INTRANET TOUR | Connecting Quality + Knowledge Management @ DPS

My name is Susan Strom and I'm the Chief Client Officer here at Knowledge Architecture. And with me today are two members of DPS's team, Tim Beltkamp, Director of Quality Management, and Gregor Wells, Director of Information Technology. Thank you both for joining us. And you are in a K Connect Deep Dive, where we share stories of how clients are using synthesis to help evolve and grow their AEC firms through knowledge management. Today we're spotlighting DPS and their investment in quality management. You'll learn both about why they're focusing on quality and see how they're facilitating knowledge sharing about quality through their intranet. Up to. If you have questions for Tim or Gregor as we go, please add them to the Q and A feature at the bottom of your Zoom toolbar. We'll try to get to as many as possible before we wrap up at 12 Pacific. With that, Tim and Gregor, thank you so much for joining us and sharing what you've been up to with synthesis.

Excellent. Thank you, Susan. I think I'm up first. First, I wanted to just say thank you to Susan and Chris and KA and actually everybody in the greater KA community. We've just gotten so much value from all of you throughout our whole journey with Synthesis five and six. And as you're probably about to see, we've borrowed some of the elements on our intranet from all of you as well. And so it may look a little bit familiar. We hope that this presentation, we can give some ideas back to you all and share in that way. So I'm just going to request control. I wanted to start out by talking a little bit about our path with synthesis. I know that we all sort of have our unique way that we got here, but I wanted to share our origin story just for a minute because I do think it's relevant to what we're talking about, how the general theme of interconnectedness, of quality and knowledge sharing. So it was about five years ago that one of our principals here at dps, Chuck Hanson, who some of you may have met. Let's see, this is his profile page. Chuck was a principal in our structural Engineering department, and I think he's here now. Hi, Chuck. Chuck started thinking about his pending retirement. And in true engineering fashion, he's just like, how am I going to relay all of this captured information in my head out to the entire firm? Because he recognized what a shame it would be if he walked out the door and took all of that knowledge with him. So he kind of took it upon himself to start scouring around and Finding a suitable mechanism that would help him share this, share this knowledge. And we had an intranet at the time. In fact, we've had a series of intranets over the years. They've all been kind of mediocre. I've built most of them. They were okay, but nothing like the synthesis platform. So Chuck read about Synthesis and ka, I think, in ENR magazine, checked it out. We started talking to Chris, and next thing you know, he had recruited me to help stand up our first intranet, which we did. And it did exactly what we wanted to do. It established a culture of knowledge sharing here at dps. And obviously we had been doing some knowledge sharing before. We never knew that that was the term. So this was also sort of our introduction to kind of formalized knowledge sharing. And it became part of our culture. It really did. And part of the language we branded our intranet up to. As you see, it doesn't really mean anything. Susan told us we should have a catchy name. She said this is how it becomes part of the conversation. And it really has. It's part of the conversation and just part of DPS's culture. So fast forward to 2023 and the introduction of synthesis six. And Chuck was really close to retirement at this time, so we needed some help in making that migration. And we recruited Tim Feltkamp, who is on the call. He's our Director of Quality management. And Tim really led the migration effort. He took it by the horns and kind of made it happen. And as he was doing so, he started to explore this idea of kind of building a lot of the content around a new effort that he was spearheading, which was this quality management system at dps. It's really become a very cool way that we can introduce both new and old staff to how DPS approaches our projects, how DPS approaches our practice, and how quality really needs to be centralized to all of those efforts. So with that said, I think I'm going to hand it over to Tim and let him kind of demonstrate this thing to you all. Tim, the floor is yours.

Okay. Thank you, Gregor. Appreciate the intro and the background. It's always great to hear that story. I always love to hear it over and over again. My name is Tim Belkamp. Again, such a pleasure and honor to be here today just to share some of our story and how we've gone through and developed our intranet through synthesis. I will say I came into the role of Director of Quality Management fairly recently. I've only been in this role maybe for a couple of years at the firm. I am a registered architect and so, you know, I was running projects prior to that for many years. But again, quality management is something that, you know, tends to always be kind of on the forefront. And I would say that, I would guess that a lot of people, even on this call, feel like they're in the same, the same condition as far as, you know, a lot of things were happening over the past few years at dps. You know, we are a continued growing firm. We are still growing. And you know, over the years, we do, like many firms, we do have some, you know, sort of turnover and a lot of new staff coming in, I will say a lot of young staff coming in. And so really that tends to, you know, make us even more diligent in finding ways to train up staff and to really start to think about quality in the work that they do. So as I came into this new role of virtual quality management, you know, there were some questions that, you know, we tend to ask myself as, as we're going through Synthesis six development. And, you know, part of that is how do we make quality a part of DPS culture, you know, rather than like a policy driven process? And, you know, we've done that in the past. I will say that it wasn't always real successful. And so, you know, taking this idea of how do we really start to initially establish a foundation where we can create a greater quality awareness throughout the firm. And so when I start thinking in those terms, you know, really the, the thought is, you know, what information or tools or resources can lead to achieving higher quality. And I think that's kind of always what I'm thinking about. How do we promote continuous learning as well through these things and through the kind of information that we make available to people. And so really that becomes part of some of the questions we were asking as we, as I myself was thinking about a quality management system for dps. So I will say as we started to develop the quality management system within dps, really what it started to become was this system that highlighted, you know, processes or responsibilities or resources that we feel influence quality in the work that we do. This was something we were already working on before our transition into synthesis 6. I will say it is still in its infancy. Our transition to synthesis 6 happened just this past January. And so, you know, we're only four months into this, I would say, so we don't have a lot of, you know, metric data or things to look back on, say, oh, this is, this is working really well, or this isn't so we are still kind of in the exploration stage, but this is out there. You know, this is something we are starting to really put out and talk about to the staff and make sure they're referencing to, to this area of up to the DPS quality management system. And so really the idea of the quality management system is not necessarily having all the information right within this area of up to. The idea of the quality management system here is a lot of it is just mentioning and reminding and pointing to other areas of uptube where you can find the resources and the information you might be looking for. And so that's really the idea around here. It's not so much a booklet or tons of information within the quality management system itself, but it's really highlighting all the different areas of up to that we feel relate to the quality of the work that we do or that can help influence the quality of the work that we do. So really, the quality management system, the way it's organized and you know, a lot of you probably will find this is very, you know, it's very similar to a lot of the quality systems that get created from firm to firm in different areas, but really four main groups working in a repeating cycle is the idea of how we created this. And the four groups were, you know, based around first quality planning, going to quality assurance, quality control and quality improvement. And the idea is these work in a cycle. And so really the quality planning piece of it being more about, you know, what do we do when we begin a project, what do we want to be communicating in regards to quality when we start a project. And then, you know, that leads into quality assurance realm, which is really more about what procedures or resources do we have to guard against deficiencies or having defects in the work that we do. Providing those resources in the quality assurance realm as we're doing that, you know, you're getting into these quality control aspects. And really the way we're defining that is that's when we're really checking the work that we're doing. And you know, at what, at what milestones are we checking the work during the while we're producing it. And so really it's, it's all about checking our work to see that, you know, it's meeting our quality standards and best practice and things like that. And then that leads into this quality improvement realm too, which really is about, you know, you always want to be looking at ways you can improve the work that you do. And so talking about that and making that a basic component of our System of quality. So what I'm going to do. The other thing I just want to mention real quick is as we continue to develop Synthesis 6 and this platform for the migration, really as we mined information that we wanted to include and up to for our relaunch, a lot of it actually started to inform content within this QMS as well. So it kind of worked hand in hand. It was taking information or resources and saying, oh, that really, you know, that really is something we want to push as part of what can drive better quality. And so let's include that and reference it in the quality management system.

Hey, Tim, I think it's worth noting also. Well, you already said it once, but how we don't go to a specific spot necessarily on up to learn about the qms. It has tendrils all throughout our intranet and it serves as a tool to help people really explore and learn about all of the content throughout up to. And occasionally people will run across a page that looks like it's not quite finished yet. It's not completed yet. And that's because that page is not quite finished or completed yet. And that's actually by design. We talked a lot about what do we do with some of the stuff that we know we want to fill out over the course of time, but we just don't have the time or the, you know, we just don't. Can't put the effort towards finishing it right now. So we published it and the thought there was that it could be a conversation starter. What we're really hoping is that people, as they explore the Internet, are going to come to us and say, hey, I found this page. There's a bunch of empty spaces. And then we can engage them to help us build it out even more. So it's, you know, of course the Internet is never going to be finished. It's a constantly evolving thing and we're trying to lean into that and use it just to help improve. Improve it all together.

Yeah. And you know, always the idea of a living document, right. I mean, it always wants to be growing and morphing and transitioning as we innovate and you know, think of other ways that we can improve quality that we can focus on. And I think that's why really, you know, when we talk about quality improvement, I think the more we were working through synthesis and talking about quality improvement, it just, you know, quality improvement really inherently happens through knowledge sharing. And so really that's what made, that's why it made such good sense to include this and build it all into this environment. It gave us a chance to document things that we've learned, you know, document key considerations, stuff to that we want to be remembering as we go through the project delivery process and make it all accessible, make it accessible to the entire staff, you know, all of our offices, so that we can really start to see more of a consistency in the way we do project delivery at dps. And so, you know, it's also a great place for to provide resources that we believe are kind of what we call the DPS way or, you know, best practices that we have. And also another thing that we tend to think and about is creating feedback loops. And I'm not going to get into that at the moment. I'll touch on that in just a minute. A little bit more as we look at the quality improvement area. So I think what I'd like to do is just really highlight just a few things in each of these areas as we go around. We did build this into a guide so you can just kind of manage and get to any place we want. But I'm just going to poke in to a few of these areas and just highlight a couple things here and there under the quality planning area. Again, just the idea of wanting to communicate quality as you begin your project. And that can mean a lot of things. You know, talking about kind of what's our objective or how are we all accountable to really think about the quality of the work that we do. Really thinking from the very even getting our work, you know, how do we think about go no go processes or reviewing our contracts, things like that, all the way getting into when the, when we actually get the contract, thinking about, you know, how does that fit into our work plans. But when we get into this design process area, this is one of the areas I just want to highlight because I think it's a great story for DPS how this kind of came about. Our synthesis 5 version really did not have a major area that was really dedicated to design. And as we were meeting with folks and talking about, you know, what do we want to include in the synthesis synthesis 6 version for our relaunch? Actually it was our, it was our Director of Design that really asked the question, how come design isn't, you know, like a main community in our intranet. And that was really an aha moment I think for Gregor and I like, you know, that is really a great idea and really what that led to was us really incorporating a whole new community for the relaunch of up to. And that is the design community. And so what we like about this again is it just starts to give resources and guidance for how we believe the design process wants to happen through dps. And so, you know, just even looking at things like providing a roadmap for people to help just guide them and really provide more of a, a consistency in the way we reach solid design solutions at dps. So really it's just all about kind of just defining goals and objectives and things like that. You know, we can go to any of these areas and start to see like, you know, what types of things do we want to see happen during these phases of design? So in schematics, you know, we really want to be having charrettes and talking about those. We want to be communicating graphically, consistently with some ideas of how we do that. You know, what are the types of building performance things we want to be looking into. And again, as you go through this, you'll see, you know, we really do start to hyperlink in this system to different areas of up to that have more information, for instance, about building performance analysis. So really it's starting to just dig into those certain areas. Again, I by no means have time to dig into all of this, but just to kind of highlight kind of the idea and the approach that we took. You know, even in construction administration, we still want to be thinking about things or construction documents, for instance, and, and really, you know, at that time, still wanting to be chatting, having purposeful design chats and thinking about final building product selections and how we're detailing things. And you know, again mentioning we want to be QCing our, our drawings and so really giving links to resources on up to that do that. And that really is the whole idea behind the whole design community that we established. You know, just different areas of talking about those things. The other thing I'd like to just highlight real quickly under this is kind of this design topology area. This was actually something we got through this community, the idea, we heard it through one of the spotlights that someone else had done, and we really liked it. And it really kind of started developing and evolving as we were working on it and talking to folks about it. And you know, DPS is a multidisciplined firm. We are organized by studios, which basically means we're kind of organized by the building types that we do for design. And so really what this started to become was a place for our studios to kind of take ownership and do what they want with it. I will say that a lot of this area is still in development just because it is Brand new. And so but we did provide, we did our best to provide a framework that would help encourage and inspire people to start building information in here. You know, just for an example, if we go into the education building typology, it really gives a place for our education studio to talk about kind of their, their approach to what they do and highlight featured projects and you know, show the staff that is in that studio currently. And again, always giving contact resources of who to reach out to for those type of building typologies, you know, and then getting more specific, always diving down into like Pre K through 12, getting a little more of the specific areas, who are the people to contact, what are some featured projects or again just key considerations for those things. And so just always trying to continue develop information in here so it's always available at people's fingertips.

It's pretty cool. Showing this off to brand new staff at DPS UP2 has a slot in our onboarding process. We spend an hour, I think on day two for all of our new staff and particularly the younger staff. It's neat as we show them things like this. Hey, you're in the education studio, you know, they're always a little bit overwhelmed and wide eyed and we can kind of give them this resource and say, you know, in your spare time, drill down and start to learn about the actual design process that's happening within your studio. These are some of the expectations that you're going to have crossing your desk. So educate yourself and just being able to show them this kind of thing that's really specific to probably some of their fears about joining a big firm and you know, first day jitters kind of thing. So I think it's a really helpful just to help ease their, ease their mind and get them started on the right track.

And I think when we were asking people or telling people about this idea and this concept, a lot of times the way we approach it to folks is, you know, what questions are people coming to you asking kind of repeatedly or over and over again. And that might help identify the types of things you want to answer in this environment so that people don't have to keep asking them over and over again. And so in that essence you start to be able to provide resources, links, things like that that you know, some of our more experienced staff know that are out there, but some others may not. And so it really gives a place to house that information and share it. Again, just a quick look for instance, just kind of like in our hospital area, getting a little dive, a deeper Dive into space typologies, for instance. And this one, for example, is an MRI space. And so really giving a place for them to start just building information in and, you know, other projects that have had those type of spaces for reference, key considerations, any, you know, links for resources, things like that. So again, we love kind of how initially people have grabbed onto this and we hope it will. We hope it will continue in the design community. So that's the design community. I'm going to keep things moving here in the quality management system. We're going to touch on just a couple things in the quality assurance realm. You'll see that this one in the table of contents, you know, it has a lot of things that we're referencing. Again, just lots of resources and so forth. I'm just going to highlight a couple here real quick. I think one that we love to see how it developed was the owner project requirements. Again, this is nothing new to a lot of firms, but it's something we want to make sure that we. That is happening on all of our projects, again, to make sure that we're meeting the needs of the owner and what their expectations are as we move through project delivery. And so what we ended up doing was developing a specific page called our OPR Guide, just to give some templates, some information, some just good resources for developing an opr. And then what kind of another thing that kind of developed out of this was an OPR for repeat clients. And the idea behind this was, you know, for some of the repeat clients that we have, a lot of times we do building after building for them and we start to learn certain ins and outs of what they like to see in their buildings and then how good are we at really documenting that so that we remember things from project to project for that client and don't have to keep asking the same questions. I think a lot of times our clients expect us to know what they've requested to be included in their projects. You know, and so really, again, this is. We hope that this continues to grow. These are some initial ones that we've developed and are still under development. But again, the idea of you provide context for people who have worked with these clients. You start to give links to just resources for whether it's the client for branding or any design standards they might have that we want to make sure they're meeting and really just start to look at any key considerations for products and finishes that they always like to see in their, in their buildings or special systems, you know, things like that. So really start to give a place where we can build that in. So it's not kind of buried in some subfolder somewhere on our server somewhere, but it's right here available on up to. For people to access.

An interesting side note about these though. We've had some studio leaders who love them. They said yes, absolutely, we don't have to bug the client every single time for the same information on, you know, different projects. But we've had other managers say absolutely not. You know, that's a great way for us to use stale information on a project, you know, three year old detail or something like that. So it's really a case by case basis for these OPRs for repeat clients. And we need to kind of tread lightly and be careful and make sure that the particular studio or the particular group for the client that really wants it and needs it and then expresses to their staff to use it.

Yeah, and keeping the, the information current. Keeping the information current for sure. You know, which is again why, I think why sometimes we prefer if the information is online, like if, if an owner has their standards published online, then we link to it online. So always know we're linking to the most current version of what they're doing. Just to highlight a couple other things, you know, under drawing Fundamentals I would say this is another one that we kind of expounded on based on some of the other Internet tours we saw as we were developing this. This is information that we had before, but it was kind of scattered around. We had kind of an example drawing set before and we had some of these QA checklists that we had that were kind of arranged by milestone or different discipline. But really what we liked about developing this into a guide on up to was it gave us a chance to really go sheet by sheet and kind of condense the information all into one area. So people have it in one place at their fingertips. So if they're working on a floor plan sheet, they have a sheet example they can look at. But then we can also start listing key considerations. And again, these are things like again, if we see has been people are missing when we're doing QC reviews, then we add them here, right, so that we can throw them in here and people can read through it every time they're working on this sheet and be reminded to pay attention to certain things in regards to that. And then we also have developed different milestones like the how much or what type of information we we prefer to usually see on these specific sheets during different milestones, whether it be doing schematic design, design element or construction documents. A couple of the other things just to mention under here, you know, the cone analysis page, we liked how that developed. Again, what you see is, is links going here. Another thing we love to do is spatter around. Smart, smart. Linking to any other training or videos we might have had. So Gregor will mention this in just a few minutes. But you know, recordings from any of our training classes that we've done related to code analysis, we try to populate right here. So it's available, but it also provides links to get to a lot more of the code information, whether it be posts or any other information. We love kind of the new environment with thumbnails and the way we can filter and organize for our code library. Again you could just start looking by codes and by different editions or states and regions that we've worked in. Love that ability to just really have more of that interactive capability to find what you're looking for quickly and to search for the information within there. And the last thing just in the quality assurance area, you know, we are always talking about documentation standards and again the qms, it doesn't have all the standards built right into it, but it mentions that we should be following them and then it gives you a link to where they live. And that's the other thing we did with this migration was we ended up before a lot of our standards were just PDFs of the information with the documents. And really we made the move to actually build the standards as Pages into, into synthesis 6 and really we love how that turned out. It makes it just a one stop shot. All my information is there. If I need to edit something, I just edit it right on the page and publish it rather than having to find a document, make the change, make a PDF, it, re upload it, all of that. So again we really liked how it just kind of has developed into this area to provide, you know, resources for classes about that standard. Any of like the charts or cheat sheets or guides that we have related to that standard and really put it all in one place and easily accessible for staff. So that's called just a few examples of the quality assurance types of things. Again, things that we believe, you know, people should be using as their doing their work to just be reminded and to help guide quality control is really a page in of itself that really mostly focuses on checking our work. Right. So it's really mostly about QC reviews and just highlighting what our expectations are for, you know, frequency and the types of reviews we do and that we want them to be scheduled into projects, providing contacts that people can reach out to to do QC reviews. So again, really trying to just really give a place that says, you know, this is important to us. We want to make sure these are happening on all of our projects. Here are some resources to do it and again, really to give some more consistency in the way we go about it. So I love that it just gave this place for us to really to talk and focus on quality control and then quality improvement. The last one, what I do want to highlight here, and I'll let Gregor talk about a couple other things here, but the primary thing I want to just talk about here is this idea of feedback loops and kind of what we've done to try to help, I guess, get this more established and build awareness that we want to see this happening throughout. DPS is really, we put together this team we call the qmt, which is this quality management team. And the idea here is this is a team of people that we want people to reach out to whenever they have an idea or an issue or something that they feel may need to be corrected or maybe there's a process we can improve. Really trying to say we want your input so that if we're doing something or we're seeing something that keeps getting repeated as an issue or a mistake or a failure, maybe that we want to see that happening. And so really a place here is to just encourage things like project team debrief. So when a project wraps up, you get your team together, you talk about its successes and its failures, and if there's anything that's really outstanding there that we think, oh, we can do something, we can build something into our quality assurance resources that may help remind people of this particular issue so it won't happen again. I know we were talking with Susan earlier on. It was like, it'd be great to have an example of this. So I tried to just come up with just two or three examples of kind of how this works. I don't necessarily have a lot of things I can show on the screen in regards to this, but I think part of the idea is, for instance, as people are doing QC reviews, they started noticing that we were dropping the ball on maybe providing UL assembly information on some of our drawings or it wasn't very consistent in how it was being portrayed or included. This came to the attention of the quality management team. It caused us to discuss it and try to come up with some best practices in regards to that. And so what that ultimately leads to, you know, when we get that feedback we decide, how can we build this into this environment? So even, you know, UL Assemblies really became a page that we built as a best practice. And it gave us a place to store that information, to say, this is how we want to see us approach UL assemblies and what we believe our best practices are, and then again, give resources to UL assembly information. And, you know, we even had a post from our code specialist in our office that talked about UL numbering and understanding that. And we loved that we saw the post and what said, you know, that that needs to live here, right here on this page. And so we built a lot of the information right here on the page to provide that key information. I would say another thing, that another example is feedback from our construction administrators. So, for instance, we had developed a document standard for roof assembly tagging. And our tag for a very common TPO roof was R11. And so that was the tag for the assembly. But what we found out and got reported back from one of our CA folks was the contractor on this particular project was confusing the R11 assembly with R11 insulation value of the roof. And we're like, oh, we never thought that that could be a confusing feature of the, of the numbering that we came up. And so again, getting that feedback caused us to reorient and, you know, change our standard assembly to RF11 so that it would decrease the confusion there and hopefully decrease area errors on future projects. Just another brief one to mention as far as even in the revit workflow area for a feedback issue is the casework that we would work on casework families. And the way we portrayed casework in our drawings was really being developed differently from studio to studio. And what eventually started happening was we had probably three, at least three different workflows for showing casework within our drawings, which meant three different versions of casework content in revit, which was very. What we were hearing from our BIM manager was it was just very time consuming to update and maintain the content because there were just several versions of casework content that we were dealing with. And so that led the quality management team to take that on and say, okay, how can we meet with these different studios, come together, and find one way to go about firmwide to handle our casework? And what that ended up doing was it reduced our casework content in Revit by 2/3 and again, saving time, making things more efficient, making things more consistent in the work we do. And that helps even in the quality checking realm as well. It helps the people that are doing the quality control reviews to become familiar with how we typically should be showing things and stuff like that. So with that I'm going to turn it over back to Gregor. He's going to chat a little bit about our Learning Grow Community, which we think to just made some great leaps and bounds when we made the transition to Synthesis six.

Thanks, Tim. And I should mention we've got a couple of good questions in the Q and A which we can address in just a few minutes when I'm done here. But Tim, Tim mentioned a few times our learning community and we did establish a formal commute formal learning program at DPS shortly after we stood up the first version of up to and it went through a pretty drastic transformation with Synthesis six as well. It started out as being DPSU and DPSU was just sort of a standard 2 semester internal learning model. And it's really worked well for us, you know, throughout today and every day we really preach that knowledge equals quality, so the more you know, the better job you're going to do. And we wanted to make sure we reinforced that. So DPSU used to be its own community and it, it's just what I kind of said. It was a two semester learning platform where anybody at the office can sign up for any number of classes. All the classes are online. So it just, you know, it repeats itself again and again and again twice a year. And we've got a fantastic group of people who stand this up every semester. Tim's on that group and they do a fantastic job. But with Synthesis 6, we decided we're going to expand the community to include all the learning resources we have to offer. And we moved some things from different corners of the Internet and we dropped them into the Learn and Grow community. So now it's really this kind of collective resource of all of our learning content. Specific learning content, I should say. For example, this is where Ask up to lives. This is our Ask a Question. Oops, where am I here, Ask a Question, get an Answer piece. Thanks Jim and Shepley Bullfinch for this idea. But this is the concept of anybody can ask up to a question. It feeds out to 20 or 30 different long experts throughout the office who have all committed to answering that question within 24 hours, which is pretty nice. We have in our Learning, Learn and Grow Community spaces for intern development and professional development. We have of course, a learning library just where somebody can come and filter and sort all of our different learning content to get exactly what they need as quickly as possible. As quickly as possible, which has proven to be pretty useful.

Resource.

We even have a new page that we call Hashtag Learning. And this is where we just gathered all of those posts and all of those common hashtags that have some sort of a learning slant to them. And we've plunked them all on a single page so that people can come here and they want to learn about thought leadership. It's easy access to do so or code, talk, or any number of different things. So again, knowledge equals quality. So this tool, tool, not only Tim's QMS, but the synthesis tool overall, just reinforces DPS's kind of key, one of our key values of prioritizing quality to always deliver the best product that we possibly can. We love the direction that this is going and we are excited to see where it leads us.

So I think.

I think that's it. Tim, one of the questions that we had was about the Starter Detail Library. Do you want to bounce back over there real quick or so I'm sorry, Susan, do you want to kind of formally kick it off?

Oh, that sounds great. Let's go to that question about the Starter Detail library.

Stephen's asking about the Starter Detail library and he just kind of wanted to see another look at that and the graphics.

Sure. The Starter Detail Library was an effort maybe about, I'd say, five or six years ago, really. Again, trying to answer to feedback about from a lot of the people that are producing our work, having trouble finding resources for, you know, doing their work for drawing, quite frankly. You know, our office has been through different renditions over the years of, you know, stamp what we call standard details. And really we wanted to get away from this kind of idea of everything standard to being more like start. That's how we came up the name Starter Detail. And the idea here was really giving some details that are pretty common to a lot of the work that we do and giving people a good head start on drawing a lot of those typical details that already have the correct components built into them. We provide just kind of a standard PDF preview, you know, of the types of things that are kind of very common to what we do. But again, the idea is that they shouldn't be always just come in and you leave them alone. But it brings in a lot of the components for a particular kind of detail and already has a lot of the noting and so forth. We tend to build a lot of our revit components with reference noting built into them so that it links to a database that we keep that we know is consistently consistent, consistently using the same terminology between our specs and our drawings. And so that's one of the ways we can try to reinforce that. But that's really what the starter detail library is all about. It's just trying to provide those resources to people so, so that our folks do have a good resource to start drawing. I mean, one of the issues we always faced and you know, continue to face now and then is people basically copying over information from old projects. And really we don't want to be doing that so much. We want people to be bringing in the correct components for every project that bring in the correct reference, noting that bring in, you know, stuff that is current rather than bringing in old content into Revit. So this is just again, one of those ways we tried to answer to that and make those available to people. So really what the start of D Library is, is just it gives a place for people, people to find a lot of the common stuff we do bring it in. It has a lot of the components they need to, you know, either update them or rearrange them and make them work for your specific project.

Nice. I'll just jump in before we go to the next question to remind folks that you can add questions via the Q and A icon in the zoom in your zoom tray and you can also upvote, upvote other people's questions. So I invite you to do all that and that'll help us prioritize our time. TJ asked a question about basically duplicating content or not duplicating content. You know, there's some content that could fit in either category. It's a design standard, which is a design standard, but it's implemented in Revit. So, you know, managing that line. She asked, how did you manage linking between your documentation standards and the more tool specific instructions that someone might expect to find under design, like drawing and repit without duplicating information?

Yeah, I, I would say that was a common question as we were doing the build on this thing. It's always a challenge to not repeat information. And I think that really what we tried to be purposeful was, you know, try to have the information lives where it makes sense to live primarily, whether whatever community that lives in. And then, and then really what we end up doing is linking or pointing to those other areas if they feel, if we feel they relate to the content represented on a certain page. So if we do have standards or something, but there is a particular Revit workflow that works with that standard, then, you know, we'll, we'll include that workflow in the revit area of up to and just link to that. I don't know if this is answering the question, but I think, you know, that was the idea of trying not to repeat information. I mean the QMS in and of itself kind of does that to some degree. It kind of re highlights information that's elsewhere on up to But I think the idea in that case was really to just. It was kind of that double reinforcement, you know, like we want to be focusing on quality. Let's talk about the types of things that help us do that and then mention those things. But then point to really the resource that has all of the information in regards to it.

Thanks, Tim. Jim asked a question that goes back to something Gregor shared about onboarding employees, but a slightly different flavor. How do you introduce more junior staff to all the great information provided without overwhelming them?

Gregor, you want to take that one?

Yeah, that's a really good question. And another challenge, the onboarding process is, is a big start to that, but we've got some junior staff who, you know, they were onboarded a year ago and maybe forget to look it up too. I mean it is our default homepage, so it's kind of hard to forget to look it up too. We're trying to keep it in the conversation. We're sort of taking a phased approach to synthesis 6 and the development of it. This first stage was to sort of get everything out there, kind of talk it up. And then I think next Tim and I were just talking. It's probably time. We've got a lot of studio specific content within the platform. So it's probably time to start recruiting some content managers from each studio and hopefully getting them excited about taking ownership of some of these pages, talking about it amongst their, amongst their peers in their group meetings and starting to build out, you know, organic, as organically as we can build out the site that way.

I will say, you know, you know, reviewing up to with new staff is included as part of the onboarding. So we do take it just an hour with each new staff member to kind of give a very 30,000 foot view of up to right. It's got so much content in it that we couldn't possibly cover it in an hour. I mean we could go on for half a day just really going over every area. So really what we try to do is highlight the information that's there, where to kind of typically find it and then encourage to kind of dig deeper, look through the information, keep mining for it within up to and really using up to as your first Source to ask to search for information that you're trying to find out because a lot of it's there, you just need to find it. And so but it is, it's. It's fairly overwhelming. You can tell they're just kind of like, you know, deer in a headlight sometimes because it is a lot of information. But they are always very impressed like that we have a lot of this information housed in this one location where they can access it and search for it without having to continually ask people or find people to ask how to do certain things. Or even if it's like filling out your timesheet, you know, building that information up to and showing them you can find it here, you don't have to worry about going to find and remembering or asking someone. The information is right here. You just need to access it. It.

You know. This is related to a couple questions that were asked and Greger answered them in text, but might be interesting for others as well. There's a question about like, who can contribute? And I think there's two lenses on that, like, who can contribute to the page content and the stable knowledge that we've been looking at today. But also who can contribute to the activity stream? And then kind of a related question was on the pages. It's like, how are you keeping all of that fresh? And I think Gregor alluded to that a little bit with like, you know, we're starting to bring on others, but there's anything else you'd like to add on.

I will add. I'll let Gregor chime in too, because I know he has. He could have something to say here too, but I will chime in that we did. We were a little more purposeful in the relaunch as we were migrating stuff over. I felt like our synthesis 5 version, we did assign basically community managers to develop content and we gave them pretty, pretty much free reign to do so. And I think one of the issues in the, in the old version was I. We felt like there wasn't a lot of good consistency in the way things were presented or how to find things. And so I think with Synthesis six, we realized that not only the platform really helped mitigate that, you know, just by all the settings you could set in there to keep things consistent. But I think we limited a little bit more like the people who go there and actually build content, or at least we tried to oversee it a little better just to help provide a little more consistency from page to page. And I think that did work. But by no means were we you know, keeping people from having access to, to kind of take it on themselves. I don't know if you have anything to add on to that, Gregor.

Yeah, only that we're trying to maintain that consistency with this new version. We did have some people go off scripts so be surfing through the site and everything looks pretty normal. And then all of a sudden you get to a page that's like, whoa, where am I? You know, it didn't feel at all like the rest of the site. We're trying to avoid that, you know, as people approach us or as we approach people with some ideas to improve the content. I think we'll sit down with them and give them some training and teach them how to do things and encourage them that if they get stuck, don't, you know, don't stop doing it, but come and ask us and we'll help them get through that hurdle. And with regards to the activity stream, you know, we give everybody access to the activity streams as I feel like most firms do and would, but we really encourage anybody to post anything and we don't get too bothered is, you know, we've got a water cooler stream. It's our only other activity stream other than the main homepage 1. And the water coolers more kind of not work related stuff. But if somebody posts a not work related thing on the homepage, you know, we don't slap their hands, we don't move it, we don't do anything. We just, at this point we're kind of happy when people post. And to me, I love that stuff. That's some of the most human centric things that get posted and I don't really care where it gets posted. I'm just glad that people are doing it.

Yeah, that's great. Thank you so much for providing that context. There's another question from David about allocating time to do this work, to write something down. You know, take something you learned in a QM meeting and actually create the page and create the stable knowledge asset. How are you allocating time as a business for this work?

Well, I'll say from a quality management standpoint, just in and of itself, putting a role for Director of Quality Management was a big step forward I think for dps because that always was a challenge. Prior to that was, you know, we wanted to be focusing on quality, but everyone was so busy working on projects, no one really had time to focus on it. And so that is always a challenge. So that's what I'm thankful for at DPS is they actually saw the importance of being able to dedicate some time to spending on quality management. And so we do have, you know, this is fairly recent too. Even within DPS structure is some of the role development that we've provided there. We actually have a whole kind of area that is about quality and the roles we can, people can take on if they're interested in moving that way in their career path, focusing on quality and the work we do. So, so we do have quality managers as well. But again, they're working on projects, they're not totally dedicated to that, that role. So it is always a juggling act. I meet with them, you know, once a month. We talk about things, we chat about things. And then a lot of times I'll take that back to the quality management team and even the quality management team, you know, they're all, they're all doing other things too. They're working on projects, have other things on their task list. So it is, it's a challenge trying to dedicate resources to quality management. For sure, you know, we're, we're a large firm, but we're not a huge firm. You know, we're what, 200 plus between all three offices. So as we continue to grow, I think we continue to realize that we need to really provide resources and time for people to be able to focus on this type of stuff. Yeah, and I really do appreciate that, you know, even for Gregor and myself, I mean really, Gregor myself took on the brunt of the migration, but we're thankful that the leadership, you know, allowed us to do so, gave us the time and resource to be able to focus on that.

We have a couple more questions in about three more minutes, so let's, let's see if we can do it. I'll take the one from Steven first. Some comments suggest you might be struggling to get young and old staff alike to use up to every day as an integral part of their design workflow instead of a last resort. If so, how are you encouraging everyone to consistently and constantly use this content?

That's a great question. And it's, it's a forefront on my mind quite often. And so I would say that we are still figuring that out. I think part of that at the moment is really just communicating out and reminding so creating posts that point to different quality management aspects of this of up to, to remind people that it's there. That's one of the ways that we're trying to just keep the word out and keep reminding people we incorporated into some of our DPSU coursework. So you Know, for instance, this spring I did have a course that specifically focused on the qms. And so just another way to remind people that it's there. But I still feel we have a lot of work to do there, really continuing to develop the culture and making sure people are utilizing the information. And I think we'll start to look at even some of the, some of the analytics and stuff too on up to about who's clicking where, you know, at some point, maybe when we're at least six months down the road or eight months down the road to try to see who's looking at what and what pages are being utilized and which ones aren't so much. And that might start to tell us like, oh, we need to really start preaching or pointing or posting about those areas to remind people to use those resources.

And quality is an ongoing conversation even outside the borders of our Internet and up to, I mean, you know, we hear it about it in town halls straight from the CEO, how important, important it is to him. And you know, we have a lot of opportunity to remind people that this resource is here. And if you're struggling with something, come here first that your answer is probably within.

Yeah. All right. We have one minute for one question and it is not a one minute question. I'm just going to call that out. So give it what you can. How do you measure the quality of your work products to fuel those feedback loops?

Another great question. So again, we are kind of in my role, we're constantly, you know, talking about that and trying to develop more insight into how we can do that because I can't say that we have a lot of past experience or develop stuff that we've utilized. We're working on that. But I will say some of the things that I am focusing on, I'll try to just mention this as quick as possible. I think some of the things as far as what we're looking into for quality metrics to help gauge, you know, how successful we're doing in that realm, one is obviously client satisfaction. The repeat business you're getting is one way you can, I think, utilize. Like it means you're doing good work. It means, you know, people are, you're building trust in the work that you do. I think change orders and RFIs are always something that come up during construction to kind of give a tell. But you can't just take them in for what they are. You have to kind of dive a little deeper into them about reasons why they are what they are because they don't always all relate to the quality of the work you're doing. They can relate to many things. And so developing ways that we can. And we are currently developing some tools to help track that better so that we can start looking at those. Those metrics and maybe discovering some holes or things we need to work on. I think claims and litigation is always a good one to look at, to see kind of the quality of the work you're doing or you might be missing the boat on certain things. Again, you got to look at those for ones that you really do own versus ones you probably really don't own. I think employee engagement is a good one to look at. I think profitability is a good one to look at. I think project delivery consistency is a good one to look at hours spent in construction administration. You know, like, if we're spending tons and tons of hours and we're always going over our fee, either our fees are too low or, you know, something's wrong with our documents, because contractors have to keep asking questions and we have to deal with. With stuff and even competitive bidding, you know, in public projects. I think if you're getting competitive bids, that's usually a tell, you know, to so it, you know. So we're looking into kind of areas, like to kind of look in those realms and how we can maybe start to analyze those in a realistic way that can help inform us, like, how are we doing in that regard and where are areas we can improve.

Nice.

I was gonna say, I think a lot of information, too, you use to really bring it to leadership, too, to get their buy in. Like, we need more resources focused on quality management or improvement. These are things that are happening in these realms and that'll always talk to them. You know, I think as far as getting on board to providing resources, yeah.

It'S a great place to end this part of the session. So, Tim Greger, thank you so much for sharing all of these ideas with us. It was incredible. So much information. I know many of the people in this room are interested in continuing the conversation, so if you would like to. We're going to pop over to a Zoom meeting for a virtual hangout where anyone who comes over will get into small groups of. Of, you know, four to five people for about a half hour, and you can just debrief, discuss, dig into some of these content, these topics on your own. And then we'll have, you know, 10 minutes together, something to say hello and might be another opportunity to ask Tim and Gregor questions. Chris will drop the link to that meeting in the chat now. It's there. So if you want to join us, just follow that meeting. I have to close this meeting and then I'll meet you over there and we'll get started. The recording of today's Deep Dive will be posted on our website and the online K community and sent out via email, likely next week. And I think that's it. Tim and Gregor, thank you again for this, and I look forward to seeing both of you and anyone else who wants to join us over in that Zoom meeting.

Sounds great. It's been an honor and a privilege.

Thank you indeed. Bye.

See you over there.