How do people handle projects that are Phased?

We have a project that will be broken into about 4 phases. I have never really dealt with this, so was wondering what others did. The 2 options we have come up with is to handle it with layers or with seperate drawings. My thought is to set it up using seperate drawings and just incorporating the previous phases into the next one. Does anyone have a different approach? We are using AutoCAD.

It might well depend on what you are drawing, when it needs to be drawn, and how the client wants it represented.

In the construction industry, we run across the phasing premise on almost every large project. Sometimes each phase is a separate contract, so there is no question that it is a separate dwg, job number, everything.

The most recent job I worked was architectural millwork for an extensive renovation of a resort hotel pool bar in Orlando Florida. There were two phases, but we were contracted to draw both phases at once, in one set of drawings.

The only differentiation we made to the phases on our end where of course, on the delivery and work schedule, and on the Key Plan for our drawing layouts. We used a pdf provided by the client of their key plan, inserted it in modelspace and highlited each area where our work was to be installed. As well, we labeled each highlighted area with its phase identifiction. Even though each phase was in the same dwg file, we kept phase one and phase two apart as far as the layouts we plotted simply by setting up layouts for phase one first, and following that were the layeouts for phase two.

All the phase one layouts were page numbered starting with 01- nn.x Then phase two all started with 02- nn.x. What kept this simple was that there was only one pool bar area included in phase one, but not in phase two. There were two restroom buildings, one in each phase, and two Towel & Retail buildings, one in each phase. It was pretty easy actually.

The layout set for phase one contained the pool bar, one restroom building, and one towel & retail building, ending in page number 01-014.F. The other set of layouts(plots) for phase two was a lot smaller, 02-01.A through 02-09.C

When plotting the phases, each set included page 00CS (cover sheet) and 00KP (key plan).

Hope this is at least a seed for some thought. Good luck. Make lots of money.

The type of project and the particulars may dictate the best approach. If the phases are totally separate like Dana's project, then it's easy. In the building systems industry, the lines between phases are do not correspond to the architectural phases. Most times, work needs to be done outside of the architects scope for the phases and somethimes it turns out to be in an area that is part of a later phase architecturally.

Both of your approaches work well. A combination of the two would probably be best. Having a set of drawing for each phase makes it very easy. Demo work from Phase 1 won't be shown in Phase 2. New stuff from Phase 1 becomes existing in Phase 2 and so on.

If you are still unsure, give some more details about the project.

Using different layers can get complicated in a hurry. I recently had to represent a landfill through four stages of its life cycle. That meant one group of existing contours that would stay put, one existing group that would be removed in phase 1, one new group that would be added in phase 1, one existing group that would be removed in phase 2, one new group that would be added in phase 2, one new group from phase 1 that would be removed in phase 2 ... and that's just for the first two phases. Add in labels and surfaces, and it gets even more messy.

If you even suspect that the project will get that complicated, or if you have more than one feature that will change from one phase to the next, xreffing is the way to go.

Of course, you could set up the different phases as independent projects, but then you lose the convenience of having your changes in earlier phases propagate down to later phases. If there's another way to handle it (and there probably is), I'm not aware of it.