Jacqueline Warner
Jacqueline Warner is one of our Autodesk admins who had access to product usage reporting earlier this year. She was an integral part in providing feedback to ensure its effectiveness for the recent global release on July 15th. Here are her top 5 tips on seat usage reporting as a tool to make better management and purchasing decisions and improve team productivity and product adoption:
1. Product standardization
Before I had seat usage reporting in my Autodesk Account, I had no way to track who was using what products and how often. Since accessing seat usage reporting, this challenge has been solved.
For example, we rolled out Revit 2019 and I was able to see that it wasn’t installed properly on people’s machines because not everyone was using it. Thankfully we hadn’t launched it to our entire organization to standardize on that version yet and we were able to rectify it and get everyone on the same version before I got any tickets from users about incompatibility.
2. Alignment with remote offices
Now, with reporting, I have insight into the data needed to better align all of our offices on the same toolset and versions, to avoid version conflicts that slow down work.
The data helped me see that some people were using Revit 2015, which gives me an idea of the bigger picture of my team’s product usage and how I want to strategically plan moving forward to onboard them to new versions or different tools as we continue to adopt new products.
3. Smarter purchasing decisions
Before accessing my seat usage data in Autodesk Account, it was the last piece of our software purchasing that was not data-backed, which made me concerned about trusting what I was spending it on.
We want our building informational models to be smart, we want all of our software to be smart, why wouldn’t we want our product purchasing decisions to be smart and not just guesses? I now know that I’m making smart purchasing and management decisions for my team.
4. Expense justification
I did not have hard evidence before that proved why my team needed to upgrade to an Industry Collection. I knew based on my manual efforts that upgrading was the best choice for us, but could not find a way to present that to our purchasing manager.
With the data, I was pleasantly surprised to see a lot of people were using the collection that I wanted to upgrade everyone to, so it really helped justify that expense that we didn’t just buy Revit alone.
5. Strategic conversations
I never had the opportunity to have conversations with my team about efficiency because I didn’t have the knowledge about how they are using the tools and technology I deploy. We mainly focused on tactical conversations, instead of understanding the bigger picture.
With reporting data, I was prompted to have conversations with people like, “you could be a lot more efficient using these newer versions.” I now can spend my time better understanding how we can ensure we work towards a better business outcome, instead of worrying about manually tracking usage.
Jacqueline’s Pro Tip:
Seat usage reporting is a great tool for you to check at renewal time to make the right decisions for admin efficiency in your day-to-day management, increase team productivity, and make impactful investments with more tools and technology.