INTRANET TOUR| Collecting High Quality Project Information + Stories @ TowerPinkster

My name is Susan Strom and I am the Chief Client Officer at Knowledge Architecture. With me today is Jill Overacker, who is Tower Kingster's Managing Manager of Marketing and communications. And you are in an intranet tour, which is a place where we share stories of how clients are using synthesis to help evolve and grow their AEC firms through knowledge management. I'm very excited to have Jill with us today because over the past few years she and the Tower Pinkster team have just totally transformed the quality and consistency of their project data, which as many of you know here is no small feat. Their efforts have made marketing at Tower Pinkster much more joyful, but their work has really had a bigger impact on the business. One of the offshoots of this project information work is, is that their knowledge management efforts have really gained momentum, which again is something I know this community is very interested in. So just a little bit of a roadmap. Jill is going to share the Tower of Pinkster story and we'll be collecting questions as she goes in the Q and A panel which is at the bottom of your screen. We'll have about 20 minutes at the end for questions. We'll dig into them. The webinar portion of all this will end at noon Pacific, three Eastern. And then if you'd like to continue hanging out with us after the webinar, we'd love to have you join us for a 45 minute hangout that will follow in Zoom breakout rooms. We'll share a link at the end of the webinar portion for the hangout and you can just follow the link and join us over there if that sounds good to you. That's it for my intro stuff. Jill, thank you so much for joining us and sharing what you've been up to with project data and synthesis. Pass it over to you.

Awesome. Thank you Susan. I appreciate that. Let me get my screen shared here and we'll get rolling. Coming through. Good, Susan.

Yeah, that looks great.

Perfect. So thank you to Knowledge Architecture and also to Open Asset for having me here today. I'm really excited to share what we've been up to at Tower Pinkster around project information. It's been an exciting couple of years to say the least, so we have a lot to cover. So I'm just going to jump kind of right into it. As Susan said, my name is Jill Overacker. I am the manager of Marketing Communications here at Tower Pinkster. Also on the call to to answer some chats or to jump in if needed is my colleague Lauren Sikoma. Lauren and I have really been on this journey together and so she's here to serve as my fact checker and I'm here to serve as the tour guide. So we are both here to answer questions and to kind of, kind of help explain our journey along the way. So this is our roadmap. As Susan kind of mentioned, we're going to start with a really quick get to know Tower Pinkster, just to kind of level set as to who we are and also like what has been going on in the organization for the last three years or so. We're going to then dive right into Dottie, which is our intranet, and also into Open Asset. So kind of get a sense of where we are today. We'll then journey back in time to 2021, talk about how we were storing project data, how we chose Open Asset and like some of the best practices that we've had for data collection data in that journey. We'll then go on to talk about our intranet, why we chose it, how we ended up with Dottie, this idea of this single source of truth, which you're going to hear me talk about a lot. And then we'll end with a tour of Dotti, our Internet system and we'll look at some more options from employee data and other highlights within the system. So we'll get going with a little bit about Tower Pinkster. So real basic overview. We are a multidisciplinary design firm, Architecture, MEP and structural engineering, interior design landscape. We also have a technology and security team through a lot of different disciplines, a lot of different things going on. We were founded in 1953, so just celebrating 71 years this year. And up until about 2021 we were, we only had, had had offices in Michigan, West Michigan specifically. So a very local firm. And we've received a number of awards for design excellence and culture. Those are things that are really important to us. So in 2021, just to kind of give you some stats of where we were, we had two offices in Michigan. One is our main office in Kalamazoo and then we have an office in Grand Rapids, Michigan as well. We were organized in five market sectors, which is kind of just a legacy organization of how we talked about our services. And we had about 140 team members. So that's kind of where we were sitting about three years ago today. 2024. Right now we now have five offices. We have three in Michigan, one in Indiana and an office in Kentucky. We organize ourselves into nine market sectors which is just to Try to showcase sort of this growth and this growth of expertise and this growth of how we want to talk about ourself and our services. And we're also at about 210 employees. So that's probably a story that a lot of you are going to feel connected to. We've had a lot of growth in the last three years. So what's happened in the middle between those? We did have a merger. So we merged at the end of 2021 with an organization that had a Southern Indiana office and a Kentucky office. We added another office in here in Michigan. We did a major switch from Azure to vantage point in 2022. And then we have about 114 members that have been with this organization since basically after the pandemic. Right. So we have a number of people, almost half the firm, who are relatively new to the organization and trying to figure out Tower Pinkster and what we're all about here. So that's kind of a little bit of background of what we have had going on for the last couple years. So we're going to dive right in. That was my little overview about Tower Pinkster. But we're going to get out of here and we're going to go straight to our project directory here in Dottie. So Dottie is our intranet system, our knowledge architecture intranet system. We named her Dottie for the pink dot in our logo. And as you can see here, when you come to our project directory, you can scroll through a ton of different projects. Right. It kind of just keeps going on for a long time. We have made the decision that when you come to our project directory, it already filters out any projects that don't have images in it. That's because we have, you know, if I unclick this box, we would probably have over 5,500 projects, I think. But we have a lot of small projects that aren't going to ever have any imagery in them. And we made the decision that most people are coming here because they want to see our expertise and they want to learn about the firm and they want to try to get a sense of some of those bigger projects that we've done. So we have lots of different ways that we can filter here within our directory. Client is a really great one. So we work in kalamazoo, work in K12 quite a bit. So Kalamazoo Public Schools, if I wanted to click that, I can now see all of the projects that we've done with Kalamazoo Public Schools. If I wanted to look at these projects In a location. I can click on the location map and see them without throughout the city. Right. They pop up. They're clickable here. You can go into the project profile and see further information. There's a number of other ways that we are filtering information. Basically any sort of information that we have about the project that's in Dottie, we can filter by it. So one of the ones that we do a lot is like completion date. So if we wanted to see, you know, all the projects that were completed in 2019, we could do that. We could see for any of the years here. We'll get rid of some of these guys. One of the ones that we do quite often is looking at some of our construction partners. So. So Oak is a local construction firm here. We work with them quite often. So if I wanted to see just the projects that we've worked with with Oak, I can do that. If I want to go even further and look at just projects that are with Byron Center Public Schools, that we've done with Oak, I can also do that. And then if I unclick this box here, I'm going to see all the projects. Right. This is what it looks like when we unclick that box. And we can now see all of the projects that we're currently working with. These are probably projects that aren't just aren't done yet. So we don't have any photography for them. But again, it kind of gives this sense of where we're working and what we're doing. And the joy here for us is that this is information that's no longer gate kept by the marketing team. Right. We used to be the only ones who would kind of know a lot of this information and people would have to come to us to kind of learn. So we love that. It's just kind of open to the entire staff. Everyone can look at it. This is a very popular page with our new hires. They come here a lot to learn about the firm, our expertise, what we're doing. So we hear that a lot, quite a bit. So let's get out of here. We're going to look at a specific project. So if I start searching Dunbar. This is Dunbar Hall. Dunbar is a project that we recently completed with Western Michigan University. And when we go into the project page, we can now see more information about that project. So the information that's here that we're seeing is getting pulled in from multiple different sources, some from Open Asset, some from Deltech. So it's coming from lots of different places. None of this is actually stored in Dottie. It is getting pulled in from other locations. So we have the project name, we have the client, we have the Deltec number that is associated with it. We have some images of our project that you can see here. People can click through them. You know, previously when we would get project photography, this information probably wasn't shared with the entire firm. It might be shared with the project team. But now anyone can kind of come and look at it and learn more about the project. One of my favorite things I think about this is anytime you were to tag this project in a post, it's going to show up here on the project page. So if we click the show all button, we can actually go back and look at. And now Dottie's only been around for just over a year, so we're excited to see this happen with projects that we have won since then. But we can go back and see, like the life cycle basically of this project. Right. We can see original renderings that came out. We had an architect that did a walkthrough through the construction site and posted about it, did some video and photos. So we have that here as well. With the grand opening, we did a post about that. And this is all just internal, right? These are just internal things that we're sharing with our staff. We have the photo shoot and then we have those final professional photography that came through that got shared with everybody. So that's really fun to be able to kind of see all of it and to. It's just more of that project history, that project data that before was kind of living in emails. Probably half of it wasn't even coming to the marketing department. But it's all right here now. So if we scroll down, we can see some basic information about the project. This is all pulling in from open asset. We have a description, we have a location for the project, and then we have some of our partners who we worked with on that project. And then another, really, I think key part of this is showing the team members. So, you know, as we scroll down the side here, we can see every person who was a part of this project and who worked on it. And if you hover over them, and we'll go through this part later in the webinar, but you can actually click on, you know, the different people. We could go in, we could learn more about Cassie here, understand other projects that she's worked on, how long she's been with the firm and what her credentials are. So there's a lot of great information about a project that previously, you know, some of it, a lot of it would live in a project sheet and you know, just wasn't shared openly. So we love that people can now see this information, it's now visible to them and that visibility is really helping us generally making sure that data is correct because people can see it and they can tell us if it's, if it's not right. So if we scroll all the way down here, we will see that we have links to either you can go find it in Deltec or you could go find it in Open Asset. So if I click on the Open Asset one, this is going to take me to that same project in Open Asset. And this whereas Dottie's open to everyone within the firm. Open Asset is really a marketing solution tool. So we have it. So the marketing team has access, the business development team has access. Some like a very, you know, few number of our design team have access. And our hope is to expand that access as we go forward. But for right now, this is more contained of who can actually see it here. So you'll see the same things, right? We have that Deltec number at the top, we have the project name, we have that same description that we just saw. But as we scroll down here, you're going to see some different information. This Azira name is the name of the project. When we pursued it, that's what was put into Deltec. And I'm sure we've all had that moment where we're like, this project name doesn't make any sense. So when we pull this project or like a proposal for a project sheet, we gave it a different name so that we weren't always having to change this WMU 2019 part. We could just say Dunbar hall renovation. So that's something that we did for that. And then we have an alternative description. So this gives us information about the project that maybe doesn't need to be in that full, that project description. But if we ever go after technology and we need to know we just want to have it, we can store it here, right? This is a database, it's made for this. So we're storing information about the technology design that we provided. What, what really is in that building from a technology standpoint, some really in depth mechanical information, which is fun security features. So we can kind of just store, we can gather and store this information here, never really knowing, you know, when we're going to need it or use it, but just adding it to that full or project story and having it there available to us as we scroll down, we have additional information about, you know, we have our reference. There is, there was additional project. I mean we have more project information for this project. There's some stuff that I just for the sake of, you know, just confidentiality I had to take out. But we do have more information for all of our projects about as well as we scroll down, we have keywords that are associated with this project. This helps us filter the full project. In open Asset, you can filter by full projects or just by single assets, which we'll take a look at here in a second. But so we've tagged this with things that are relevant for how we look for projects that. So it lives within our higher education market. So that's an obvious tag. It is currently seeking LEED gold. So we have tagged it in sustainability as seeking lead. We've also given it project types. So you know, under higher ed there's lots of different categories. It could be student housing, it could be athletics, but we've tagged it as academic and campus life. So that when we're looking for these types of projects for a future pursuit, we can easily find it. We scroll down, we see the location, we see the employees, you know, some of that same information that we saw before. And then the other difference here is in Dottie we had five of the nice images, right? We had those main marketing images that people could look at. Here in Open Asset, you'll notice we have 122 files that are dedicated to this project. And if we click this we'll see that it's not just those really nice marketing professional photos, but now we have some in house photography, we have some construction photos in here, we have renderings in here, we have stuff from the grand opening. So again it's trying to manage those pieces that marketing doesn't always need. But on occasion we get asked about and instead of having to dig through different folders and random files, we can now come here and we can find everything that we need, which is amazing. And then if we scroll back to the top, sorry, it's my scrolling. We can actually search through these, through these assets because we have tagged them individually. So if we wanted just to see exterior, we can do that. If we want to see things that are with people, we can do that. So there's lots of different ways to filter, right? And there's a endless amount of tags that you can do and they make it really easy. So we really enjoy that. If I were to remove Dunbar, so let's say we're we want to get out of Dunbar. We don't want that anymore. We can filter through now. Instead of 122 assets, we now have almost 36,000 assets. But we can filter through anything that we've decided is something that we want to look for. So green roofs are definitely like a sustainability feature that we want to feature a lot and we want to make sure that we tag them. So again, removing that need to have a memory of like, oh yeah, there was a green roof on this project. I remember it now. We can tag it as a project or as an asset that has a green roof in the photo or as part of the project so that we can find it in the later date. Right. We don't have to have this amazing memory anymore. We can just find things and there's. I could do examples all day, but astroturf is another one. We do a lot of turf fields in our K12 work. So we can tag these and we can find them for future pursuits, which is always really nice. So that's how we filter through different assets. I'll show real quick just how we can filter through projects. So this is a. This is how you. The tags that we kind of talked about, those higher ed tags, those academic tags, this is how you filter through those. And if we just reset these here, you'll see we have, Yep, just over 5,500 projects here in Open Asset. And then we can see all of the different options that we have, right? So we have our market sectors, we have clients, we can filter by all of these different things. So as an example, if I want it to look at K12 and let's say I just want to see middle schools, right, we can do that. If I want to get rid of all of these ones that don't have any photos, I can just say I want things that have one or more files. And now you can start to see here's examples of our middle school work. And you can keep going down, right? We can look at just ones that are in Michigan or in Indiana. You know, there's lots of different ways. And we can add filters on here. You know, we can add them by. I just want to see projects that are by one project manager, right? So I could filter that as a field here because project manager is a. Is a role that we assign each project. And I, again, we can do this all day because it's, it's really fun to be able to do this, but, you know, lead that. Our sustainability features, that's a big one for us. So making sure we're tagging everything that's lead gold or lead silver, and just having an easy way to find this, because previously, you know, I think it was a Google Excel sheet that we had to go and look at and remind ourselves, okay, these are the projects that are lead, and this is what status they are. And now we just kind of have it as part of our system. So it is, it is pretty nice. So that's open asset. I'm going to go back to our presentation and we are going to talk about, as promised, we're going to go back in time. So we're going to go back in time. This is what we just saw is where we are now. Let's talk about 2021 and what we were doing. So in 2021, we were. We basically had giant InDesign files, and this is a screenshot of one of those InDesign files. So our project data, we had one InDesign file for every market, five markets at the time. And each InDesign file basically had all of our projects in it, right? So we would get a new project, get new photography, build a new page in InDesign. That's where the data would be stored. And then when a project or a pursuit came in, you would just go in, you'd pick the ones that were relevant and you'd move it over. So this is what a typical project sheet would look like. These are the different pieces of information that we would gather. And it really became an element of, like, this is what we could manage, right? This is what we could find easily based on what was available to us. Project descriptions came from a lot of different places. Talking to design team, maybe a news source, maybe something from the client. But this is what we would kind of put together. And same thing for employees. Every employee had an InDesign document. If there's a pursuit that came in that we wanted to use them on, we would check Azure at the time, see if there was any new project that they were working on manually, add them here, and then take what was relevant to the pursuit, delete everything else and kind of move it over. So, and again, these are the kind of the data points that we are collecting for these. And, you know, the interesting thing is just like there are thousands of data points that we are trying to collect and we're trying to store them in InDesign, which is not a database, which is not built for this. So we were, we were struggling to stay accurate and we were struggling to. If changes were made in like, you know, round one, around two of revisions for RFP making them in those master documents so that they would stay changed. So it was just becoming too much for us to kind of do well and do efficiently. So how do we get here? How did we go from that, you know, doing InDesign to really having a system that we can filter and search and store information and feel really good about it. So for us, you know, in 2021, we were staring down a merger. We knew that that was coming and we were about to get an influx of about 30 years of project data from this new firm. So in addition to the firm, the information that we had, we're going to have to filter and organize all this new information and we were going to have to be able to regurgitate it back out in pursuits in a way that was relevant. So it really for us was a moment where like, okay, we need a solution to this and we need a digital asset management system. So that's kind of where we were at and key drivers for this, for choosing open asset. And this is a thing that I, I'll say again because it's kind of our, it's really our overarching driver. And our theme is that we wanted a single source of truth, right? This idea that information in Deltec or an InDesign or you know, somewhere else, like information could be different in different places. That is not what we wanted. We wanted something that could be. This is where the information lives. If it's here, it's correct and if it's not there, then we need to find it kind of thing. We need it to be flexible because I don't want a solution that's going to work for our firm today, but not grow with it and not be able to change based on future needs. So it needed. We were going to do all this work of uploading all of our data. We need something that's going to grow with us industry specific. I'm not usually an industry specific kind of person, but for, you know, there's two reasons here. One is knowing that if it is industry specific, it's going to organize our information and have integrations that are relevant for us. And then two, just from like an internal standpoint, it was easier us easier for us to sell this if we could show how other firms were using it and being successful and being more efficient with their time. And then we needed it to be accessible but managed. Which is really a piece to say, you know, we wanted to open the, the gates of this data that marketing had kind of kept closed. We wanted more people to have Access to it. We didn't want to be the gatekeepers of it anymore. But at that same time, there are things that we know about different renderings or photos or whatever it might be that we need to be able to say, you can't use this one, this one can't be shared externally. You need to check with a photographer before you do this. So we needed to have some control over it, but not total lockdown, right? So we wanted a nice middle ground. And for us, open asset made sense, right? It is this database that connects to vantage point. So for us, that was great. We knew we were going to vantage point. If we can make vantage point, that single source of truth, that oracle of data, then that's great. That's what we want to do. As you saw, there's filters and there's tags. Like, it's almost endless. And it makes searching really easy. You know, it's designed for this industry. We can lock down certain things. We can also indicate whether this is the most recent or this is good. We can also just hide stuff from other people too. And then there's lots of other things that, you know, we do a whole webinar about it. But templates, there's integrations with InDesign and PowerPoint, there's all this employee data side, and we can easily share files with partners or, you know, with graphic designers or whatever it might be. So lots of great things that it can do. So we're sitting here, we've now, in this journey, we've now we have open asset. We've decided, yep, this is the thing that we're doing. We've gone through the work of implementing it, getting all of our data out of InDesign documents and putting it up into this system. And it really let us have a moment to stop and say, we can now collect different data. Like, what is it that we really want to collect and what is it that we really want to do and spend our time doing? So this is what we decided as a team. We kind of sat down and decided, what is it that we want to collect? What is the information that we feel like we really need in pursuits? What do we get asked about? And maybe it's not. It's not going to be every project but those big ones. We need to know more things. So this is the list that we kind of put together, and this is the list that we have been using as we talk to all of these different groups internally. Like, this is the information that we need. We get asked this. And currently, when we get Asked it. We're spending, you know, hours searching through 5 year old project files trying to find the information. Like we need your help as the project is moving along to help us find this. And so for us we kind of looked at, okay, who are the groups in the firm that have information and where are they currently putting it? So there's a number of different groups and I'm sure a lot of firms look very similar. You know, marketing, we have, we now have open asset. We're so excited and we're storing stuff in there, but not many other people know about it. We have the marketing drive where we're putting things and like honestly there's some information that's just like on the website, right, that probably isn't getting correctly shared with the rest of the firm. The design team, they have their drives, they have a design narrative. There's probably just like information in their brain that needs to come out. Accounting, they're great, they put everything in Deltec so they're good. But you know, just figuring out what they're doing and how we access. We have our market leaders who are helping with that front end strategy of pursuits. They're really our thought leaders so they have a say in what this data looks like. The project teams, they are going to know a lot of the nitty gritty stuff, the challenges of the project, some of the cool features of it. A lot of it probably lives in email, project folders. It's just in their brain. And then our project managers and our PAAs, they're really kind of our workhorses of data, right? They're the ones who know a lot of these nitty gritty pieces that we need and that it's really, those are the things that are really hard to find. So we kind of looked at all of this and we looked at the systems that we had in place and we really decided, you know, Deltec is kind of the answer. It is the spot that you know, we're going to get to, we're going to get to synthesis here in a second. But it's the spot that's going to feed information to these existing systems, right? It's going to feed information to open Asset, it can feed information into Dotti, our intranet. So that's really where we need to be putting information, right? It makes the most sense. So how do we actually, how do we actually do it? Right? So we really, we know that this data is known and we know that it's being put somewhere. We just got to figure out where it's being put, who knows it and then make sure it's getting into Deltec as like this thing that we've decided. So starting with our design team. Design team really doesn't put anything into Deltec, but they have a lot of those front end pieces, some of those visual pieces, the renderings and the sketches and the floor plans that we need. So it sounds kind of basic, but we just email them every month and say, hey, we are looking for your most recent items. Do you have any. Even if it's like community engagement photos, you do something cool with the client and you have something visual to show with it, please send it to us. We want to put it into open asset so that we can have it. And we've done training with them and we have done so we've gone to their design share meetings. We've talked about open asset and what it's doing. We've talked about, we've. We have them doing some trial access about how they can use it to help them do their work better. And then the fun thing that they have kind of realized since now too is that once they send us things and we put them in open asset, if it's like a nice rendering, it's going to show up on Dottie and the rest of the firm's going to get to see it. And I think it's a nice way to kind of break down that barrier and celebrate that work. And it's getting people to send us more things because they know it's going to show up the next day on Dottie as a post. Our accounting team, like I said, they're already doing the work and they're doing it appropriately. So that's great. But for us, it was just figuring out within Deltec, where is that information stored, do we have access to it and how do we do that? So it was just sitting down with them and also getting a sense of what can we have access to, what can we have access to and making sure that we don't need to. We know where they're putting things so that we don't have to bug them in the future. So that was just a learning, a Deltec learning moment for us, knowing that that information already exists. We just need to know where to go find it easily. Our market leaders, again, their involvement in a project kind of varies depending on like in the life cycle of a project. But they're very involved up front and we do have regular meetings with them to discuss pursuits and marketing efforts. And one of the things that we do is we will Pull up, you know, like Open Asset and we'll look at some of the major projects that they have in their market and just say okay, what do you know about this project? What have you heard? A lot of them are also the principals on that project so they'll have some sense of what's going on and they've been helpful in that sense. So project managers and our project administrative assistants, specifically our project administrative assistants have been, you know, the, the lifesaver in all of this. They have been the ones that we have brought that list of data to them. And our, so our vice president of project management and the woman who runs our PAA group, we have brought that list of data to them and said this is the information that we need to have in order to do our job better. And they've looked at it and they've said yes, we can do this but you need to help us make it easy. Which for us means making sure there's the correct fields in Deltec which we have the ability and access to do, making sure it's clear and then doing trainings with them. So we are currently doing trainings with this group of here's the information that we've all agreed on. We have buy in from this group that this is important and we want this and this is where it needs to go and this is how you do it. So you should feel like you have the ability to do it. So we're really kind of relying on our PAS to help push some of that forward. We also have reoccurring meetings with our PMs to talk about. We have client satisfaction surveys so we just tagged this on as like a second item too of like, like I said in open Asset you can actually filter by pm. So we can filter by their projects and just ask them questions about data and try to fill it in for them. But really we are trying and doing active trainings and I'm guessing it's, it's going to take while. Right. Change is hard and how they utilize Deltech, it's going to be hard to change that. But we are making a very active approach to do that. So we meet with them regularly, we talk about the importance of it, we show them the value of it and then making it really easy and simple and straightforward I think are kind of the big ones. So choosing synthesis, I think it's the same idea here as what we talked about before. You know we had some key drivers we were you know, looking at, you know, open asset was kind of getting done and do moving Forward, we're now looking at, you know, we've now merged, we have all these new staff. How do we communicate with them? How do we make sure we're all learning the same information? How do we all have access to the same stuff and have that same messaging for everyone across the board? Right. We're not getting different messages. So this idea of a, of a new Internet came about. I was tasked with kind of looking at them and trying to figure out what makes sense for us. So for me, key drivers and for our firm, again, this idea of a single source of truth. We want, we don't want something different on the Internet that's going to be different than what's on our Google Drive. We have Google or might be interested. Different than what's on Deltec or an open asset. Like we want a single source of truth. We want to give access to project and employee data that has always been kind of gatekept by marketing for project data and HR for employee data. Not necessarily because we wanted to gatekeep it. That's just the nature of it. We wanted it to be a learning spot. Right. We have a bunch of new staff as we shared. You know, we have over 100 new staff who've been here less than four years, but we also have staff who've been here for over 30 years. So. And you know, who are looking at retiring in the next 10. So how do we grab that information that's in their brains? How do we put down on paper? This is how Tower Pinkster does projects. This is what's important to us. This is our standards and what we do. And how do we make this a learning resource then? We want to drive connection between our employees and our offices. How does our New Albany, Indiana office know what's going on here in Grand Rapids versus Grand Haven? How do we share and celebrate the successes of one another and drive a culture that really celebrates knowledge and information and access to information and asking questions. And that's really what we wanted it to do. So for us, again, you know, this one synthesis connects to Deltec vantage point and open Asset. So for us, we had put a lot of work into these two systems. So the fact that they connected was amazing. You know, there's this implementation process that really focuses on knowledge management and thinks about intranets in a really broader way than what I think a lot of other. You know, a lot of people think of them as just places to store files or like a directly a communications tool. There's good balance here of those. And then employee directory that's probably our most visited page by far. You know, with over 200 employees, we have a lot of people to look at and we can. Staff can post, they can ask questions, they can engage, they can comment. Um, so lots of really great things about it. Oh my gosh, I'm running out of time. But we're going to keep going. So let's jump into Dottie real quick. This is our Internet system. This is Dottie. This is our homepage. So just talking about, just wanted to show like this is what the homepage looks like. We have this really. It's kind of set into two different things. We have this scrolling dashboard of information where people can post and share and like and comment on different things that are going on in the organization. We have this firm. I will give so much credit because it has been embraced and there's just a desire to share and connect within this organization that, that I think Dottie is really just helping activate, which is awesome to see. Over here we have quick links to some of our key points for the employee directory, the project directory, which we already looked at. We've pinned key messages on the side here so people can find them in case they didn't come to Dottie for a day and they've missed it. Upcoming birthdays and anniversaries and then our hashtags that are trending and you'll see if we click new images. These are all of the things, these are all of the images, renderings and photography that we've put into open asset that we've told the system, yes, please share this to Dottie. And again, this is stuff that would not have gotten shared before and would only have been known by probably the project team and maybe marketing. So very cool that we're able to do this now. And if we look at kind of our homepage, we have our committees, which is a really important part of what we do and who we are here at Tower Pinkster. If you click into one, you can see who is on the committee, right? So before this information was, you kind of had to ask about it honestly. And you wouldn't really know who was in charge and you wouldn't really know who the members were because it just wasn't written down anywhere. But now you can see the mission, who's on the committee, what they're doing, what they have coming up, and some of the stuff that they do. So there's a lot of great information here. We post all of our. All staff meetings here. So if you happen to miss an all staff you can come back and you can watch it. And if you are a new hire and you want to go back and watch one of the all staffs from last year, just to kind of see you can absolutely do that. So we want to. Again, it's this breaking down, this access to information that I think is so important. Our HR and counting, that's all the stuff you would expect it to be, right? It's how much PTO do I have, how do I earn pto? I need to ask for time off. What does that look like? What are our benefits? What are the different offices and how do I get there? That kind of information, which is great practice and standards. This is really where the meat of the learning and that content lives. All of our disciplines have a page here where they add. Where they've added content. People come here to learn. People come here to see what our process is and what our standards are. If we go into like architecture really quick, we can see that they have different codes and sheets and how do you do stuff and what does the Tower Pinkster way, you also get a sense of who's on the team, who's in leadership. Again, just kind of breaking down that access to information. Our technology page is our IT team. So how do I, how do I do? How do I check out a room? What do I need to do if I need a new mouse? All those kinds of things. That's the information that's here. Marketing and business development is obviously the best page. We do say so ourselves. This is where you can come to learn about the firm. You can also find templates here. How do you use our brand? How do I. Can I get the logo? You can get the logo here. You can also learn about our markets, which is really fun. And this is a great example of how we've used the project directory to pull in key projects. So each of our markets is broken down by who leads it, a little bit about it, what are the sub markets within that market? And then what are some of those key projects that you might be interested in knowing about? Right. What are some of our big projects? And then we have a running. Anytime the hashtag community and civic is used, it shows up here. So you can see project wins, you can see ribbon cuttings, you can see all sorts of interesting things that are happening within that market and see some movement and excitement. And then Tower Pinkster U is our educational hub. That's where, you know, people are coming to learn about how do I grow in my career, what do I need to learn? How Do I do that? And finding resources to make that happen. So that's a really quick overview of Dottie does a lot more. We're going to head back over here really quick and just talk about key takeaways. And I, I felt really cheesy when I was putting these together. I'm not gonna lie because some of them are pretty basic, but I do believe them strongly. What have we learned? What we've learned is that change is hard to get by in early and to get it often. You know, I think especially with the implementation of Dottie and finding project details and getting people to change the way. I mean, we've had to. We've had a lot of meetings, we've had a lot of hand holding. We've had a lot of explanation. And it's. And it's constant too. Right. We have to meet on a regular basis in order to keep it top of mind. And I'll even mention it in the hallway to people like, you know, it's. It's something that we are always talking about. Keep moving. You know, we've. This has not been a. A fast process. We started this again in 2021. And we still have things that we want to do. We still have ideas for how we improve this and make this better. But these little steps do become big improvements over time. Doing this presentation was kind of. It was exciting for us to see how far we've come. And it was also like a good reminder of like, hey, you've come a long way, but, you know, it is small. Things do become big over time and then have a roadmap. I think understanding what you want, like, ultimately will help you make decisions along the way. And again, having that driving force of like a single source of truth really helped us focus and hone in on these are the systems that we need in order to make that true. And I think it. I think it turned out. It's turning out really well for us. So we're super excited about it. That's what I have. So we can turn it over to questions now, if there are any.

Yeah. Thank you so much, Jill. That was incredible. And a lot of questions have come through and been answered while we've been talking, which is great. I'd like to invite anyone who has a question to go ahead and add it to the Q and A. Once you see questions there, you can also upvote them so you can, like, direct our energy. I did pull out a couple questions that had been. You kind of happened in the chat that I think might Be worth discussing a little more. So I'll start with one just from Alicia. How or, sorry, do you have a dedicated knowledge management employee? Or how are all these sites built and maintained? And I think you could expand that a little beyond this to, like, how is all this information built and maintained? Like, who's the team behind all of it?

Yeah, so there's not like a dedicated person. I would say every. Every page, every section and community within the intranet has a knowledge owner. So the HR page has knowledge owners from HR and accounting. All of our discipline pages have owners, so they are responsible for the content on their pages. Just like marketing, BD is responsible for the content on our page. Everyone within the intranet and within those pages is responsible for that content. We are in the process of hiring a database specialist, which we're super excited about. And part of their job will be maintaining some of the data within Deltec. But really the data that's within projects is really the marketing and business development team. That is our job. So Lauren has done most of that and is responsible for a lot of it, but it is the job of all of us. So anytime we see something that comes through, we all know that we need to go back to the source and put it there and make that change. So it's something that the team owns for sure.

Thanks. Staying with the project data stuff, there were a couple questions about how the monthly emails work, like who they're going to and when they get sent, and if I could like, kind of read between the lines on the questions. I think what I was hearing was like, is this just going to all design team members, like, everybody, or is it going to project teams, like at certain milestones? Yeah.

So we send a blanket email basically to our design team, which for us includes our landscape architects, our interior designers, and our design architects. So they have a group that, you know, we kind of organize them as the design team, as a broader group. So we send them that email and then they're the ones who also do the design share meetings, which is a regular standing meeting that we attend and have presented at before. So we go from just a. You never know what you're going to hear and you want to kind of grab information, but that is the group that we send it to. And I would say, you know, there's probably the usual suspects who are going to send us renderings and doing that work, but we want to make sure we're getting everybody just in case there is a project that maybe, you know, if we just to send it to the design architects, we might not be getting a landscape project that doesn't have any architecture in it. Right. So we want to make sure we're kind of just making everyone have that opportunity to send us information. Yeah.

Thank you. There's a question, a couple of questions about Dottie. One was, can anyone post to the homepage, or is this for marketing to share info? Maybe you could just speak to your perspective on who gets. Yeah, supposed to share who gets to share.

So everybody gets to share when we have a new hire come in. So when we launched adi, we did some training, a lot of training sessions about what you might post and what you might not post. And it's certainly something. As we were doing the implementation process that we talked about, how do we, you know, there was concern, like, how do you make sure we're doing appropriate things right? Like, people are posting what they're supposed to post. But we did a lot of training at the beginning to talk about what makes sense to put here and what doesn't make sense to put here. And then I also meet with every new hire. So every time we hire someone, I do a little Dottie 101. We talk about what you might post, what makes sense here, and then talk about how they can interact and use the system. So I do a training session with them, but anyone can post to it.

Yeah.

Great.

Sting with Dottie. There's a question from Tommy. Which section of Dottie gets most or the most team member engagement?

Yeah. So pretty easily, I would say it's our employee directory and probably the project directory. So employee directory is huge for us. We didn't have a directory before, and honestly, people would go to our website to kind of look and see who was, you know, on the team or how I might connect with them. So the. The employee directory is huge because we can filter by. You can filter by team, you can filter by location, you can filter by where they went to school. You know, there's so many options of data that we have within our employees and what it kind of looks like. So I would say the employee directory is probably the most popular. And then practice and standards is kind of maybe third.

Yeah, I say that's. I frequently see that the employee directory is one of the most popular things people like. People.

Yep.

Let's see. From Carrie. Can you please expand on the design share meeting? Like purpose, format, cadence?

Yeah. So I think our design share meetings, you know, they're really set up by our VP of design, and they were really, I think, there as a way for the entire design team to have a moment and engage and really I think the effort is to move our design forward and really kind of showcase anything cool or interesting that the group is doing that maybe other people don't know. So in a way it's kind of. It was like a mini Internet before, right? Like how do we share what we're doing within this group, this big group so that other people can feel inspired or think, oh, that's interesting or cool. So it's really, they come and they share best practices and then for us we kind of like self invited ourselves because we're like, we want to hear too like what you guys are talking about because this is really relevant for us. As far as like again, project data. This is information that is being openly shared. But like they just don't think about sharing it with marketing. But like we want this information and it often inspires us to think about thought leadership, blogs, awards, you know, cool things that they're just not thinking about because they're just doing the work and it's our job to kind of think about. So it often inspires us to do other things with that information.

Thank you. There's a question in the, in the chat that's. I see Lauren typing, but I'm going to elevate it. How do you find common language? So the example is public, civic, municipal government, they're all very similar, but if you're using all of them then searchability becomes difficult. So how did you approach kind of like getting to agreement on the link, the common language that Tower Pinkster was going to use?

Yeah, so I mean for us, I think we, because of the way we went from five markets to nine markets, that's a relatively recent thing that we did. So we had always referred to it as government projects or commercial projects, but community and civic is kind of a combo of the two and it did take some wordsmithing to kind of get there. But luckily for us we also just have these like, you know, when you're in synthesis, if you're trying to do like a hashtag, I, I'm assuming it's kind of where this question's coming from. Like how do we make sure everything's tagged correctly? It'll give you kind of a do you want to use this hashtag? Kind of a suggestion which helps us kind of keep it in line. And we can also go on the back end and kind of combine. So if someone does hashtag something incorrectly, we can go into the backend, look at the hashtags and just combine them. And change them as a way to make sure searchability stays relevant. But that is something we think about often.

Yeah, I know it's an ongoing challenge with like the project type field and vantage point and just getting everyone comfortable with the same list.

Yeah. And that's kind of like if we're looking at it from an open asset standpoint, we have set what those names are and no one can change them. Right. So that's one of the things that. Accessible but manageable. Like we only want you to be able to choose, choose the filters that we've designated as the filters or the tags. You can't make up your own. So that's nice because, you know, again, that's a, that's a problem as well.

So, yeah, we have time for a couple more questions and then we'll switch to the hangout. So you still have questions and you haven't had them answered. You can follow us over there.

See?

Did I just lose it? There's a question about the Design Shared group and maybe it's just a clarification. The question is kind of, is that a community of practice? How many people are in it, or is it just like something that's kind of continuously happening, open to everybody, amorphous about who attends which month and etc.

So there's. There's a few versions, I think. So there's a big one. We haven't really pulled the Design Share into the digital site yet. We would love to. It's very in person right now and there's a couple. There's one for the broader team. I know Interiors has their own kind of separate Design share. Landscape will do the same thing. So they'll do it based on discipline. But the way that we're organized as an organization is just that Architecture, Landscape and Interiors are part of the design group and they will meet, I think they meet every other month as a full group. Got it. Lovely.

Thank you, Jill. And thank you so much, Lauren, for answering so many questions in the chat. So we're able to get to, I think everybody's, which is awesome.

Love it.

All right, we're gonna wrap up the webinar portion of this, the recording from today's session. I know the question came through. It will be shared, it'll be on our website and also we'll go out via email next week. We have some upcoming events, more events coming up and Chris will drop a link to that in the chat or you can find them on our website. And as I mentioned, if you'd like to continue the conversation, we are going to open up and hangouts momentarily. So the hangout is a chance to just talk. If we have enough people, we'll go into smaller breakout rooms. If it's a smaller group, we'll just hang out with Jill and Lauren. If you've already RSVP for that hangout, just find the link and open it. If you haven't rsvp, Chris is putting a link in the chat now. It's already there. Just follow that link, but put in your name and email and whatnot. You'll get a confirmation and then you can join us in that hangout. I look forward to seeing anyone who wants to join us in the hangout, or if not there, at our next webinar at K Connect in a couple weeks, wherever we find each other. Jill and Lauren, thank you again for sharing your work. And thank you to everyone who joined. Thank you for sharing.