This guest post was written by Jordan Billingsley, the BIM Coordinator and Design Technology Leader at Hord Coplan Macht. In the post, Jordan describes the method he used to assess software usage and skills at his firm. Take it away Jordan!
Is your software super or superfluous?
Software is a major investment for every design firm. In the era of the “app”, “monthly auto-renewal”, and “freemium”, it’s easy to accumulate a variety of software, from stand-alone applications to add-ins to mobile software.
Determining the effectiveness of all that software can be a daunting task. Sure, separating the wheat from the chaff is easy. But determining the most useful, while also respecting user preferences, is infinitely more difficult.
My firm recently undertook an effort to measure the effectiveness of our software investment. To do so, we used a combination of online surveys, user interviews and cost analysis. As a result, we were able to map our firm’s software use,…