Christopher Parsons discusses how effective knowledge management and continuous onboarding are critical in AEC (architecture, engineering, construction) firms—particularly during mergers & acquisitions and growth. He argues that onboarding should be an ongoing process across an employee’s journey (to new roles, project types, or offices), enabled by deliberate learning systems and clear firm ‘ways’ of working.
Chapters
So let's go back to mergers and acquisition. You kind of called out some of the downsides and the risks of not kind of doing good knowledge management around an M and A well, but there's also all these missed opportunities too. So let's say that you don't do a good job of letting the kind of legacy folks know what the new people bring in terms of skills and expertise, right? And so you're working with a client, they need experiential graphic design and you go find a consulting firm to help with you instead of hiring that you already have in your company. And so just even the basics of socializing, who knows what, what are we doing here? Like, you know, integrating those kind of like capabilities honestly, like get down to it. Like if they have a separate project database from your project database and you kind of figure out what our past experience is and you can't reference their projects quickly and easily, like you're just missing opportunity to kind of showcase. I talk about knowledge management being about helping AEC firms make the best use of your knowledge. You're not making the best use of your knowledge if you don't integrate the firms well from like a knowledge perspective. Right on the M and A side, on the onboarding side. What's interesting to me about onboarding is we're building a learning management system into synthesis. It's in private beta right now with 14 firms. And one of the things that's come out so quickly in working with those companies in our new system that, you know, create courses and learning paths and assign them and a lot of this is around, but what's become very, very clear is like a lot of the high opportunities aren't necessarily just new hire onboarding. You need to, you are continuously onboarding people through their entire employee journey with you onboarding to being a project manager. You're onboarding them to doing healthcare architecture because they don't know all the terms and the jargons and the equipments. You're onboarding them to doing CA for the first time or doing a site visit for the first time. So it's this really intentional, we know you're going to go do a new thing. We want to teach you the CJP way, right? We want to help you learn, we want to get you experience, pair you up. Like there's this kind of very intentional, like knowledge and learning kind of development plan for people that's scalable, but it requires this goes back to the merger, merger thing. But then also it could be growth. Like you went from being a 50 person firm to being 120. You went from being a single office firm to having four offices. And like the process and the CJP way scatters and it's kind of whatever somebody did on the last project becomes the process. So in order to do that kind of continuous onboarding I'm talking about, there needs to be some time to work out, like, well, what is our way? Sometimes our way is we don't have a way you can pick, but at least you're being clear, you know? And so I think there's so much of that deep thinking about how we do the work we do, why we do it the way we do, that just firms are doing right now. And I think it's really heartening to see.
