How Emerging Professionals Make Project Data Collection Scalable and Sustainable at LS3P

Sure. We started with project data. So think about your typical things that come up in a marketing proposal. Construction size, construction costs, cost per square, put the components within a project, does it have a lead accreditation, anything that you would need to report on from a marketing standpoint? You know, what, what sector is it in? Which seems pretty, pretty easy, but sometimes that information was missing as well. Who is the client? How many projects have we done with that client? So really just anything and everything that you can think of in terms of project specifics, we wanted to make sure that we were collecting if we were going to use it. So, right. We had all of our friends in a room. We got. We really started to see some. Some interest in this, of, oh, this can make my life easier. I really like this. And then we tested it to see would this be successful. So instead of coming up with a concept and making it totally perfect before we rolled it out to the whole firm, we wanted to make sure that we tested it with a small group of folks. At that time, we also thought, oh, well, project managers, easy. They know all this information. They have tons of time. They'll be able just to throw this in the database. Yeah, that got some chuckle, But I will actually say for a couple years we operated that way where project managers were ultimately responsible. They put in the project data, and we did make progress. It was really slow progress, but we did make some. And we made enough to show what impact having data could have on all of the different areas of the firm. But then we knew we were growing and something needed to change. And that's when we came up with the idea of, let's utilize some of our less seasoned team members, our emerging professionals, we called them interns at the time, we now call them emerging professionals to help gather this data. So that's when we truly rolled out the data manager program. And this was in 2013, where we had these individuals collecting the project data alongside of the project manager. So the cool thing that we saw throughout this process too, is it became the kind of mentorship program as well, because they did have that access to the project manager. They were talking about things like cost per square foot. They were getting to know owner agreements and consultant agreements on a more detailed level than they had access to before. So that was a really cool outcome that we really didn't anticipate. When we first thought of tapping these individuals on the shoulder, we again started small. We started with just one of our sectors. We're in 13 different market sectors at LS3P. Everything but single family and we started with K12 and we, we went from there and we tested it. We ran reports before and after to show the impact of the data and we celebrated it. We celebrated what these individuals were doing. We tracked their time separately. It was not charged to the project. So we were able to see how much time is this really taking for individuals to have this type of impact on data collection. And then we provided a lot of training to them just to make sure that was kept in the forefront of their mind, the importance of doing this throughout the life of the project and then the conclusion of the project. And it really, I hate to say it this way because I know so many firms are struggling. It wasn't that hard. It really wasn't to launch and to get people's buy in on it.

The hard part was disassociated, like moving beyond the mental block that this has to be the project manager because they're closest to it and realizing somebody else could do it with help.

Exactly.

Can you talk about a day in the life of a data manager? So I'm an emerging professional. You've asked me to do this thing, like, do I do this check in once a week, do my checking in at project milestones, like when am I kind of working with my project manager to capture data?

Sure. It's mostly on project milestones. And it's important to note these individuals are aspiring architects or interior designers or planners. They're not going into data analysis and data science and all of that loveliness. They really are on the path to become licensed or designers within the firm. So this is just a project role on the project. So I think that's important to clarify, it's not an overhead position. You have your principal in charge, you have your project manager, you have your project architect, you have your data manager. They could be doing other things on the project. Hopefully they are doing other things on the project because we want them knowledgeable about the project and engaged in it. But what we found is it roughly takes our data managers 20 to 30 hours a year to collect all of the data on their projects. So normally that's anywhere from five to 10 projects per data manager. So the lift is really not that large. We do one really big push a year where we take a look at all projects that closed in the previous year and we do an analysis of them. How much project data are we missing that we didn't capture? And we tap the data managers on the shoulder to just review them. Review your projects, make sure we have all the data in them. So we can just fully close out those projects. And that time takes a little bit more time, but that's combined in that 20 to 30 hours a year time, so it's really not adding a lot to overhead.