The Autodesk Forma Health Check gives you a maturity score in a few minutes. It tells you roughly where your organization stands: Digital Leader, Well Established, Developing, or High Optimization Opportunity. What it cannot tell you is why, or what to change first. That is the job of a workflow assessment, and the two get confused often enough that it is worth spelling out the difference.
This post explains what a SolidCAD Forma workflow assessment reviews, how it runs, what you receive at the end, and who should not bother. If you have not taken the Health Check yet, start there. It takes less time than reading this.
Take the Autodesk Forma Health Check and get your maturity score
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A score is a symptom, not a diagnosis
Most Forma environments did not become inconsistent by design. A hub gets set up for the first project, the second project copies it with a few changes, a new PM builds a third from scratch, and within a year there are four folder structures, three review workflows, and a permissions model nobody can fully explain. Users fall back to email and spreadsheets because that is the one place the rules are still predictable.
The Health Check surfaces that pattern as a low score in Governance or Adoption. It does not show which project templates are drifting, which approval step everyone skips, or which role has edit rights it should not have. The assessment is where we look.
What the assessment reviews
We work through six areas. The order matters, because the early ones usually explain the later ones.
1. Hub and project template setup
How new projects are created, whether a template exists, whether it is actually used, and how far live projects have drifted from it. This is the single most common root cause we find.
2. Roles and permissions
Who can create, edit, approve and publish, by role rather than by name. We map the roles you intended against the access people actually have, including external partners who were added for one project and never removed.
3. Folder structure and naming standards
Whether a documented standard exists, whether it is enforced in the hub, and where it breaks down. We also check whether the standard matches how your consultants and trades actually name things, because a standard nobody can follow is not a standard.
4. Workflows: reviews, approvals, issues and transmittals
Which workflows are configured, which are used, and where people route around them. If a review workflow exists but issues are being tracked in a spreadsheet, we want to know why. Usually the workflow is right and the trigger is wrong.
5. Reporting and visibility
What project leaders and executives can see without asking someone to build them a report. We check dashboards, insights, and what gets exported by hand every week, because manual exports are a reliable sign that the reporting layer is not doing its job.
6. Adoption by role
Not "how many users logged in", but which roles use Forma for their core tasks and which only open it when forced to. A superintendent who checks drawings on a phone and a designer who publishes from Revit are two different adoption problems with two different fixes.
How it runs
The assessment is deliberately light on your team's time. It has four steps:
- Discovery call. One conversation to agree scope, pick two or three representative projects, and confirm who we should talk to.
- Read-only hub review. We are given reviewer access and work through the six areas above on the projects you selected. Nothing is changed.
- Role interviews. Short conversations with a handful of people across roles: typically a project manager, a BIM or document control lead, a field user, and whoever administers the hub. We are listening for the gap between the configured workflow and the real one.
- Findings session. We walk your team through what we found and the recommended order of fixes, and answer the obvious question of what you can do yourselves versus where you would want help.
What you get back
- A findings report organized by the six areas, with what we observed, why it matters, and which projects it affects.
- A prioritized fix list. Each item is tagged by effort and by who owns it, so a hub administrator can start on the quick ones the same week.
- A roadmap for the larger items: template consolidation, permission model redesign, workflow changes that need user retraining. This is the part most organizations use to plan the next quarter.
You own all three documents. There is no obligation to engage SolidCAD for the fixes, though many organizations do for the roadmap items.
Who it is for, and who it is not
The assessment is a good fit if you have at least one project running in Forma, more than one team using it, and a sense that the platform is doing less for you than it should. A Health Check score of Developing or High Optimization Opportunity is usually the trigger.
It is the wrong tool if you have not deployed Forma yet, or if you have a single project and a single team. In those cases a structured implementation or a short enablement session is more useful, and we will say so on the discovery call.
Related reading
Next step
Start with the score. The Autodesk Forma Health Check takes a few minutes and tells you whether an assessment is worth your time.
Take the Autodesk Forma Health Check.
If you already have your score and want to talk through what an assessment would cover for your hub, contact SolidCAD at info@solidcad.ca.
Contact SolidCAD.
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