Thursday, April 30, 2015

Upgrade to Revit 2016 - Grumble grumble

...in response to..."Should we install Revit 2016 and upgrade our projects?

Given the performance improvements in 2015 and again with 2016...any team or firm that doesn't upgrade their projects is willingly poking themselves in the eye all day, every day. The very idea of working in 2014 (or worse 2013) after using 2015/16 makes me sad.

"But Steve, EyeTee doesn't like having to install the software every year, and gosh there has been so many updates this year."

Okay, what other software does your firm use every minute of every working hour of every week to generate income? EyeTee shouldn't be getting agitated about keeping software up to date for the people who generate the income of a company. Besides installing software and keeping it up to date is in the job description isn't it? "Um, I don't like answering phones. What? You're the receptionist!!!" It's a bit like objecting to servicing your car and you drive a limousine. You depend on it to make a living but don't want to take care of the means to an end?

If a project team won't upgrade the project...they don't get to whine about poor performance... If IT won't install it then they need to revisit their priorities. Are they too busy to increase the chances of everyone else being more productive?

Grumble grumble...

14 comments:

Anonymous said...

Steve,
Completely agree with you that IT's lethargy should not be the guiding factor in deciding to upgrade.
However, what keeps this upgrade being "upgrading for upgrading sake"?
Does the "performance improvements" justify the VERY minimal functionality improvement?
This is not a rhetorical cynical question. I genuinely want to know.

John Cook said...

Very well said, Steve. I have the exact same opinion when my teams start whining and moaning. I like some of your analogies here, think I might use a few. Thanks for the good post, as always.

Steve said...

Dear Anonymous...really? You're not sure if you should install a newer version that is MUCH faster than the previous, which is faster than the one before that?

That's a real question?

Yes, it is worth it, you should install it. Unless you like poking yourself in the eye all day.

You'll find you end up like other things along the way...even if you don't feel like the new features are worth it.

Here's another thought...you're paying for it.

Russ said...

There seems to be loads of people that are under the impression its bad news to upgrade a project so projects stay in the old version. I think the is stupid and always upgrade our projects and never had any issues doing so. I think it must be left over from CAD Manager mentality of "don't upgrade autocad until SP1 is released".

Anonymous said...

Assuming of course you have some magic influence on all the consulting team who will have to deal with Revit having never supported backward compatibility

Goo said...

personally i would be weary upgrading half way though a project. we upgraded an old project from 2014 to 2015, and it moved all our services out of sync with the wall, and not all in the same direction. so we keep the older projects as they are, new projects we use the latest versions. (revit MEP)

Anonymous said...

I don't think it's left over CAD mentality to wait for the first service pack to be released. I remember when one version of Revit was released where Revit ignored nested parameters and all of our families were non-functional. After logging a support request, Autodesk admitted they messed up, so SP1 fixed the issue.

RevitCat said...

There are other reasons for not upgrading: Because Autodesk make licensing so painful if you run multiple Autodesk platforms. Two issues:
1. Typical network licence only supports four concurrent versions of all products. Autodesk can extend this with special licences but the reality is painfully slow to sort out.
2. If you just upgrade Revit and not the others, then you use two two or more licences per user if they open multiple software at the same time - to avoid this you need to upgrade all Autodesk software at the same time, which means updating all customisation etc.

Unknown said...

When we upgraded a massive project from 2013 to 2015, a Navisworks export bug (still not fixed) broke exporting from Revit 2015 to NWC. Upgrade issues do happen, best idea is to test your workflow before pushing the entire project team to new version.

Steve said...

Just in case it isn't clear enough, I'm not encouraging anyone to be reckless or too casual about upgrading.

The bigger the team and project the more care is necessary.

That's doesn't change the fact that the entire team is enduring poorer performance and the lack of access to features and other improvements because...it's hard.

I worked with a project team that put it off for a long time, finally upgraded from 2012 to 2015... night and day performance not to mention many new features etc. were now available to them.

Get'r done.

Omar said...

as Goo said,
With my work team, we tried once to open 2013 MEP files (which included a lot of families with custom parameters) in revit 2014/15, it damaged the whole file, mainly its families.
Errors pop up with "delete connections and fittings" or "disconnect family from its network"
So upgrading to 2016 with files from 2013/14/15 will then result in same errors or not?

Tim Grimm said...

I agree with you Steve; those that live in the Revit ecosystem should get used to the annual upgrades. It's just a part of doing business. However, I would wait until after the first Service Pack is released.

Believe it or not, we are still working in Revit 2012! It's not because of IT, it's because senior leadership is so risk averse. We're literally only going to upgrade because the 2012 license is being shut off by Autodesk. Sad.

Unknown said...

Completely agree. At previous firm, they had good hardware, licenses for Windows 7, and suite subscription to 2014, but they kept running with XP/Revit 2013 for 'organizational' reasons.

Unknown said...

I agree with Steve, we've been working on a project in 2014 and it was terrible. I took ages to scroll, sync, everything. We spent tie which means money on just waiting for things to load. When we transferred to 2015 it was amazing quicker and making us more efficient. We are now on 2016 and with the program stability and performance increase as well a few more tools I would say yes its worth upgrading. For spending 1 or 2 hours to install and configure and save time in the long term is really worth doing regardless of how many people moaning. and if you I.T. department are putting up a fuss then maybe you should go higher up and explain, stay on 2015 and waste money or upgrade and be more efficient and save a load on money, money talks!!