Kicked-Off

We are officially underway. Over the course of the last two days, I've had a conference call with 'The Specialist' in Texas, a few conversations with our Project Manager & the Sales Rep (from their local office), some e-mails, an FTP posting, and a few more emails.

The results? My doubts are hereby (almost) completely withdrawn.
What I thought was going to be tough to fit into the 2 weeks before our training starts will be taken care of without a problem.
What I thought was going to be 2 days worth of work in our office actually only took me a few hours.
Sometimes I think too much. Ya' think maybe?

Why? Because the Specialist will be creating the content we need (on his computer down in the heart of Texas) prior to the commencement of training. I uploaded a package of all that he needed, which included things like logos, linetype settings, layering info, text/dimension samples, and a number of other things. Standard stuff, really. But then, what else do you make templates out of anyway?

So, all I'm going to do now is try to get a little background "intro-training" for my people so they don't go into the classroom totally cold. If we go in there ahead of the game, we can skip the really basic stuff and get to the meat much quicker. Two years ago when I first went through training on my own, the first couple of hours was dedicated to learning the interface and finding your way around the program. Those are valuable training hours that we can better use doing anything other than "... and this is the Project Browser." That could really pay off in the long run.

We also need to decide what our training/pilot project will be. That is one other aspect that I really like is the fact that we will be using a Revit Architecture file from one of our best clients to do the training. Real-life training instead of everything being sanitized and only from the training manual.

This is going to be good. I'm feeling much better than I did before about the setup stage. It's far from over and there are many obstacles to overcome, but the guys at Avatech are making it a little more "warm & fuzzy" at this point.

It is T-minus 13 days and counting. Time to rally the troops. More to come as I/we get closer to Zero Hour.