In the past, our projects have been small enough, and our team has been close-knit enough to cope, but we're now finally thinking that it's time we got a bit smart about how we document changes in drawings, and how we manage the initiation of drawings and their subsequent drawing issues.
I've seen, and been impressed by, the online demos of archetype project management software. In some respects, we do some of that kind of thing already. We create projects in a database which, in turn, to some extent automates the process of creating folders and populating titleblocks. But if there was a comprehensive way of documenting changes to drawings (including xrefs), and taking some of the task of managing all of that out of the hands of our CAD monkey (me - most of the time) I'd be interested to hear about it.
A little bit about our present configuration: In our set-up, we xref (and 'nested-xref') drawings into a 'final drawing'. A drawing number comprises the project number, the drawing series number (10-19 for survey information, 20-29 for GAs, etc.) and the layout number. So drawing 2166_20.dwg holds a number of paperspace layouts numbered
01.,02.,03.... each with its own titleblock, thus a typical drawing number might be '2166_20_01' - meaning Layout 01 of drawing 20 of project 2166. Also, I should just mention that, in terms of production information, we work almost entirely in 2D - oh, and very importantly, we print to PDF.Are we bonkers/inspired/backward? Just wondering how other people manage all this kind of stuff.