Author

Ryan Lenihan

ACC Model Upgrades. Surprise Part 6. It’s Not the Tech That Breaks You

Digital By Jul 23, 2026 No Comments

I thought I was done with the ACC model upgrade series. Five posts in, it really felt like I’d covered it all — how the updater works, what breaks, how to check models before upgrading, how to get usable reports out the other side. I’d written about every technical failure point that had ever bitten us, and I was ready…

A Short Story About How Nested Families Work When Exported to Ifc.

I had a question come through that’ll sound familiar if you’ve ever pushed Revit → IFC on a live job: Nested families are carrying asset data in Revit, but that data disappears in the IFC. LOI attributes, classification, IDs.. gone. What’s going on? This comes up more than it should, and when providing advice, far too many people are confidently…

Revit Cloud Upgrades Part 4 – The Test Upgrade Report

Digital By Apr 09, 2026 No Comments

You know that moment when you finally hit Test Upgrade and the HTML drops into your inbox. You open it, scroll a little, and your stomach tightens. Hundreds of warnings. Maybe a few errors. Sometimes a model or two that just… refused to cooperate. It’s incredibly easy to treat that document like a report card. Like Revit just graded your…

The Doorman Fallacy

Digital By Apr 02, 2026 No Comments

Every few months a story does the rounds about a job that gets “optimised” out of existence. A door greeter, a receptionist, an admin. The pitch is always the same: we can automate the visible part of the role, save some money, and nothing important will change. Except something important always changes. Rory Sutherland tells the classic version with the…

BIM Cache Cleaner 3.5.3 Update

Digital By Mar 31, 2026 No Comments

Revit 2026 changed how cloud model caches can be configured, and BIM Cache Cleaner wasn’t picking that up properly. In Revit.ini, Revit now allows the cloud cache to be redirected using: On a few machines I tested, [Directories] ProjectPath was empty, but CacheLocation was set. BIM Cache Cleaner was still scanning the default location: So it simply never saw the…

Revit Cloud Model Upgrades Part 3 – The Pre‑Upgrade Checklist That Actually Prevents Pain

Digital By Mar 26, 2026 No Comments

Most upgrade failures don’t happen during the upgrade. They happen six months earlier when everyone was “just trying to get drawings out the door”. By the time you hit Upgrade, the Revit upgrade process is simply showing you the consequences. This is the checklist I run before pushing a single model through the ACC Project Upgrader. It’s boring work, but…

When Leadership Is the Ceiling. How Low-Capability Managers Normalise Mediocrity

The “law of the lid” says a team rarely outperforms the capability of its leader. It’s a neat framing, but the real issue runs deeper. Low‑capability leadership doesn’t just cap performance. It rewires the culture until mediocre becomes normal and ambitious people either blunt their edge or walk out. I’ve seen this play out in enough teams to recognise the…

Revit Cloud Model Upgrades Part 2 – Diagnosing Common Upgrade Errors and Root Causes

Digital By Mar 12, 2026 No Comments

Upgrading a Revit model isn’t just a file conversion, it’s a forced rebuild of geometry, constraints, joins, and parametric logic. And when that rebuild fails, the cause is rarely the upgrade itself. More often, it’s exposing instability that was already baked into the model. As discussed in Revit Cloud Model Upgrades Part 1, most upgrade warnings — and complete upgrade…

Revit Cloud Model Upgrades Part 1 – How the ACC Project Updater Works and Common Misconceptions

Upgrading cloud-shared Revit models via Autodesk Construction Cloud’s Cloud Model Upgrade tool can initially feel daunting. It often surfaces a flurry of errors and warnings, but the key insight is that most issues indicate pre-existing model “technical debt”, not bugs in Autodesk’s tool. Understanding Technical Debt Technical debt is a concept originally coined by software developer Ward Cunningham in 1992….

What’s Cooking This Year

Digital By Feb 19, 2026 No Comments

I haven’t posted here since December, I’m calling it a Christmas break. But it’s mid-February now, which means it’s time to get fired back up. Rather than jump straight into a heavy technical deep dive, I wanted to share a quick outline of what’s coming over the next few months on digitalBBQ. 1. Cloud Model Upgrades I have a few…

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