Most BIM workflows in small and medium sized architectural practices weren’t designed. They were inherited.
Someone joined the practice from a larger firm and brought their folder structure with them. A training course from four years ago established a naming convention that nobody has touched since. The project architect who set up the first Revit template left eighteen months ago. The template remained. Nobody is entirely sure what half of it does, but it works well enough, so it stays.
This is not a failure of discipline. It is how knowledge moves between organisations — through people, not documentation. The problem is that knowledge carried this way often arrives without its context. The folder structure made sense inside the firm that designed it, for project types and team sizes that may have nothing to do with yours. The naming convention was a response to a coordination requirement that your practice may never have. The template was calibrated for a specific procurement environment.
When those origins are lost, the practice is left with rules that nobody can explain — and, more importantly, nobody thinks to question.
The Experiment That Explains It
In the 1960s, researchers studying primate behaviour placed five monkeys in a cage with a bunch of bananas hung from the ceiling, accessible by a ladder. Every time a monkey climbed the ladder, all five were sprayed with cold water. It didn’t take long for the group to start pulling any monkey away from the ladder before the spray came.
Then the researchers began replacing the original monkeys one by one with new ones. Each new arrival would approach the ladder — and be pulled back by the group. The new monkey learned the rule without experiencing the cold water. By the time all five original monkeys had been replaced, none of the remaining animals had ever been sprayed. But every new arrival was still pulled away from the ladder. The group enforced a rule that nobody could explain and nobody had experienced.
This is a reasonable description of how most Revit standards get maintained in small practices.
The detail worth sitting with is not that the rule survives — that is understandable. It is that questioning the rule starts to feel like a disruption. The new team member who asks “why do we do it this way?” is not being difficult. They are doing the most useful thing a newcomer can do: testing whether the rule still has a reason.
What This Looks Like in Practice
The inherited behaviours most worth examining tend to cluster around a few areas.
Folder structures and file naming. These often reflect the coordination requirements of large, multi-disciplinary teams exchanging files with contractors. For a small practice primarily working in-house, the same structure adds overhead without adding clarity. A two-person practice does not need a federation layer.
Revit templates and shared parameters. Templates absorb decisions — about families, view templates, annotation styles, parameter sets — that made sense in a specific context. Those decisions don’t age well when the context changes. A template built for residential work carries assumptions that actively resist adaptation to a new building type.
Level of Detail conventions. LOD requirements travel between projects as received wisdom long after the coordination need that generated them has passed. Producing geometry to a level of detail that no downstream process will actually use is one of the most common sources of wasted modelling time in small practices.
Coordination workflows. Clash detection processes designed for large teams with formal sign-off chains are often applied wholesale to projects where a ten-minute conversation would achieve more in less time.
The Audit Question
The useful question to ask about any inherited BIM habit is not “is this correct?” but “what problem was this solving, and do we still have that problem?”
That reframe matters because “correct” in BIM is largely contextual. A naming convention that is perfectly suited to a hundred-person practice with a dedicated BIM manager and a live Common Data Environment may be unnecessary friction for a practice of eight people sharing a server folder. Neither is wrong in the abstract. One of them is wrong for your situation.
Working through a practice’s BIM habits with that question takes half a day. The output is not a new standard — it is a cleaner version of what you already have, with the parts that no longer serve any purpose removed.
Small practices have a structural advantage here that larger organisations rarely have: the people doing the work are usually also the people who can change the way the work is done. There is no governance committee. There is no change management process. There is just a decision, made by people who understand the work, to do it differently.
The question is whether anyone stops to make it.