Embedding Knowledge Management in Roles How Turner Fleischer Baked KM Into Studio Culture

Each community will be responsible for getting the feedback for the pages that they're creating. And again, I go back to. Because it's in somebody's role, that's what they need to do. They take the job. It's part of their role. So we're not leaving it to chance. I mean, we used to, we didn't, we didn't. Well, we didn't even write roles until two years. So we were definitely one of those companies like, oh, you should just know what you should do. I don't have a role. How am I supposed to know what I should do? So that was a whole year long project of writing a role for every single member of our studio. And so we baked it in. And so an interesting thing about how we're leveraging, so you might ask, okay, Ellen, that makes a lot of sense. People and culture. You've got, you know, somebody whose role it is that makes sense. Marketing. Well, what are you doing about practice? Whose role in architecture is it to do this? And so we used to have practice area leaders. Well, guess what, they're super busy people. And to your point, Evan, they are way more useful in a client meeting or pursuing new business than they are sitting here and crafting wiki pages. So we knew we had a need there. We created a role for a year, five years ago of project coordinator. So I knew my project managers were too bogged down with administrative work. They're taking minutes in the meetings they're leading. There is something inherently wrong with that. And so multitasking works.

What are you talking. Everybody can do it.

And I still have some project managers that are like, I'm good, I'd rather do it myself. But I'm proud to say I have 25 project coordinators now and they are absolutely impacting the project managers and the team's ability to focus on the architecture and not on the administration. And they're giving better client service because there's, you know, PMs are hard to find. Right. Client wants to get someone on the phone, they've got now a point of contact. Right. But we needed to create another role. When you have everybody in a role, well, they want to know what's next. So we just developed a senior project coordinator role and the senior project coordinator. The difference between the two is their viewpoint now is less projects and team and they're starting to look across the studio. And so we baked the practice community into their role because they're in projects. They have at that point, once they become a senior, even though they're not architects. And this was a big stumbling block in this role. We did not hire architects as coordinators. We hired smart administrative professionals. By the time they get to the senior role, they know enough about architecture, they're going to be able to gather the information that's needed for these wiki pages, work with the experts, do the interviews, create the drafts, and get that process going.

I mean, it might even be a benefit. They're not architects, Ellen, because they can. If it's the shop drawing page we talked about before, if they've never done one, then they can ask questions like a beginner would ask. Right. In terms of how we're doing it and why.

Exactly. Exactly.

That naivete is. Is a. Is actually a benefit when it comes to that kind of thing. Yeah. Going through that discovery that you talked about, I love how we're now keeping track. We're whatever number 50 minutes in, 45 minutes in, and we have talked about. I talk about knowledge management, being people, process technology, and culture all the time. And we've talked about technology for like 5% of it. Right. Like, we're right in the people, process, culture side, because this is really the lift when it comes to doing knowledge management. Totally well.