a few people finding some of the last few seats. It's probably going to be pretty tight. So if you have an extra one next to you, make a new friend, I guess is the theme of this morning.

But well, thank you all for coming out this morning. We are super happy to be back in person at AU this year. We were talking up here that it seems like it's been a long time, and it seems like it hasn't been very long at all kind of at the same time with that.

But this CAD manager panel is something we've been doing for eight years now with that. So I am curious as, everyone is all coming in. Anybody been to all eight of them, other than the guys that up here on stage?

RK MCSWAIN: I have.

RICK ELLIS: You have?

CURT MORENO: I haven't.

RICK ELLIS: You pointed at yourself, but then you raised your hand. So, OK. All right, so those of you who are, again, relatively new, and I'm not going to go through and do the math with everybody of how many years and all that stuff. But this is a class that came about well nine years ago, I guess, as a number of us that had been at AU for a number of years that had CAD management backgrounds.

We're just standing around talking and had one of these really good conversations that you can have at AU during lunch, or one of the events, or something like that. And afterwards said, I don't get to talk with other people like this any place other than AU, because not too many CAD managers get to hang out with other CAD managers. And someone said, yeah, well this should be a class at AU.

So we submitted, and I guess eight years later, people have continued to show up. So we will continue to do it. So thank you all. hopefully, this gives you something that you can take away from it. It's not a real technical one, as you can see by the title. It's more than being just a CAD expert. So that's going to be kind of the focus of things for us this year.

I'm going to go through some real quick introductions and then we'll just kind of dive into the conversation with that. So my name is Rick Ellis. I'm going to be your moderator for today. I'm based out of Portland, so a little bit longer flight here than it was to Vegas. And currently, my job is I do a lot of training, and consulting, and standards work, and things like that.

Prior to that, I was a CAD manager for a number of years at a civil firm in Portland. I've written a number of books on AutoCAD, and Civil 3D, and so forth. And this is I believe year 17 teaching at AU for me, if my math is right. And nobody's going to check that, so we'll just move on with that.

As far as our panel goes, leading off we've got Kate Morrical. She's a digital design manager at Silman. And they've got offices all over the country now. It used to be just kind of Northeast. But you have things have moved out. Also for those of you who go way back with AU, you may remember her from her time as the technical marketing manager for AutoCAD in AutoCAD LT, here doing different presentations. She's also a former AUGI president, for those of you who are AUGI users.

So thank you for your service, I guess is the way to put it with that. And I'm going to throw a question at all of you, as we do introductions. It's been three years since we've been together with this. Anything new, exciting, different that happened since then?

KATE MORRICAL TOWNE: Oh, so many things. Yeah, I've been joking that last time I was here, I didn't have brown hair, I didn't have gray hair, I didn't have glasses. And I didn't have a daughter. So I have a two-year-old now, which is new since the last AU.

RICK ELLIS: Congratulations with that. Next Curt Moreno, down on the end, I know there was a pool about what top hat he was going to have this year with that. Those of you who have looked at things or follow stuff online, may know him as the Kung Fu Drafter, or Kung Fu Manager, also has written a lot of articles for Cadalyst, if you still get that. And for his real job, is an IT manager at a civil firm in Texas. So Curt, same question, last three years, what's new?

CURT MORENO: Man, just me being me.

RICK ELLIS: That's enough.

KATE MORRICAL TOWNE: That's always new.

CURT MORENO: Yeah.

And still, you somehow got invited back. So we're [INAUDIBLE]. RK McSwain, another contributing editor to Cadalyst, again, those of you who go back farther with things like I do, may remember Hot Tip Harry on times. We've outed him. So we know who Hot Tip Harry actually is. But he's got his own blog online CAD Panacea. Also an IT manager and CAD manager at another firm in Texas. We have a little bit of a Texas bias, I guess, on our group. And an also Autodesk Expert Elite, which I'm envious of, because I'm neither expert, nor elite.

But so what's new in the last three years, RK?

RK MCSWAIN: I guess my input on that would be nothing is new. We, our growth at my company has continued to stay the same throughout the pandemic, and it's just-- I literally don't have time to be here this week. That's how busy we are. So I know a lot of companies kind of had to drop off. But I've seen us in and lot of other companies like ours that are just ramped up, not went down at all.

RICK ELLIS: Great.

RK MCSWAIN: And of course, the work from home thing, that changed a lot how we do things.

RICK ELLIS: Sure. Well, thank you for taking the time to be here. I know this is the only reason you showed up. And then, last but not least, the international portion of our contingent, we went all the way to Canada to get Mike. He's also our mechanical guy with that, Technical Services Manager at Prairie Machine. In a previous life worked for a reseller, like I did to if I want to admit it.

MIKE THOMAS: I'm also Expert Elite.

RICK ELLIS: Also Expert Elite, yes. So we have at least 40% of us now who are expert and elite and with that. And I know Mike shares a hobby with me, that you coach teams for your daughters and stuff.

MIKE THOMAS: Yes I do. When you got four daughters, that's pretty easy to find a team to coach.

RICK ELLIS: Find a team to coach, exactly. Well you have--

MIKE THOMAS: Oh, and I now have a 10-year-old stepdaughter at home too.

RICK ELLIS: Awesome.

MIKE THOMAS: Yeah, five-- five daughters at home.

RICK ELLIS: So that is what's new, is you've got five daughters at home.

MIKE THOMAS: Yes. Yeah.

RICK ELLIS: There's a lot of crying there, isn't there?

MIKE THOMAS: And it's all me.

RICK ELLIS: It's all you, exactly. Exactly. All right, so well that is our panel. That is it for PowerPoint for us. So we don't have to worry about that. But I just want to get into the discussion with everyone. And so for all of you, this is kind of a question we'll run through the entire group. Since we're talking about CAD management being more than just being a CAD expert, how did you get your first CAD manager job? And what were your expectations with that job when you started it? And how do they differ from what reality was there?

So I'll let RK lead us off.

RK MCSWAIN: How did I get it? I got it because nobody else was doing it. And right?

RICK ELLIS: Yeah.

KATE MORRICAL TOWNE: How many of you can say the same thing?

RK MCSWAIN: Everyone. There was definitely a need to be filled there, and it just, it fell in naturally. There was a problem to be solved, and I went and solved it, and it just kind of happened, so that way. What was the second part of that?

RICK ELLIS: Oh just what were your expectations when you started?

RK MCSWAIN: Oh, I didn't have any. I didn't have any. Yeah, it I was very young, jumped in, and just started solving problems the best I could. And 25 years later I'm sitting here.

RICK ELLIS: So definitely a career goal you started off with I'm going to go be a CAD manager, right?

RK MCSWAIN: No.

RICK ELLIS: OK. All right, so Kate?

KATE MORRICAL TOWNE: Yeah, same story. We didn't-- when I first joined my firm out of school, we didn't really have the set of standards that we were following, or we maybe did but didn't know about it. Again, I saw a problem that we needed to fix, and I liked CAD, and I liked process, and so I dove right in.

MIKE THOMAS: So I was in a server room with the IT manager, because I was working for a reseller at the time, and he was just complaining, complaining about engineers, and this and that. And I'm like, wait a minute. I'm tired of traveling. Maybe we can work something out here. So they essentially hired me on the spot, and that's how I got into it. It wasn't title of CAD manager at that time. But it grew into that. But that's how I got it, right time, right opportunity I guess.

CURT MORENO: Awesome. As a little boy I often told Santa that I wanted to grow up to be a CAD manager, working on my family's sharecropping farm where we raised socks. No it was honestly just attrition. The guy who was in charge got fired, and for a long time nobody was in charge. And then one day, I turned around and much to my surprise and disgust, I was in charge.

And I didn't have any expectations, because I didn't know it happened. I think that it's just for a lot of us, it comes down to seniority or experience. If you're the guy that they come to and say, how do we do this? Then by default you're the CAD manager.

RICK ELLIS: Yeah, so I think there's a lot of consistency up here that I'm hearing of I didn't set out to do this. And my story is very similar. But you ended up with it by default, or attrition, or nobody else was doing that. Probably meant the responsibility also came with no adjustment in pay, or anything like that.

KATE MORRICAL TOWNE: Well, I've always been convinced that there's a better way to do something. And so I go find it. And then you become known as the person who knows the better way. And then like Curt said, you become the CAD manager, because they know that if you don't know the answer, you know where to find it.

CURT MORENO: Now, you also have to keep in mind that this, we're talking about the end of the '90s, beginning of the 2000s, and a lot of companies, management had the prevalent idea that they didn't need a CAD manager, that this just wasn't necessary. So in some places, when you became the CAD manager, you were the first CAD manager, because it was new.

RICK ELLIS: Well, that's actually a good segue to our next question for Kate. Did you have Inventor or anyone that was a resource for you to learn how to be a better CAD manager?

KATE MORRICAL TOWNE: Yeah. I can't name a single person, because at the time that I started taking on CAD management responsibilities, I was working in a 30-person office. And as we've said, I was the one who knew the most at the time. So I found that mentorship and those resources here at AU, among other places. There were lots of online forums. The Autodesk forums, at the time a couple of other communities I think have gone dark since then. But I went online, and looked for people who were writing blogs, and looked for people who were, gosh, pre-YouTube, right?

Which is like, I don't usually feel old, but pre-YouTube starts to make me feel old. But looking for people who were putting their expertise on the internet in one form or another. And then coming to conventions like this, and I used to call it like CAD therapy. Because you can come to AU, and complain about all your CAD problems, and everybody understands. It's great. And you go home, and you try to complain to your family, and they're like, I'm sorry. I don't understand. But here they get it.

RICK ELLIS: Yeah. Anyone else with that? Was mentorship something that anybody sought out, or found by default?

RK MCSWAIN: I just have a similar story to Kate. It was a very small company and, no there was-- this was even earlier than you just mentioned. Because our internet at our company at that time was still dial-up. I mean it wasn't even a hard connection. So it was difficult to find assistance, like we can just go out and find today. So it took a long time to get somewhere, sure.

RICK ELLIS: Well, and that's what is great about this conference. I mean it's because-- and I'll ask the group here. How many of you get to talk to other CAD managers someplace other than AU?

There's a few of you. Like six of the lucky people. Everyone else, it's kind of an isolated position. And I know a lot of us were making it up as we went through that.

KATE MORRICAL TOWNE: Well, just a suggestion, before you leave today, introduce yourself to your neighbor. Say, hi. How many people here are CAD managers, or BIM managers, or some--

MIKE THOMAS: Some title like that.

KATE MORRICAL TOWNE: OK, yeah. Most of the room. Say hi before you go.

RICK ELLIS: Well, and that's where I mean certainly I've met all of you at AU. And those connections are to me far more valuable than any class that I've ever sat through down here.

RK MCSWAIN: And I know there's to me going back 20 years or so, there was different definitions of that. There was CAD managers who managed projects. And there was CAD managers who managed the drafters, and then there were others who did the technical side. And I guess there's a mixture. It seemed like it was more segregated back then, what that title actually meant.

RICK ELLIS: Sure.

RK MCSWAIN: And what the position did.

RICK ELLIS: So kind of along those lines, RK, resources that you found, and I'm sure they have evolved over your career, but resources that you found to help you be a better CAD manager? I mean we can all go find YouTube videos about how to do a certain process in CAD. But things to fill in the other parts of that skill set.

RK MCSWAIN: Yeah, it probably started-- my first day, it was 2004. And I was in Robert Green, and Mark Kiker, and these guys, some of those classes. And then that was around the time people started coming up with the blogs, and things like that. And so it was a lot of online resources, things at AU. Like you just mentioned, there wasn't anyone else in our company you could go discuss this with, because there were no other CAD managers.

And so it's very much since, the online presence has helped a lot. It was probably very difficult 10 years prior to that, because you didn't have things like this necessarily.

RICK ELLIS: Any of you go to local user groups back when that was more of a thing?

MIKE THOMAS: We don't have that option in Canada. Yeah, no, there's not a local one for us to go to.

KATE MORRICAL TOWNE: Yeah I have Revit DC, I'm from the Washington DC area. So that's a very active group meeting online, mostly now obviously. But that's been a good resource.

RK MCSWAIN: I don't know if Curt, did you ever go to one of the Total CAD back in the day, when they were still a reseller? They used to post--

CURT MORENO: Yeah, and it was creepy. It kind of I just-- I don't want to cast dispersion, but it was way creepier than AU. So I really, I wish local user groups were-- there's still a few of them out there. And I wish there were more opportunities for people to get together who can commiserate. Because like Kate said, here we all understand. This is the world's biggest flash community of CAD nerds. Nowhere else do you get this kind of shoulder to cry on support.

In terms of when I was a CAD manager, I was really more focused on production and efficiency. As I've progressed in my career, everything that I've learned about being a decent manager is through research and reading, mainly psychology and marketing. I've gone outside of it. I've had to go outside of our industry to find that knowledge and bring it back in, and it's benefited me immensely.

RICK ELLIS: Yeah. My experience with the whole local user group thing is that it totally depends on the people who are willing to donate their time to run that user group. If you have a very special person who is willing to give a lot of their time, because they're not getting paid for it certainly, there have been-- I've seen some, and been a part of some very vibrant and useful user groups. I've also seen some that don't have that leadership, and they didn't last very long.

KATE MORRICAL TOWNE: Your reseller might be a place to start for some of these. I'll shout out CADD Microsystems here. They're the ones who run Revit DC, and Revit Baltimore, in Revit triangle. They got a bunch going on right now, and they've been a really good partner. So if you have a local reseller you think might be willing to donate the pizza and the conference room.

RICK ELLIS: Right. All right, so Mike, do you have anything as far as what was the most unexpected part of the CAD management job that you found.

MIKE THOMAS: So when I first started, I'd say it was the silos, but it wasn't so much like should it be red or should be green. But it was the processes and the procedures and how everyone had their own take on it, and wanted to do their own thing. But yet, no one was talking to each other. And that was one of those things where I expected it, but not to the level-- because the company was 125 people at that time. So that was one thing I didn't expect, was how solid it was, and everyone doing their own things, and not really talking to each other. So that's what threw me off when I started.

RICK ELLIS: And what did you do?

MIKE THOMAS: Well, I learned pretty quickly you can't go in there guns ablazing. That's for sure. I learned to be Switzerland, and try to not really-- just be neutral, and just let people talk, and then find the commonalities, and then work from there, and then figure out when to drop the hammer, and when not to drop the hammer. So it took a while to figure that out. But yeah, just be Switzerland, and be neutral on it. And then the things would kind of work out for the best. That's what I learned.

RICK ELLIS: That is definitely saying something that the Canadian is telling us that he needed to be nice. You know?

MIKE THOMAS: Yeah, with a whole room of Canadians that were trying to be overly nice.

RICK ELLIS: So anyone else, anything that really took you by surprise when you started out as CAD manager?

CURT MORENO: I will say that I was surprised by how little support I got from management. When somebody was doing something on their own, because that's how they've always done it, and we were trying to not at the time we weren't trying to make a standardization effort. But we were just trying to get the sheets to all look the same. But this is what we've always done it.

You go to the boss, he was like, well, that's how he's always done it. Just let him do it. Yeah, I was surprised at how little, how few teeth would be in the bite that I would ask to come in here. Tell him to get on board.

RICK ELLIS: So what was your approach? What did you do?

CURT MORENO: You know what? I was young at the time. And honestly, brute force of just re-doing it the right way was the quickest and the path of least resistance. So I ended up duplicating a lot of work to just get it done. So it was more important to me that we produce a decent sheet set than I have to argue with somebody who at the time was older than me, who had already really not been convinced that CAD wasn't just a fad, and we were all going back to the board, that kind of thing.

RICK ELLIS: But over time, I know your relationship with management has changed quite a bit there.

CURT MORENO: Well, yeah it has. Because like I said, at first up until about 2007, I work myself into a real negative space. I mean, I hated my job, I hated the people I worked with, I hated my managers. And I came to AU and I was so flabbergasted by the level of work people were doing. I went home and turned my career, my job 90 degrees, and started my career.

When I learned what was important to my managers and how to approach them that way, then I started getting a lot more traction. There is a lot to be said about speaking the language when you go to live in a new town. You can't just show up and expect everybody to do things the way you want to. To get what you want, you have to learn how to ask for it.

RK MCSWAIN: I was going to just say the answer to your previous question, I figured Curt would use this line. But more hours, no more pay. That was the unexpected part.

CURT MORENO: Yeah, I'm being positive over here.

RK MCSWAIN: But I think one of the ways to address that, and I learned it later on not then, but our former panel member, Robert Green, talks a lot about ROI. If you can show why something is going to be, you're going to get a return on that investment, why should we standardize this, why should we do something a different way. That can help show that you're providing a benefit to the company. You're not just over there draining away doing something that nobody understands.

RICK ELLIS: Sure, yeah. Because it's very easy to be just perceived as overhead. And we wish we didn't have to have you. Why would we support you, that type of thing. I mean nobody's felt like that, right?

So Curt, I mean you can call it what you want, whether it's team building, self promotion, whatever-- but I know we've talked before about how important you felt it was to go to your satellite offices, and meet with people, in person, be seen in person, and that I think a line that you used was the best money you ever spent was on a sandwich or pizza.

CURT MORENO: Yeah, buying somebody a sandwich. So how many of you have worked for companies with multiple offices? A good number of you. How many of you in your mind can visualize everybody on the design teams in those other offices, like you can see their face? You know their name. You know their face. Considerably fewer of you.

When I was a CAD coordinator, that position was 100% overhead. I left design. And it gave me the freedom to visit all of my offices at least twice a year. And I wasn't going there to visit the engineers. I wasn't going there to visit the management. I was going there to visit my CAD design teams, because I felt that everybody knows the engineers. They go out to celebrate project launches. They take clients.

When you're in the CAD trenches, it seems like everybody else is getting these freebies. Or the vendors come in and bring lunch, or whatever. So I made it a solid policy. Look, have everybody there on Tuesday. I'm going to show up. We're going to talk about what we're doing, and what's going wrong, and how to make it better, and then we're all going to lunch.

And I wanted them, one, to know my face, and know that I knew who they were. I knew that they had kids. I knew that they liked dogs. You know, I knew he was going back to high school. And then I wanted them to feel in a quality that just going and buying them lunch made them feel like they were important. And that perception I think makes them more engaged, definitely with me, so that we can achieve things in the company-- standardization, new software, new education or pure training.

But also it makes them more engaged with the company as a whole. It was money well spent. You will never spend $11 better than if you take somebody on your CAD team to lunch. That's just it.

RICK ELLIS: I'm going to guess. That's the way that you got past the, well, we've always done it that way. I mean you start to build the relationship, get on somebody's side.

CURT MORENO: Yes and no, but I also-- I also wisely chose my fights. I'm getting older. We're all getting older. When I took over, there was a couple of guys that were one or two years from retirement. They had transitioned from boards to CAD, but they had also transitioned from stone to boards. Nobody was going to tell these two guys how to do something different. And their managers certainly weren't going to, so I wasn't going to.

I said you know what, Dave and John, you go do you. And when you retire, I'll be right there to say goodbye, and cut your cake, and the guy who takes your place is going to do it my way. You know what? So the job was getting done. I wouldn't touch those CAD files with three rubber gloves and a 10 foot pole. OK, one time he asked me to help him, like, I don't want my fingerprints on that. Get away from me Amtrack.

So they did their projects, and that's what they wanted to do. And two years later, they both retired. And nobody had any animosity. I didn't try to make them be something that they're not. When I took over, one of those guys took me aside and told me under no uncertain circumstances, that I am not his damn boss. And I said, well that's good, because I'm not your damn boss. I don't even know why we're having this conversation. I bought the guy lunch. Everything was OK.

Let him do his job. He retired. You know, he's happy. And I talked to him maybe once every year. There are those people who that's not your-- don't waste 90% on your effort for 10% of return. When you can spend 90% on your effort are people who are willing and flexible.

RICK ELLIS: And a lot more work from home, how has that changed? I mean if you go to the office, are people still there? I mean it's hard to take people out to lunch when everybody's at home in their PJs.

CURT MORENO: So that takes a little more planning. Now I'm in IT. So I'm not responsible for our CAD production anymore. So I don't do that. We've also in the past few years really downsized our CAD teams. We're getting a lot more efficiency. So it used to be 30% of our company was CAD, when I first started. And now I might have 10 dedicated drafters in the whole damn company.

But in terms of work from home, you just tell everybody, be at the office on Wednesday. I'm bringing in lunch. We're going to talk about the new infrastructure, or the new file, sharing whatever we're going to do. But I'm also very communicative through Teams and Slack. I reach out to people. I mean it's just a constant. I'm like the sitcom version of a television child just constantly messaging somebody, and the person in front of me is talking, uh-huh, uh-huh.

So but communication is key. You got to communicate.

RICK ELLIS: So anyone else on team building? I know Kate, that's a big thing for you too.

KATE MORRICAL TOWNE: Yeah, so when we went remote, as everybody did, I found it kind of leveled the playing field. So I was based in our DC office, pre-pandemic, and knew those folks really well, and did not have quite as strong ties to the people in the other offices.

Now the ties to everybody are pretty much the same, which means unfortunately a little bit weaker in my home office, but also raised in the other offices. The thing that I miss and I'm still trying to figure out how to replicate is a little bit of the serendipity, the walking by somebody's desk, and seeing them, like, hey wait what are you working on? Oh, I've got a better way to do that. Or overhearing somebody ask a question, like we've got an article on that.

Still working on that a little bit. I'm thinking going to try office hours or something to bring that connection back. But I have been pleased with how willing it's made people in different geographic locations willing to reach out, like the fact that my desk is not next to theirs, is not a barrier anymore. And I do kind of appreciate that.

RICK ELLIS: So you've got the good with the bad on that.

KATE MORRICAL TOWNE: Yeah, both sides.

RICK ELLIS: But yeah, definitely can see where just missing that, oh we passed in the hall and ran into each other. I mean that's what's been missing with AU virtually the last couple of years, is the person you met sitting beside them in class, or passing in the hall, or having lunch.

KATE MORRICAL TOWNE: I miss the cool stuff too, like I don't find out sometimes that people are doing something really interesting, unless they reach out and tell me. Or I reach out specifically and say, hey, what are you doing lately? Oh, wow. That's really neat. Let's make sure that everybody else knows about it too.

RICK ELLIS: Sure. Yeah.

RK MCSWAIN: Yeah, I think there were so many hands that went up about the multiple offices saying. I think this is very important. Probably not quite 20 years ago, 17, 18 years ago we were just getting into having the ability to do conferencing between our offices. And my manager took me aside and said, we were doing these lunch and learns for the CAD staff. And I'll never forget. She said, no. You need to go to those other offices and do this in person.

This is, just like Curt said, it's about that face time. And the satellite offices, for lack of a better term, they will always feel like a satellite office, if they never get that personal interaction. So that was my previous firm. The firm I'm with now, we literally can't. We have upwards of 50 offices. But I still try and get out to as many as I can, the larger ones, and even the smaller ones sometimes.

And you brought up the Teams. It's very easy to just schedule a Teams meeting and jump on. But yeah, if you can be there in person, I think that's very important for them.

CURT MORENO: You know what? OK, who uses Teams? Who turns on their camera. Go to hell. You know what. Let's face it. We need to see each other's faces. We're humans. We're not really going to understand what's being said unless we're picking up 100% of the signals. The closest we can come to that is with facial expression. My IT team every meeting those cameras are on.

If my fat ugly face can be on a camera and not be self conscious about it, your skinny ugly face can be on it. OK? Nobody has ever looked at a picture of Curt said, oh my God, did you know he was fat? And that's what everybody's concerned about. That I won't look-- I won't look marvelous. You know, sometimes my hair is in a ponytail. Sometimes it's up. Sometime's it's pff. Not what's important. The work is what's important.

And we need to have that interaction. So please, turn on your cameras. Dust them off.

KATE MORRICAL TOWNE: At least some of the time, if it's not all the time. I mean sometimes you-- phone calls still exist, right?

CURT MORENO: Oh, and that's true.

MIKE THOMAS: Well, I was just going to say, like if the reason you're not turning a camera on is because you want to do this, or you want to do that. Then maybe ask yourself why are you actually attending this meeting, right? And is there value in this? And if there is, then put everything aside. Turn your camera on, and have that interaction. Right?

So I'm guilty of it too. It's like, oh, I got this meeting. I'm going to turn my camera off, so I can do this, and do that, right? And only partially paying attention, and that's not the way to do it.

CURT MORENO: And when you're more engaged with the meeting, it'll happen faster, and you can go do something else.

RICK ELLIS: Yeah and I mean, Mike is exactly right there that I think everybody has probably been frustrated by feeling like, oh people, aren't engaged in this meeting that we're having, or who's paying attention out of all of this. And if you're all sitting in a room around a conference table, it's kind of hard to not pay attention and just blow it off. But if you turn off your camera, and are just an avatar or presence in that meeting, even the best of us aren't going to-- you probably well intentioned think, oh, I can do this and pay attention at the same time. No you can't.

CURT MORENO: GoToWebinar man, these systems snitch on you. It'll tell you right there, he is not focused on this window. He's focused on another window, checking email, working on a document. These things, if you know where to look, man, they are just little tattletales.

RICK ELLIS: And don't get me wrong. I think the technology is great. It has its place. But I also think that there's probably a consensus that it doesn't replace going there physically and making that physical connection.

MIKE THOMAS: It also drives me nuts when the person to desks down sends me a Team message to ask me a question.

RICK ELLIS: Yeah.

MIKE THOMAS: And I don't know why, but that just irritates me.

RK MCSWAIN: You get up and walk down?

MIKE THOMAS: Yes. I, walk down.

RK MCSWAIN: Absolutely.

RICK ELLIS: Yeah.

KATE MORRICAL TOWNE: If we're on--

CURT MORENO: No, please.

KATE MORRICAL TOWNE: If we're on teams highly recommend setting up a Teams, a channel, a chat for your team. Because that's the way that people can ask a question of everybody now. You can't just stand up in the office necessarily and say, hey, who knows the answer to this? But if you set up a dedicated chat for your team, it gives you more visibility in what's going on, hopefully makes them more comfortable asking questions.

RK MCSWAIN: Yeah, we have about I don't know what it is, over 700 Autodesk users, and we set up a team just for them. And if they want to opt out, they can. But different people will come in there and say, hey, do we have a so-and-so out there. And somebody from a totally different state might jump in, maybe it was an acquisition we just did or something. They'll jump in and say, yeah, we've been doing that for a few months. Here use this, or something. So yeah, the technology is awesome to be able to do that where it's not just all email and really, really good.

RICK ELLIS: But those are good examples of using the technology the right way, not replacing it with for everything. So I know that several of you have in your career has kind of been migrated to IT with that. And I know that CAD management is this really a vague position. I think it's defined by a lot of people a lot of different ways. In general though, do you see CAD management becoming more a part of IT, and what are the pros and cons on that?

MIKE THOMAS: Well, Curt's an IT manager. I'm an IT manager. So I guess the answer is yes.

RICK ELLIS: Yeah.

KATE MORRICAL TOWNE: Well, yeah, I'm going to say, no, actually.

MIKE THOMAS: Oh.

KATE MORRICAL TOWNE: I know. I know.

CURT MORENO: I would agree. I don't think that it is.

KATE MORRICAL TOWNE: So-- go.

CURT MORENO: No, please. To my opinion, my opinion, CAD management is essentially linked to practice. As I used to work for a single service company, Silman is building structural engineering. About a year and a half ago we got bought by T.Y. Lin. So they do the horizontal engineering, and someone does vertical, right? So we now are interdisciplinary engineering. And IT is a shared service among all of the different industries.

But each of those industries has their own CAD and BIM management needs. And if we tried to consolidate them under IT, I think we would have some unhappy users. So I think there are more links to IT now, because we are more capable of getting things pushed out to individual workstations, and centralizing the management. But we need practice experts as CAD and BIM managers, or we're going to be in trouble.

MIKE THOMAS: So maybe this is a difference between either larger company versus smaller company, or maybe it's BIM and AEC versus manufacturing. But in our realm, we don't have these different buckets and stuff like that. So in our area, me running the IT manager, I'm not an IT person. But me running IT manager, means that we have a consistent vision. Like if we're going to upgrade Vault, then our server and everything else is under that same umbrella, and it's all managed the same. And essentially if it's got power and a circuit board, it comes through my area of responsibility.

So in our case, it made way more sense to, like I said, maybe it's because we're smaller, we're only 200 people, or because we're focused on one thing. So in our case, the answer is yes, it just made sense.

CURT MORENO: So I think that the size and maturity of your company has a lot to do with the nomenclature of your positions. I think what we're seeing now is more of a distillation in architecture on it that back in the day, there was CAD managers. What kind of CAD manager were you? Are you more on the hardware side? Are you more on the practitioner side? Are you somewhere in the middle?

And now we have positions that are more accepted in the industry of CAD manager, CAD coordinator, IT people that didn't come up through IT. So I think that's the distillation. But at the same time, to Kate's point, this distillation also clarifies some responsibilities and allows for greater communication. Your IT and your production have to communicate, otherwise you're going to end up in situations where there's a deadline that can't be met, because IT wasn't aware of it, and they started upgrading systems.

In my position as previous practitioner and now fully blown IT and network, I still support my CAD people where I can. But my responsibility lies in the network first. So I think we do see a number of CAD people moving into IT. And that makes us really rare, because it's a very small percentage. I agree with Kate, that I think most CAD managers will remain practitioners.

KATE MORRICAL TOWNE: If you're responsible for building families, and setting standards, and creating tool palettes, and everything-- you can't have only an IT background. You need your industry background.

CURT MORENO: And just too if you're responsible for your standardization of your CAD practice, you don't have time to run a network. Even if you have a team, you do not have time to run that network. Running my network and my team of IT guys is a full-time job. Supporting my CAD people with questions where, and now I'm starting to age out of really applicable question answering. And I've thought about taking a sabbatical to go back to production for a year to get back into it.

But you know that is that's over time. Supporting that network is full time. Just like for a CAD manager, supporting your CAD standardization is a full time job.

MIKE THOMAS: So it sounds a little bit like mixing some things. Because like I as the IT manager, I'm not in there fixing printers, even though that's what my wife thinks I do. But I don't manage engineers, CAD people, even though I manage the standards, and the practices. And it's almost the same as on the IT side is I have two guys that work for me, and it's their responsibility to do the networks, and do this. What's my role? Is to make sure that everything's standardized, and we have processes, and we have procedures, and we're acquiring the right things.

So I think it actually helped with the CAD management background and managing the people for that transition into IT to manage both. So I think Curt's right in what he says. Like if you're managing standards and doing all this, you don't have time to focus on network. That's very true. But if you're managing CADs and standards like that I think there is a natural transition into managing IT or being part of that process.

And I think Curt made a good point is there's got to be-- what buzz word can I use? There's going to be synergy between the two of them, right, between them.

RICK ELLIS: So would it be fair to say that it is easier for a CAD manager to migrate into IT and evolve into an IT role than it is for an IT person to--

MIKE THOMAS: Yes.

RICK ELLIS: --go to CAD management?

MIKE THOMAS: Yes.

CURT MORENO: I think it relies on the person. Because I am not-- OK, you know what? Let me clarify something. I'm not an IT practitioner. I do get in there and do technical things. I'm not a CAD practitioner. I do help CAD people. I'm a professional manager. If you gave me 100 donkeys to manage, I can manage those donkeys. OK?

Be in the cases that you just have to decide what it is that you want to do. Do you want to be a manager, or do you want to be a practitioner? And once you make that decision, of course, there's some overlap. But you're going to lose some fingers somewhere in the process where one is a majority, and the other isn't. Like I said, I have technical practitioners who can sit down and tell you in and out how Linux works. That is not me. I'm learning more. I want to learn more. But I'm a IT manager.