Wow I’m incredibly impressed that you’ve decided to embrace VR technology. When renovating our house, it was incredibly hard (and still is) to visualize how everything. So far we just got lucky but the basement is going to be a challenge as we’re making structural adjustments.
How did you get your team to get onboard with the process? How is the ROI?
My team design team are graduate architects, on the younger-ish side - 29 and 40. One worked for Santiago Calatrava - who, if you know, obviously models all his work. So it was second nature to them, I just pushed them to lean into it. Rhino is not without its drawbacks. It is time consuming but it's worth it because, as a sales tool, it wins every time. I'll have first time meetings with perspective clients where we'll wireframe a design on their survey (if we know some particulars of the program). Blows people away.
The ROI - the salaries were a negative on the books for two years, but now we're choosing our projects, ones that any AD100 firm would kill for.
While there is increased complexity on top of all the software thats being built today, I reckon the focus on speed (and shipping to prod) over quality has also led to the increasing number of bugs. The mindset shift from shipping quality products (not just software) to shipping something that is good enough has been the mantra of management in recent years. When business schools and tech leaders prioritize the idea that we need to be more agile and every sprint needs to be a production release, these are the results we get.
> I reckon the focus on speed (and shipping to prod) over quality has also led to the increasing number of bugs. The mindset shift from shipping quality products (not just software) to shipping something that is good enough has been the mantra of management in recent years.
I wonder how much of that is just what management always wanted. Peopleware (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peopleware:_Productive_Project...), a VERY GOOD book about software development written in the 80s, talks about managers wanting to sacrifice quality an how corrosive that is. It's just that in the past technology forced them to pursue quality: Software shipped on disk needed to be bug-free, because it made bug-fixes almost impossible. Software written by a human needed a human that understands it, who might have some pride in his work.
But now, with the internet and LLMs, we get to live in the slop-world the management has always dreamed of. More tickets, closing faster! Less headcount, less talk! Artificial workers that don't talk back! Who cares about all the rest?
How did you get your team to get onboard with the process? How is the ROI?