CAD standards, templates and file cleanup

What this actually fixes

Four hundred layers where forty would do. Three title blocks in circulation, two of them wrong. Text styles that shift when the file opens on another machine. Families copied between projects until nobody knows which is current. None of it stops work. All of it taxes every project, quietly, forever.

Scope

• A layer and naming structure, documented, with a mapping from what you have now
• Information container naming to BS EN ISO 19650-2, with status and revision fields that survive an audit
• DWG and Revit templates with text, dimension and line styles that hold across machines
• One correct title block per sheet size, with the fields your jurisdiction requires
• A deduplicated Revit family library, versioned, with the obsolete ones removed rather than renamed
• Batch cleanup of the existing archive against the new structure
• A short written standards document your next hire can actually read

Working to ISO 19650

Where your projects run under BS EN ISO 19650, the structure is built to it rather than beside it: information containers named to the fields the standard sets out, suitability and status codes applied consistently, revision handling that does not depend on someone remembering, and a folder structure that maps onto the WIP, shared, published and archive states of a common data environment.

Worth being precise about what that means when a subcontractor says it. ISO 19650 compliance is a property of a project's information management process, and that process belongs to the appointing party — no drafting office can hand it to you in a zip file. What we do is work inside it correctly as a task team: deliver into your CDE in the state it expects, name and code files so they validate on receipt, and not be the link in the chain that breaks your audit trail. Where you have no such process yet, the naming structure we set up is built so that adopting one later is a change of governance rather than a re-issue of every file.

Why the written document matters more than the files

A cleaned archive decays back to its original state within about eighteen months unless the rule is written down and someone can point at it in review. The deliverable is not only the template — it is the two-page document that makes the template enforceable.