This is an interview between Dan, Christopher Parsons, and Kerry about BWBR’s people-development approach. Dan describes a “draft and develop” hiring philosophy—bringing recent graduates into the firm and training them in-house rather than hiring seasoned staff—and ties that approach to BWBR’s Landmark Learning program. Kerry explains how a modern, formalized QA process (checkpoints, sign-offs, and tooling like VantagePoint) was developed to measure and enforce learning outcomes, support onboarding, track reviews, and provide accountability; Dan clarifies the firm has long had QA historically but the conversation focuses on the more formalized modern QA program.
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We have always been a firm where we do a lot of. In the NFL, they call it draft and develop, and we have found a lot of success in that.
And by that, I think what you're trying to say is you try and get people out of school and grow them at BWBR versus trying to poach a 20 year person from another firm.
Absolutely.
Okay.
Yeah, I think we've had a lot more success doing that. And 2022 and 2023 kind of demonstrated that to me very clearly. And in that sometimes we had to back up. And your reference earlier unlearn some bad habits from firms, people who had been at another firm.
So I've done project management this way at my old firm and they're like, cool, but yeah.
And pause. For the sake of the podcast. He's saying 22, 23. Because we onboarded a significant number of staff.
Yes, yes. Thank you for giving that context. So you ran that experiment that prove that you like draft and develop.
Yes.
Right.
Yeah. And I think I've mentioned that to Carrie. I think we're way better served to bring people out of school, teach them how to do the job the way that we would like to see it done, and clients serve the way we would like to see them taken care of and buildings built in a manner that we would like to see in the field.
Which is interesting because it goes back to landmark learning and why it's been so important to you. So if the philosophy of the company is draft and developed, well, man, getting those first five years right is really important.
Oh, yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.
And we are, from what I've seen, we're a pretty rigorous firm. Not that we're necessarily rigid, but we have a lot of process in place, and it's for the sake of not having to reinvent that every time. If you just know what's expected of you, you can just go and do it. And I think Dan sort of glossed over this, but I feel like part of the secret sauce of landmark learning is the robust QA process that he put in place to support that. And I just asked him the other day what came first, the landmark learning or the QA process. And he said landmark learning came first, but he needed a way to prove that it was working. So he was getting feedback from QA ca. Now we're doing PR requests, getting these grades, but he needed the QA process to have these defined checkpoints to say, we are absolutely doing a QA review at this point so we can see where the project is. Find these in issues earlier on and we make people sign off on these checkpoints to enforce that they're happening. And again, that feels like it was so successful because of the person that put it in place. Like you were able to get the accountability of folks to actually do this. And I think it's because you've done a lot of handholding for what I've seen you check in with people individually. You always have a story about why this is important. That's something I think about a lot. If somebody were to start their own program like this, it seems a bit daunting because even just mentioning so casually, yeah, we're tracking all of this stuff in vantage point. If somebody's not already doing that, the immediate pushback, I don't want to do all that data entry. Who's going to do that? We were lucky enough to have a person in place to configure the technology so it had the fields and the views that people wanted to see to make that as easy as it could be. And then you were able to get the CA team on board because CA team and QA team because they're the ones doing a lot of this data entry stuff. But I think you've been able to prove that there's value to the team because now people are scheduling the appropriate amount of time for a QA review. They're not getting backed up and backlogged and it helps to project staffing for the QA team, things like that. You've been able to very clearly draw the line to the value long term. Yeah.
And I do want to clarify for people watching though, we've had a QA process for a very long time.
It's a hundred year plus firm. I would certainly hope so.
But the modern, the modern formalized quality assurance program is what Kerry is discussing.
