Ellen Bensky | The Revolution of Knowledge Management at Turner Fleischer

You. Good morning. I'm really honored to have the opportunity to share our story with you. So this is me and I've been with the studio 34 years, so been around for a long time. Just a little bit about us. We're celebrating our 50th anniversary this year, which is pretty cool. We have 250 talented professionals and we have two offices, one in Toronto and a little wee office out in Halifax. So we do architecture, we do interior design, and we do experiential graphic design. So I like to start off my talk, especially when I'm talking about business, with one of my favorite quotes, that we not only need to think about the business of design, but we also need to consider the design of business. And this is something that I'm really proud of and that I wanted to share because as I go through my presentation, you might think, how the hell do they do this and still maintain a profitable company? And last year we were a Circle of Excellence winner at psmj. So let's talk about the conventional AEC business model for a sec. So usually that means that operational departments are overhead that crush your company. Turner Fleischer's business model is that operational departments actually are the foundation of. Of our studio. So how did we build our foundation? So in 1990, when I started, and I hate saying that because I just feel so old, I had a finance and administration team. I was the finance and administration team. And There was about 12 studio members that I supported. By 2008, we were 60 studio members with a finance and administration team still supporting that. By 2012, we were 100 studio members with a finance and administration team supporting that. But there was a problem, and at 100 people, we had a lot of issues with communication and knowledge sharing. We couldn't just yell things across the studio anymore and hope that people heard them. We knew that we needed to do something. What was the solution? Creating an intranet, of course. So what I did was in 2012, I hired a contract software developer and they created our first Internet platform, which was called the Water Cooler. And this is actually pretty cool because I hadn't looked at this in years. So this came out of the archive. But I think you'll see some things that you might recognize from synthesis through this little tour here. So on our Water Cooler, we had wiki pages, we had calendars, we had boardroom schedules, we had event posters, we had shout outs, we had posts in a feed, we had directories, and we had a search bar. And this was incredible until 2014, when our contract software developer, flew off to Dubai and we lost our Internet because we had nobody that could support the complexity of that development. In 2014, I started my search for an Internet platform because as Chris said, my bar was high and we had the water cooler and it served our purposes really well. Nothing I was looking at would even come close to what I needed. But in 2015 I ended up at Autodesk University and I ended up going to a talk by Dan from Mead and Hunt and he shared their knowledge architecture synthesis platform. And I will never forget the moment sitting in that audience going like, oh my God, this is it, exactly what I needed. I came home and I called Chris Parsons, I need your platform. Chris had some sad news to share with me that I needed Deltec Vision. I didn't have Deltec Vision. What was I going to do? Of course, maybe a little tenacity in there, but I figured out a way to connect my software Clearview through Deltec Vision so that we could hit synthesis. And in 2017 we launched Newton. So in eight months we created 450 Wiki pages to start off our first version of Newton. We had nothing really. We had some old wiki pages from the water cooler. But this was really a deep dive into let's get everything we can up there as fast as we can. And in 2017 we launched Newton. Problem solved, end of story. Not so much. A new problem appeared, as happens always in business. So in 2016 we were now at 129 studio members. And what did that do? That actually started crushing our finance and admin department because it just was not set up to be able to provide the proper support for 129 studio members. So what was our solution now? We needed to create operational departments. So at this point in time, our finance administration team was doing financial reporting and analysis. They were also doing recruitment, they were doing accounts receivable, Technology oversight, General accounting fee proposal preparation, Liability insurance renewal Billing, TF Academy, BIM Transformation Oversight, Full cycle Accounting, Financial Planning, Employee policy and Handbook, Social media work, shadowing, Cash flow Management, RFP preparation, Compliance and Taxation, Payroll and benefits, and graphic standards and software integration. Clearly that was not sustainable. So I want to bring software into all of this because you're going to see software plays a really important part in what we've created here. So the finance administration team utilizes UniNet, which is our ERP, obviously Newton and Dayforce for payroll and all of those softwares are integrated. So the first piece of the pie that left left in 2016. It started as our BIM transformation committee and it turned into our digital practice department. So our digital practice department does BIM coordination, data visualization, physical model fabrication training, design workflow, automation, 3D model content creation, Computational design, digital workflow and support, tickets, desktop technology and maintenance, custom software development, digital strategy, custom revit, add in creation, Revit template management, laser scanning and point cloud processing, SQL database creation and querying. They collaborate with our IT and they also do software integration. They brought Tonic DM, SharePoint, TF Custom Apps and Power BI into the story and they're all connected. So then next was our marketing communications department. So in 2017, so we kind of named it graphic solutions first. Then we thought we'd call it Creative Communications because like a lot of companies in our space, we weren't really like, yeah, it's marketing. So it took us a couple tries, but it's marketing and communications at the end of the day, just like in any other industry, it's marketing. And so what our marketing team does brand identity, brand writing and standards, social media management, content library, website management, design and visual identity, virtual asset management, business development, thought leadership, media relations, fee proposal preparation, RFP search and preparation, marketing strategy, award submissions, internal and external communication and events, and software integration. So they brought open asset, LinkedIn and Adobe into the picture and of course they're all connected. So then we thought, oh, wouldn't it be a good idea to have people in culture at that size? I don't know, 2020. That's when we brought in People and Culture. And our People and Culture team does recruitment, onboarding, employee engagement, performance management, career pathing, payroll and benefits, incentive programs, regulatory compliance, policy development, health and safety, DEI programming, social impact, wellness programs, succession planning, offboarding, salary bans and role evaluation, Studio member policy and handbook, and software integration. They brought with them Lattice Bamboohr and Culture Amp. And of course they're all connected. Now I'm going to take a little step back in history and I'm going to go back to 2018. And in 2018 I was lucky enough to present our learning at Ka Connect. But what I really learned at Ka Connect, which was so much more valuable to me and my studio was knowledge management. I had no idea, I'd never heard of it before. What is this? And that was the start of the revolution going back to the title of this presentation. In 2019, I went back and I spoke again, but I brought Marco with me who was on my digital practice team but was really, really into knowledge and standards and process and procedure. We came back to KA Connect actually a little Full circle moment. As you can see here, we came back to KA Connect, Marco, myself and Peter Frost, who's actually here with his new company, bringing KA into that company. So I think it's a real full circle moment that we were all here together in 2019. From 2019 to 2021, we got our act together thinking about what is knowledge management. And in 2021 we created our knowledge management department. And so some of the things our knowledge management department does is knowledge capture and documentation, knowledge sharing and dissemination, Newton management, cross departmental collaboration, data analysis and reporting, project retrospectives, process improvements, lessons learned, physical and digital library management, and software integration. So knowledge management actually integrates out with absolutely every software platform. So then in 2022, the last little piece of this pie had to come out and that had to be learning and development. Learning and development. We had our academy and it was a big thing, but it was still maintained by finance and admin. So we created a learning and development team and their responsibilities are TF Academy management, teacher training and course preparation support, learning framework and strategy, technical skills and training, soft skills training, continuing education for professional licensure, E learning, content development, learning analytics, needs analysis and strategy learning, program development, and of course, software integration. But we had a little bit of an issue here because do they fit in people and culture? Well, learning and development definitely is related to people in culture, but wait a minute, do they sit in knowledge management? Because knowledge management is all about learning and development as well. Went back and forth and back and forth until we finally decided they're living in knowledge management. So now we were left with the finance department and voila, the finance department can now focus on only finance. So this is what we've created, this massive tangle of connections and webs and these departments, but really when you think about it, comes down to we've got our operational departments now that are providing the foundation for our designers, but in the middle here, it's all through software and software connections. And when you think about it, what is software? What's in software? What are we really actually talking about? We're actually talking about data and knowledge. And what do we do with data and knowledge? Well, we're connecting everybody through sharing data and knowledge. But then what are we doing with data and knowledge and all of those connections? If we start to really think about that, we're creating workflow efficiencies. So I want to take a little time and dive into some of the cool stuff that our operational departments are doing. They're all working together, but I want to dive into Knowledge management and digital practice to show you some examples of what you can do when you have teams like this to create workflow efficiencies so that your designers and your professionals can really take their time and focus on their area of expertise. So let's start with knowledge management and I just want to introduce the team first so you can just kind of get an idea of what the team looks like at this point in time that's working on all this cool stuff. So we have Marco, our director of knowledge management. Raise your hand. There he is. We have Kayla, who's next to Marco, who's our knowledge management specialist. Tara is our knowledge management coordinator. Reza is our product coordinator. Nihar is our manager of learning and development, and sue is our learning and development coordinator. So we're going to do a few before and after. So how did we used to do things and how are we able to do things now? So on demand learning, this is what it used to look like. Walk up to somebody's desk, bring them your problem, they would tell you what to do, you'd walk away, you'd have that knowledge in your head, so you might have learned something. But what if the person sitting next to you had that exact same question and you didn't know that and you weren't able to find out the answer? So one of the things we've done now is we have an on demand learning on Newton called our E Tutor library. And our Etutor library is there's short video snippets across many, many different topics. So they could be platform related, so they could be Revit related or Bluebeam related, or they could be process related. So it could be Billing or it could be Outlook, or it could be Zoom. And they're all categorized and you can search them, you can pick the software and it'll take you right to that. All of the learning that is about that topic, you can pick it by category. So these are constantly updated. They come from internal events that we have like tech talks, so they'll pull little bits of those out, or they just come from people asking questions and our team thinking, oh, let's create an E tutor for that. I'm going to talk a little bit about the academy, just to give a history for people that don't know about it, because I'm super proud of it. It started in 2015. We are now in our 27th term in 2024. 2024 looked like this. We offered 25 courses, 14 workshops, 55 practice electives, 26 wellness electives for a total of 119 learning opportunities, which created three hundred and sixteen individual sessions of learning in 2024. Kind of crazy. So some of the efficiencies that we've been able to bring to TF Academy through all of these integrations with all of these amazing departments, some of these examples are going to be really simple things that you don't even think about. How could we do this better? So, registration. So we've got 250 people registering for all of these things at the same time. We used to use a Google form, then we'd pull that all out into an Excel spreadsheet, and then we'd create wiki pages on Newton where you would have to go and open up each course to see if your name was on the course selection. So took a little bit of time to process all of that. Now our registration is through a Microsoft form. So everybody just goes through and they go through and they click through all of the opportunities that are being offered. Yes, I want to take it. No, I don't. Yes, I want to. No, I don't. And then they hit submit. That goes into a massive Excel spreadsheet and then that's displayed in a Power BI dashboard on Newton. So as soon as the course lists are out, you go on Newton, you go into Power bi, you can search by your name and you'll see exactly everything that you signed up for. The instructors can go on and quickly see who's in my classes, so they get an idea of who they're going to be teaching to that semester. And it's available for everybody to use. So Team Academy feedback. We're big on feedback, so the teachers need to get feedback to know, hey, how'd that go? What can I do better? How can I improve my class? So before it was a fillable PDF, it was emailed out, emailed back. A Microsoft Word document was created with all the feedback, and then that was shared with the instructors and it was reviewed with the instructors. Now we have a Microsoft form and everybody gets sent the link and you fill in the Microsoft form, you answer some questions, there's a spot where you can also fill in some commentary, and then you hit submit. Then, of course, there's a Power BI dashboard that each instructor gets access to and it's reviewed with our learning and development team and you go through all of the feedback. And architects are visual people. So anything we can put in a Power BI dashboard and be easier to digest for them is going to be more impactful. TF Academy Continuing Education Certificates So a Lot of our courses give our studio members continuing education for their licensure and certification. So again, before it was a fillable PDF and when those PDFs were filled out, they were files that were shared on a server and every studio member had to go grab their certificate and do whatever they needed to do with it. So now we have an InDesign file that is filled out. We have a TF custom app that pulls information from our SQL database that auto generates the certificates and then they're uploaded to BambooHR in everybody's training folder and so they're easily accessible and they're stored there and nobody's moving them around anywhere. So that was some of the cool things that the Knowledge Management department has been working on. Now I want to show you some of the things that our Digital Practice department has been working on. Before I tell you that I want to introduce our Digital Practice department because I am absolutely so proud of them as well. It's going to take me a little while because there's a few of them, so bear with me. There's Brent, our cto. Artem is our Manager of Digital Practice. Rocky is our Digital Practice lead. Maurizio is a senior Digital Practice Specialist. Serjana is a senior Digital Practice Specialist. Descartes, a Digital Practice Specialist. Hans is a Digital Practice Coordinator. Alice is an intermediate Computational designer. Hao is a software developer, swagit's a software developer. Torkin's a senior BIM Coordinator, Rish is an intermediate BIM Coordinator, Gideon's a BIM Coordinator and Brad's our Facilities Manager. And what I like to share about this team. And again, it's weird. I'm the CFO, but I'm really proud of this. They're only 10% billable. What are they doing in the other 90% of their time? Let's take a look. Here's four things that they've been working on and I'm going to take you in and show you a little bit about these four things. There could have been 20, but Chris kept reminding me of the time that I had and what I could share with you. So user defined fields. So before we had a bunch of department trackers, I'm sure you guys all have Excel trackers embedded throughout your organizations. We had a lot. And project coordinators, project managers, job captains, managers, associates, principals, everybody had their hands in these trackers. So you can imagine the amount of time that data was entered and reentered and reentered and reentered. And was it correct? Wasn't it? We had some Standard project fields in UNET that gave us basic project information and project types and project dates. And that was entered by project accountants. But now what we've created is a single source of truth. We knew that this is where we had to get to in order to eliminate all of that duplication and entry and time wastage of people doing everything differently. And so we've utilized user defined fields in unit to create that single source of truth. So there's four types of user defined fields that we use. There's a checkbox, pretty simple, a text box, there's dropdown lists and there's tables. So we have different types of user defined fields. So we have invoicing user defined fields and that's project accountants responsibility to update. We have marketing UDFs and that's the marketing and communications department's responsibility to update and maintain. And then we have two really uniquely named UDFs. Project details one and project details two. There's a lot of project details and the responsibility for entering those UDFs are the project coordinators. We also have risk management UDFs and the project coordinators are also responsible for entering those. So you might wonder, okay, what are examples of UDFs in these sections? So in invoicing there's invoice detail UDFs, there's project contact information, where the project folder is located, is it in the Newton project directory? And then there's opportunity information and follow up notes in the marketing UDFs there's proposal type, is it on the website? Is it an open asset? Is photography, has photography been done? Is it in process? Who's the photographer? Project sheet status, is it created? Is it complete marketing, general marketing info and those ever wonderful marketing stats that always change and you never know what those those possibly can be. Project details 1. Your project status. We have what other services are included in this project? Members of the project team, contract administration details, permit scope of work details. And then we've got, are we the architect of record? It's kind of important to what we do. Project location, project types, building information. So if there's multiple buildings on a site, all of the different information stats for all the different buildings, who are the consultants on the project. And then Our risk management UDFs have our risk management log. So how are these all integrated across some of the things that we do? So you'll see all of these categories are pulled out into our single project tracker, which I'll show you. Newton. They're all useful in Newton. They're pulled out for DPD web apps and revit add ins. They're pulled out for social media information, project sheet information and out to Open Asset. So let's see just a couple of examples of how this works in real life. So for Newton project directory we're pulling from uninet and user defined fields and Newton. So the information comes from Uninet and it's displayed in our project directory on Newton in a couple of different places. Open Asset project sheets. So the information comes right from the UDFS right into Open Asset. Through our Adobe InDesign project sheet template we have an auto bim execution plan that was created as a TF custom app. So the user defined fields are pulling from Uninet through the custom app and showing up in our BIM execution plans in a couple of different places. So now I want to talk about custom forms and workflows. So some of these again are going to be really, really simple. And you'd be like, whoa, that's kind of crazy. But we process approximately 350 consultant invoices per month, which is a lot. And so what we were doing before was email. So we would take in the old days it was like literally pieces of paper. Then we got to emails and so the project accountants would email a batch out to the project manager and say, please would you review these and approve these. So then we can get it back and we can enter it into the system and bill it to the client. You can imagine it's getting missed in email. There's a lot of where is it? I need it. Did you sign it? What are you doing with it? So now we have a TF custom app. And so the consultant invoices are entered by the project accountant into the app with all the details. The invoice is attached and then this goes out to with notes, there's always notes, fields. And this goes out to the project managers and then we can track their review. They send it to their manager for approval and then they send it back to accounting. And it's all done within this app. And anybody can go in and see at any moment where this is. So you don't have to email somebody and say where's your approval? You can just go in and say, oh, you've been sitting on this for two days. Please get to it because I need the answer. Fee proposal preparation, really, really big deal. Lots of moving parts to it. So we, we used to have part of it to request the proposal. We had some of the documents in Microsoft Word. We had a massive Microsoft Excel spreadsheet. And then email, look at this, review this, Please do This. What do I have a question about this? And again, it's all sitting in outlook at various stages that nobody could understand where it was. So now we have a fee proposal preparation custom app, and it starts right from the fee proposal request and it goes all the way through the review and approval process. So every time somebody reviews it and updates it, they just hit next and it goes to the next person and then it goes to the next person until it gets to completion. Hold, write off approvals. So in our studio, if you want, a project manager wants to hold more than $500 or they want to write off more than $500, they need to get approval for that and they need their manager to approve it, and then I'm the final approver on it. So before, again, it was a fillable PDF and it was emailed out. So it was emailed out to their manager. Then their manager had to send, then they sent it back to me. Then I had to open it up, digitally, sign it, save it, send it back. It was a lot. So now we have a custom app and again they enter their hold and write off requests right in the custom app. They hit next and it goes to the next person in chain. And before I even came here this morning, I was sitting in my room and I approved a whole whack of these because we're right in the middle of billing and if I didn't do it till I got back, they would not be happy, happy with me. So I opened the app and just right through. And you can approve, you can reject, you can say why right in the app. So that's our custom forms and workflow. Let's talk a minute about dashboards. So work breakdown structure. We have kind of a complex work breakdown structure. It's four levels and this is what it looks like in unet. And just a caveat, Uninet's amazing, but it's really not pretty. So looking at things in uninet is just not that easy. So you can find our work breakdown structure in your timesheet. You can find it other places. But when you're trying to fill out your timesheet and you're trying to know what am I doing, what billing group am I in, what phase, what task should I be choosing? Well, of course, now we have a Power BI dashboard that sits on Newton that you can just go into and you can search through this Power BI dashboard and you can search by code, billing group, task code, anything you want to easily find out what you need to do to enter onto your Timesheet Timesheet completion status really, really important to our studio. All timesheets have to be entered and approved and submitted by Friday because our project managers get in there at the beginning of the week and they start reviewing the time. And so timesheet completion status is a big thing. Who's done it, who hasn't? And this was the way that you looked at it on Uninet, which again, not very pretty and time consuming. Of course we have a Power BI dashboard for this as well that PM's managers, everybody can go in and look, okay, what's unapproved, what's unsubmitted, where are they? Is there any hours? Aren't there hours? And you can easily know who you might have to go and nudge a little bit to get their timesheet done. Fee Proposal Tracker so where are all these fee proposals? What stage are all these fee proposals at? Always something that everybody wants to understand. So now we have a fee proposal dashboard. And so you can search the fee proposal dashboard by what are still under PM review, what are sitting with partner review, what are still in the preparation phase. And you can search it by fee proposal specialist, you can search it by fee type, you can search it by department, by manager, absolutely anything you want. And you can see it's displayed in a number of different ways. You can dive in to all of the commentary from the forms process that I showed you before. All in one dashboard. PM Bill Review Completion Status so just like timesheets and timing are really important to us, PM Bill review timing is really important to us. So in order to get our billing done in the first three months of the following first three weeks of the following month, project managers need to finish their review in the first week. How do we know if they've finished their review? Well before you'd have to go into each PM and you could see which one of their projects had turned this beautiful lime green color. So that's how you knew that they were done. Clearly not efficient use of anybody's time. So of course now we have a PM build review dashboard. And at any time you can go in and you can see by department, by project manager who's done how many of their reviews. So you can see the red and the green. It's kind of like, oh, I better talk to that person because that's a little too red on the 11th of the month. And last but not least, I want to talk about some custom applications. So I'm sure all of you have different ways that you do weekly scheduling we had a million different Excel trackers. Every department had a different one and there was no consistency if you were switching departments, it was confusing to say the least. So then we created a studio wide Microsoft Excel, which we thought, this is awesome. Like every 250 people are in this Excel sheet and all of our PMs and managers can open it up, they can work in it. It's a shared document, little big, little complex. Lot of people would be in scheduling meetings, going, oh, sorry, it's stuck. It didn't save my last change. So now we have a studio wide weekly schedule app. And so it's simple to use, easy to understand. Everybody can go in, they can enter the time, they can enter comments. All of the different types of time are in there. Each person can go in and check off their name and see what they're scheduled for for the coming week. And everybody in the studio is using the same app all together at all times. And it works. So department project trackers talked a little bit about it before, but this was the bane of our existence. Every department, every team, even clients, had different trackers that were set up differently, that were tracking different things. And again, if you worked on projects from one team to another, one department to another, you had to get used to, oh, they're looking at it like this. But the last project I worked on looked at it like this. So a lot of uptake in time and a lot of time to maintain it. So this is our studio wide project tracker. Our digital team went and met with everybody and said, okay, explain to me every field, every column, every use for all of your trackers and, and they wrote it all down, noted it all, and they created a studio wide project tracker. And it's pulling from all of those UDFs that I showed you that we're creating in Uninet. So again, it's a single source of truth and because it's a single source of truth and because entering the data into those fields is actually written in role description. So if you read our project coordinator role description, you will see UDF data entry and maintenance as part of their role description. And this is a work in progress, so we are hoping by fall to get this rolled out to the entire studio. And it's going to be a game changer because as soon as this goes out, all of those Excel spreadsheets will be retired and gone and we won't see them again. So what have we learned? We've learned clearly that operational departments are the foundation of our studio. We've also learned that they create workflow efficiencies that save designers time so that they can focus on architecture, interior design, and experiential graphic design. Thank you. And that was 9 minutes and 24 seconds left. Amazing. The prime Minister.