INTRANET TOUR | Highlights from Primera's Transition to Synthesis 6

Susan I'm Susan Strom. I'm the Chief Client Officer at Knowledge Architecture and with me today is Matt Vorick and Nick Stranowski, who are Premiera's Senior Vice President of Marketing and Communications and Director of Operations, respectively. You're in a Synthesis Spotlight, which is a place where we share stories of how clients are using synthesis to help evolve and grow their firms. Today, Matt and Nick are going to introduce Premera's recently launched Synthesis Intranet and sharing insights, lessons learned from their implementation and of course, answering your questions. A little bit about our guest, Matt and Nick. Matt leads Premiera's marketing initiatives with a commitment to continuously elevating the Standard. He has 20 years of AEC specific experience as well as a Bachelor's in Marketing and a Master's degree in Communications Ick. Premier is Director of Operations partners with managers across the business to drive performance, productivity, profitability, innovation, safety, quality and security. He has 20 years of experience in engineering and energy, including having served as Lieutenant in the United States Navy. His work is informed by his Bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering, Master's in Engineering Management, and Master's in Business Communication. Nick and Matt, thank you so much for joining us today and sharing what you've been up to with internal communications and knowledge sharing at Premiera with synthesis. So we're going to do something new which is play you a video. Everyone who's here today as part of your launch, a day before launch, like the Friday before you launched, on a Monday, you released this Alma 101 video and we're going to show it because it's a good example and give you a sense of the kind of way that Premier was preparing employees for what they would receive. And it also provides just a very succinct introduction and overview of alma, which I know everyone on the call wants to see.

Hello, I'm Alma. I'm the central source of information and online conversation here at Primera. I'm here to level up our communication and collaboration efforts and help you make connections no matter where you are. If you have questions, I have answers. That's why my logo consists of two interlocking dialog boxes with three dots illustrating an active, ongoing conversation. You'll also notice the colors representing all of Primera's divisions as this is the central place for us all. Did you know that Primera in Spanish means first? My Spanish name, Alma, is a tribute to our founding as a minority owned business in 1987 and also celebrates our current female ownership and leadership. In Spanish, Alma means soul. I'm central to the employee experience in Latin alma translates to nourishing and kind, consistent with our values. I intend to nourish with knowledge and well, Kindness is a core value here for a reason. I am your first stop for inquiries, information, news, events, celebrations, shout outs and more. I'm divided into six key categories Communities as I like to call them to simplify your search. Home, which includes interactive employee directories, company information and also highlights two critical programs here at the Great Game of Business and Safety. They're intentionally front and center here on the home page you can see company updates, upcoming events, customers, colleagues celebrating birthdays or anniversaries, and find the names of new faces that join our tremendous team. HR and Office pulls all employee information into one place. You can walk through an electronic version of our employee handbook, learn how to book, travel or reserve a fleet vehicle, walk through our career development guides and find details about each of our offices. Projects in Practice is the central hub for all technical information from division specific content to project delivery, our quality management system and project management processes. This section will continue to expand and evolve over time. Technology is like your own personal IT help desk where you can find answers to your hardware, software and network questions. Questions. The Marketing Community contains all information pertaining to Premera's brand, employee communications and business development and proposal processes and tools. Lastly, the Inner Circle. This section is dedicated to connecting you to everyone across the company. Think of IT as our virtual water cooler. You can share almost anything here. Do you want to give your colleague a shout out? Do that here. Do you want to connect with others on a particular topic? Check out the different interest groups. I have open forums for Premera parents and pet owners, as well as for those that love music and gaming. The list of interest groups will continue to grow and I encourage you to join in on the conversation because I'm designed with Premera's purpose in mind. To connect, you'll see discussion threads in all key areas such as ggob, HR and Office divisions and so on. You'll also see key updates shared in these forums. HR will share policy updates in the HR and Office section. It will share anything from network updates to system improvements in the Technology section. You get the idea. While we're on connections, the last thing I want to highlight is the ease at which you'll be able to search my employee and project directories to learn more about one another. Our directories are integrated with Vantagepoint and Active Directory, so you'll see information as it's available. The default view in the employee Directory is designed to give you all the handy and useful information in one place. You can even see people's team status in real time. If you want to reach out, you can search for people individually or filter the list to find what you're looking for. Interested in finding people that work in substation? Filter by division or department. Interested in seeing who is licensed to work in a certain state or who holds a certain license? I have a custom directory for that. Remember, if you're not sure where to look, jump straight to my search bar. This is all just the beginning. I am a wealth of knowledge now, but I'm just getting started. Make sure to connect with me often as I'll have new information for you regularly. I hope you will take some time to explore what I have to offer. My goal is to make it as easy as possible to empower you with instant access to people information and resources. Don't know where to start? Just ask me.

So I'd like to kick things off by inviting you just to tell us a little bit about Premera. Give some context for the business that you're working in.

Sure. Hi everyone. Happy to be here. So Premera is a mid sized woman owned engineering, design and consulting firm really specializing in three areas of expertise that's building transportation and utilities. And then we offer business consulting services to support sort of clients in those three industries. With about 300 employees in over 25 states at this point because of our remote staff we've got people primarily working here in Chicago, our headquarters in the mid, mid Atlantic and then in Texas. I think culture wise, you know we offer basically all services, all the engineering services you need for, you know, big infrastructure and every infrastructure and those three areas of expertise. But culture wise we're really focused on people. Our values are very people focused, collaboration, relationships and really kindness. So you know we outside of just quality and technical expertise, we're really pushing that and so we focus a lot on our people and then on top of that we practice the great game of business if anyone's familiar. So we practice open book management. So we're wildly transparent with our staff and really the, you know, the synthesis tool has helped us play off of both of those our people focused values and our open book management for information sharing. So this has really been wonderful. But that's a little bit about us.

Yeah, thanks Matt. And then Nick, I'd love for you to tell us a little bit about why, why a new intranet? Why did Premera need and decide to invest in platforming your internal comms and your knowledge base recently?

Yeah, thanks for having me. Susan and it was a big decision for Premier. And for years we utilized the pretty primitive SharePoint site to house key information, key material way in which we could push some information out to the masses. It had a pretty low usage among our employees and the structure was pretty limited in how we could share information. If there's such a thing as a doom cycle for Internets, we were probably in it. So a newly designed and a new platform checked a whole lot of boxes for us. We wanted to be more efficient in how we shared and how we accessed information that people needed, both as just employees and their benefits and the technical work that they do and the clients that they support. We've grown consistently year over year, which kind of compounded our need to enhance the platform that we use for information sharing. You know, as we found that as our staff and as our teams grew, the number of questions grew, you know, linearly with that. So rather than, you know, relying upon and using that antiquated model of getting questions emailed to our functional leads like our HR leader, we wanted an efficient self serve platform with information at the ready. It also supported, as Matt kind of alluded to our course, two of our core values of being expert collaborators and knowledge fanatics. And we wanted a visually appealing, engaging platform where we could connect with the entire company with information that they need and the teammates that they work alongside. So as we give you a peek at Alma today, I'm confident that you're going to see those, those two core values in particular kind of shine through.

I want to dig in a little bit and look at some specific examples and content that's being shared. Since that video was really, since you've been live for a few months.

I.

Know that you worked to get critical communications onto Alma right away, like right out of the gate. And an example happened recently of that, which was Erin, your CEO's midyear recap. So Matt, I'd love it if you could show your screen, kind of help us understand that post, why it was important to get it on Alma and maybe also what it took. Like was it hard to get Aaron to post?

Yeah, so it honestly wasn't. It wasn't too hard. Our CEO is really good about wanting to share information. During the pandemic, she was sending out emails weekly, so not a huge hill to climb there in terms of getting her. So want to post that stuff to jump into that post. We had our mid year meeting a couple weeks ago and quite fun because the day afterwards she had, you know, posted a full recap of it. So, you know, we try to get all employees there, but people have conflicts and we know that people miss it. And so something that we really didn't have a good tool for in the past outside of just sending out an email, was to have this place where people can go and get a full recap. And so what's really fun about it is, you know, she posted her recap of the whole meeting and we were able, you know, she posted it and then I went in afterwards and was able to edit with. With this sort of master or global rights in the background. And I was able to link all the things that we talked about in the pages of where things go, including the slides for the meeting. So all of that recapped in one place for people with, you know, a wildly different experience for us than it was six months ago before Alma existed. So pretty fun.

Yeah. You also can, from the get go, turned off your. Your newsletter. So I think you're doing a monthly newsletter and or might have been on different cadence. We had a newsletter you no longer do because as you talked about earlier, you wanted things to be happening more real time. You don't want people have to wait for this post or wait for the newsletter. And an example of rolling something out more real time that's happened recently is the employee survey that you all just completed. So maybe if you could just talk us through how that happened in real time, how the communications happen in real time with the business.

Yeah, for sure. Yeah. Killing our newsletter as fast as we did was actually not something we thought we were going to do in March or so. And then as this got closer and we were realizing how it could function and how we wanted people to get information, we're just like, what? You know, why spend another few months sending all that information out at the end of the month when we can spend the same time that we were spending building the newsletter kind of working with people in the background and say, hey, get promotions up there now? And can you get referrals out there now? And hey, can you post an update for buildings? And so our director, communications, is doing a really good job of taking the time spent on the newsletter and kind of helping change those behaviors in the background. And we figured, why wait? And why not? It's here, it's launched. If you want info, this is where you're going to get it. So we did that pretty quickly. But in terms of our employee survey in the past, you know, the only way that we would have to share stuff was really through email or making announcements and what we were able to do with the employee survey and something that we've done in a couple of areas since is, you know, before all the information exists, we can post and say, hey, this is coming. And now it's somewhere casual for people to see that. But we didn't send that out by email at all. We ended up following up a few weeks later and talking a little bit more about it during an all company town hall. But the information was posted, you know, June 12th, so just 10 days after we launched. But you know, what I had done was post a very casual post. This is where it's going to, you know, this is what to expect. Stay tuned for more details. And then a few weeks later, you know, that was June 12th, and then on June 21st, I was able to go back in and say, okay, here's the specifics of what you can expect and here's all the info. And I did that as a almost reply to my original comment. So all the info was in one place. And then using the ability to promote posts and make sure they stay on the top of people's homepage, we promoted that. So, you know, anyone checking out the Internet could see it. But you know, a more organic way to get that information to people that we hadn't had in the past. And then, you know, kind of a fun full circle moment is, you know, we did that, the survey went out. And then in Aaron's recap, you know, she talked about how we shared those survey results. We got them back and shared it in the meeting. But, you know, if people want, they can just continue to dive deeper and deeper. Her post links to the slides from our meeting, which is in our marketing section. You can see past meetings if you want, but if you go in and open those slides, people can then follow up and see the results and check them out for themselves. So it's just this kind of all the pieces are connected and it's not disjointed email. So that's been really excellent for us. But yeah, so you can go right in here and see our survey results. So yeah, pretty fun way to use that and share information with people.

And I know you also ran out, rolled out a financial wellness benefit recently. And that was interesting because you, you were helping support, I think your accounting person or HR in getting the messages out. But you weren't the authors, the author of them.

That is correct. So I was working with our CFO and she came to me and she said, hey, we're going to roll out this new financial Wellness benefit. And I was like, excellent, let's put it on Alma. Which is literally like all my team. And I say when anyone wants to share anything with anyone, we're just like, put it on Alma. If you looked on Alma. And that's been working really well for us because that behavior is new for people. When our CFO wanted to do that, I basically took the information. She was going to send an email and helped her build a post, gave her the text and said, hey, here's how you do it. And I walked her through that. So that was this first one that she posted on June 27 for this benefit that was going to roll out on July 17th. And just a quick overview, hey, here's what to expect. This is what's coming up. But then kind of a cool evolution of that, not unlike how the employee survey went, you know, then our director, our senior VP of HR went to post the invitation. So people knew that there was a webinar to explain the new feature. And so I worked with her a little bit and said, hey, can you post that here and get this up there? So that's what went up. Really short post, but that went up to say, this is how you sign up. You'll get, you'll get an email with that invitation. And then kind of continuously along the evolution again, as I said then after the webinar took place, kind of a really happy moment for us in terms of the adoption. I hadn't even needed to follow up with Melissa. Right after the webinar ended and she got access to the recording, she went ahead and posted that and shared that in the chat in real time so anyone that missed it could access it. But that. Her post, again, really simple, but links to the financial wellness page that we built out within our benefits section. And then, you know, there's access to the webinar right here and you can click on that and watch it. So really fun. That story also ends the same way as the other one did, as the survey did, where we also reminded people of that during our mid year meeting. And Erin's recap links to the same page in those communications. So yeah, getting for us to do it is one thing, but starting to get the owners of these different functional areas for us to be adopting it and doing that themselves has been a big win for us.

Yeah, these communications, a lot of them link two pages because that's the codified knowledge. So I'd love to look at a few more pieces of codified knowledge in the interest of time. I'm just Going to call out. We. We're planning to end at 11:45, which is in about 13 minutes. So, Matt, I'd love for you to show us those, the career guides, but maybe keep that a little quick and then we can take a look at the PM guides and the PM story.

Yeah, I can do that very quick. So earlier this year we had rolled out new career development guides which really just tell all employees, here's how you can can grow in your career here. And we launched them in April or so, but didn't. We just had an old, you know, rough intranet post them on. So people weren't really having access to it. But so what almost allowed us to do is put them in a nice organized place under professional development. And any employee, there's a guide for everybody. But any employee, if there was an architect or engineer interested in how they progress here at Premera, they could come in, they could click on and view the career development guide. They can say, I want to be on the technical track. I'm in Engineer 2 right now. What do I have to do to get to engineer 3? And then we've got job descriptions for each of those grades that are kind of don't focus as much on the technical skill as they do the rest of the skills that will get you promoted to openera. So all of that organized in one simple place is, you know, really helpful for people because they don't have to find the email that we sent at launch or something like that. They can search for it and find it whenever they need.

Yeah. And you can update it.

Yeah, we can update it in real time, which is excellent.

Yeah, yeah. And then one of the, you know, you shared that you, you had this somewhere else, but it was hard for people to get to. I know another place that that happened with was your PM training. Becoming a PM is a big deal at Premiera, but like probably for everyone on this call and people need to get to know the premiere way so that they can be a good pm. So you were doing that on teams last year and you're like collecting stuff, but it just was out of the way for people. People weren't really getting to it. So you moved it over to Alma and Nick, I'd love you just to like walk me through. I'm a new pm. How do you hope that I use this space?

Yeah, absolutely. So like you said, this was one of our earliest wins as far as transitioning some information and that collaborative space from teams onto Alma. And as Matt showed in that career guide, you know, A major milestone for a lot of our employees and technical team is, you know, that promotion and that obtaining that Project Manager responsibility. So we created a section under our Projects and Practice for our Project Manager training where we introduce them to the process, what they can expect from being identified as somebody who's going to be managing projects to completing all of those prerequisite tasks that are expected of them. In late 2022, we put together in house Project Manager training to indoctrinate and reaffirm the premier way of managing projects through the entire project life cycle. And ALMA gave us a great opportunity and really easy way in which we can share all all that training content, the recorded training videos, to make it accessible not just to our PM community, but to everybody. Right. Again, we're knowledge fanatics and very transparent for all those junior engineers and architects that aspire to become a Project Manager, it's just great information that can only enhance their skills even before they get tapped to be a Project Manager.

And I would be remiss if I did not ask you to show your Core Values page. There's so much good stuff, but maybe pop us over there.

Yeah. So we actually got feedback in our employee survey a year ago and some of the feedback was that people didn't know our values, they didn't understand our values. And that was a little bit shocking to our leadership team because we're like, we've not sort of strayed from who we are and what we do, but we welcomed 100 people last year. We're looking to welcome 100 people this year. So we realized we're like, they're not seeing it enough. And we didn't have a good place to put them. They're on our website, but really in a place focused for candidates, not necessarily employees. So we spent some time in our kickoff meeting in January, we really put a lot of focus on the creating videos that highlighted each of our values and our vision and stuff like that. And so what is really great and fun about this new Internet tool for us, right, is we had all these videos. They would have been played at our meeting. People responded well to them, but they would have just kind of died in a folder. And as I was building out the Core Value page and I'm like, how do we get across to people who we are? My original plan was just going to be to have like almost a one page document that outlined our values, our mission and our vision and, and move on. And as I started playing with the tool, I was able to use the guide feature and I Was like, I could have a page for our values and then, you know, as you go down, you can move into our vision and do that next. And then, oh, what's our mission and our purpose? So just the functionality and the way we were able to build that out using the Synthesis 6 tools was neat. But to have a place to then house these videos. So when people are like, hey, what are the values? Can I read them? They don't have to just read them. They can click on any of these videos that we had already created that were just sitting in a folder and actually hear stories from our employees about what these values really mean and how people are actually living them. So just a really fun way to show that. All crazy easy to do within the synthesis platform, it's really just add a video, add a video and then, you know, each of these are drop down. So if you want to read a little bit more about what does it mean to be a knowledge fanatic or a financial steward, you can just click on those and, and kind of get all the information you need. But same thing, we created a video highlighting what Aaron's vision for the company was in 2016. And what this video really does is tell people, here's what we said in 2016, here's the steps we made year for a year to follow what we told you. And so rather than just having this sort of blank vision statement on an intranet, you know, we can show people and make it feel a little bit more authentic. So being able to embed videos that way, it's been really, really helpful.

Yeah. Thank you for that very speedy tour, Nick and Matt, of some of your resources. I want to shift to Q and A, so I'm actually going to skip over the like preparing for launch bit just in the interest of time. I know there's a couple questions that are in the Q and A now. If anyone here has questions for Matt and Nick, please go ahead and drop those in Q and A. We'll try to get to all of them. And I'm going to start with one from. Someone who wrote in in the chat. And here we go. Okay, you talked about how you navigated the idea that content should be posted by the owner. Could you talk about this? How did you get the owners of content comfortable with posting?

Yeah, sure. So I'll start off on that one. From a technical standpoint, what I can say is that none of us were web developers. Right. I think initially there was some intimidation of, hey, how am I as a content owner going to be gaining that Proficiency and that comfort in posting my content in a visually appealing, engaging manner. And Matt and I joked from the very beginning, as we got comfortable with this platform, that synthesis was like the iPhone of intranets. And that always seemed to put everybody at ease. There's some really easy, simple videos that Chris put together that guides people on how you can make a simple post, how you can add it, customize it, make it look different that we rolled out to our team as well. And really that was all that we needed to do. Occasionally they'll come to Matt's team for a little bit of branding help or maybe some ways in which they can add some links or enrich some of the content. But we found that very easy to roll out to our team and then onboard more content developers and content posters as we moved.

And I'd add all of the activity was happening by email or some way anyways. So really was not too hard to say, hey, you're going to email people, Just put your email on all one. So we just kind of keep reminding people of that and it's happening more organically. But it really wasn't difficult to do, especially once people had access to the tool and they thought and they wanted to get their info up there too. But I do think it's really important for it to come from the owner and not just constantly get updates from, you know, the marketing or communications team.

There's a related question in the Q and A, which is what percent of your staff participate currently? So I was wondering if you could speak to that and if you've had any like, you know, aha moments or wins in the firm of like, getting people who are not part of the core team, who are not department leaders to participate. If you could talk a little bit about what that's looked like.

I can take that. So I think the, you know, as in any, you know, there's an adoption curve and the people who had access to it and understood it, you know, what it could do early on, are quite active. But we've seen a lot of, especially in inner circle, we've seen a lot of people, you know, as they see other activity happening, we've seen people just organically going in there and participating. We don't have analytic or analytics or stats yet on the actual number of people in there, but we are finding that a lot of people are outside of the main. People will respond to someone and say, hey, that information is on Alma. Have you checked Alma? But, you know, the win for me is people posting stuff like this and like hey, look at me having fun on Memorial Day. Or, you know, we've just had some fun stuff happening in most of the inner circle groups and we know that's going to build over time. But yeah, there's just, there's activity happening everywhere. Our fun committee, for example, I don't even think I ever showed them how to do it. And they've just been posting organically. So while I don't think the, the math like the wild masses of the company are using it the way that we want yet, it's only been a couple months and I know that we will build that over time. But we're actually doing a little scavenger hunt right now which is actually on here as an inner circle page. And what we've been doing is having a weekly scavenger hunt and people are so competitive, they're actually really loving it. But we've got questions and people get points for finding things on the Internet. And so we waited until now, which is almost 90 days after launch, we waited until now for people to do that so that they saw it, they'd seen some stuff happening, but now they're really digging in and they're like, oh, I didn't know that was there. I didn't know that was here. So we know it's going to be months before we can convince everyone this is where you need to go. But adoption wise, I think that we're doing pretty well. We don't have any numbers for that. I hope I answered that question.

Yeah. And numbers will be forthcoming soon. Post analytics are released. Maybe a part two. There is a question about resources needing to maintain this. And I know, Matt, before, you know, everyone got on, you were saying, you know, one of the things that I do with another team member is just every morning I look through the stream and tag things to make sure they're going in the right stuff. The inner circle is going to inner circle. Sometimes people make mistakes about that. But I was wondering if you could tell us anything more about what maintenance is looking like and resource wise, what it, what it's taking to get that work done.

I. The maintenance in my mind is pretty low. I feel like aside from kind of what I talked about with our director of communication, following up with people and making sure that newsletter content is getting populated and we're still providing that information to people. Aside from that, I mean, it's the time people were spending putting together an email or sending out that type of thing anyways. So it's been really easy for people. The tool is seriously so intuitive and easy to use, like Nick said. Yeah, I don't think, you know, Angie and I maybe spend 20 minutes each morning just reviewing it and checking things and, you know, promoting posts that might need more attention or changing some of the hashtags and communities so things are appearing in the right spot. But I don't think maintenance wise, it's really a heavy lift at all. Every time someone asks a question of content that we don't have on there, we'll be like, oh, we can get that up really quickly. So I feel like we just did that in our benefits section. We're getting ready for biometric screening and in this information mostly came out of an email that went out last year and we were able to build this page, I think in 20 minutes. So it's just quick and easy to use. But as long as my recommendation would be to have someone monitoring it regularly just to make sure that things are happening the way that they want and encourage people to use it the right way.

Yeah. Thank you so much for sharing what you're doing, answering questions. I'm going to ask one more question and then I think we'll wrap it up. Well, there's one question that just came in. I know the quick answer, which is the important dates on the right hand side of the screen. What is that?

Oh, yeah, so we didn't. We wanted some type of calendar function for people. So all that doing is anything that got a post somewhere else. That's another thing that Angie and I are doing. Someone posts and they say, you know, we're going to have the car wash folks are at our Lyle office, they'll post that and all we do is go in and add it as a resource like a manage. Using the tool that you can kind of manage links, we link to all those posts. So if someone has a question and they need to get to it, they can just get to the. The post or the page. You know, Labor Day as a paid holiday. If you click on it, it'll take you straight to our payroll calendar. So people can see paid holiday dates and stuff like that. So yeah, we're, we're sort of manually updating that, but it keeps it front and center for people.

Yeah, great. All right, now my final question, which is what is the biggest mistake you made and how did you fix it? What's your lesson learned?

Yeah, I'll take that one. Maybe not mistake, but a rabbit hole that we initially went down. As I mentioned, I uploaded the vast majority of our essential content, handed it over to Matt's team where the good thing about synthesis is it's so easy to reorganize data. Right. As we rolled it out to beta testers, as we rolled it out to our executive team and our leadership team, everybody had a little bit different opinion on how things should be organized. For a while, we tended to move pages around, nest them in different levels. Eventually we, yeah, you can see there with the content outliner how easy it is to move those around. What we ended up doing is really rooting what we did in the recommendations that we got from Chris and Susan of hey, over years of building these intranets, here's where most people look to find information. In the end, we found that to be the most reliable, the most, you know, made most sense for our company and for our content. So that is one thing that we started to go down that path of all these different possibilities and ways in which we could organize data. But what we kind of wound up with was, hey, if we stick with this proven, you know, formula that you all shared with us, once people get into alma, once they know where that information is located, it'll become intuitive as they build that proficiency in finding that information.

Thanks for sharing that. I know it's helpful for folks to hear what, where you might have got caught up and they don't need to get caught up with when they get into it. So let's talk about how you approach the work. So in terms of timeline, we started scoping your intranet ALMA out at the end of last year. And then in February, you really got to work and you launched in June. And in that period, February to June, prepping for today, you talked about your work in two parts. One being getting the right content and having it be really high quality, getting that all set up. And the other was preparing employees to receive and use everything that's being built and participate. So I'd like to chat about those a little bit at a high level, starting with getting the right content in place and making it of high quality, which, Nick, I know is your area. So tell us a little bit about how you did that, what you did, who was involved.

Yeah, sure. So as you said, we started off on this journey kind of viewing this as two main pieces up front getting us to that launch point. Both the essential high quality content and drawing users into that interface were our two main concerns. Both highly dependent on one another and both critical to the overall success of the, of the project. So before we even had access to our platform, you know, we took stock of the essential content that we had and we were very lucky that we had a rich library of content that we thought and that we were confident that our employees wanted and needed again, for personnel related matters to the technical work that they, that they perform. So this allowed us to get a little bit of a jump on preparing to upload that essential content. So in the first two weeks of building out ALMA and uploading our information, I was able to upload a big chunk of our essential content. And one of my goals there was really to prevent anybody from staring at a blank page. Right. I strive to get around 90% of the essential content for any given function prepared and ready to go for folks like accounting and HR and information technology. And there were a few distinct benefits I think that, that we were really looking to kind of capture. So first, we were able to curate a very consistent format and feel throughout. By using a real simple format, consistent format, it made it easier for Matt and his team to shape that content, which you'll see a little bit later. Closer to launch, it also helped us to maintain momentum. So again, no one other than Matt and myself were left to, to build a page from scratch. Each functional lead was, you know, they were, I think, excited, slash relieved to see a mostly completed product that they could really take ownership of. And it was easier for them to take ownership of as we prepared for launch again. And then finally, you know, it created this organic review cycle. I collected and uploaded and formatted the content. Our functional leaders had a chance to review it, organize it a bit, finalize their content. And then Matt and his team tied everything together from both a logical and a branding standpoint. And it gave us again, a real natural way in which we could get multiple eyes on each section.

Yeah. And then, Matt, you got involved also in February, but I think after Nick had done that two week push and then you came in, and I remember Nick telling me that every day for three weeks straight, every time you opened Alma, it would have a different logo because you were right in on how does this look, how does this feel? But I know you were doing more than just logos, you know, for a few months. So, yeah, like, how did, how were you, what was motivating you to really communicate with employees ahead of time about what was coming and prepare them? And then, like, what did, literally what did you do to prepare them before the Internet was in their hands?

Yeah, the, the handoff of sorts played so well for us because, because Nick was able to get all of that stuff in there, by the time my team and I got in there, we could really look at it as this holistic intranet that was almost usable at that point. But we could look at it from the user experience and say, okay, here's. We've hardly look at, looked at this at all. You know, what are we seeing? Where, where are gaps? You know, how can we make this better? And so really what we wanted to do was take, okay, we've got all this information in there, how do we make this really great, like a good experience for employees? And that was, that was our focus, but we did that. The logo thing is almost as ridiculous, funny as it sounds, but it was fun for us. But we, you know, Susan had shared examples with us of other really polished intranets and we were like, that's what we want. That's what we want it to look like. So we just kept playing with logos. And what's, what's neat about the, the way the branding part of the tool works is we could design a logo, think it's going to work, it looks good on paper, and then we would upload it, spend a day looking at it, and there's like, it doesn't quite fit. So we had a lot of fun with that tool, actually. And then, you know, it was actually like a week or two before I realized that Nick was seeing them change every day because he was in there too, but he was about the only other one in there. But on top, like, we really wanted to get the brand right and we wanted it to feel polished and we wanted it to feel uniquely primera, even though the tool is pretty much an out of the box. You know, we got handed this really polished out of the box tool and all we did was add a couple of bows and stuff here to make it feel really custom for us. And so that was a big win. But the other, you know, that making it feel right was, was one thing, but getting people to want to see it, to understand what they were going to see, to know that it was coming, that was a big part of what we started focusing on in early April, I think. And, you know, so we had a, we had a rollout period in the back end that was probably six or more weeks once we started moving. But those were the kind of multiple components where one, we started creating some teaser videos and we wanted to get content out there. Just send people an email and say, you know, we started that one month from launch and so get people excited. Hey, this is, we've been talking about it for a year. We've been saying we're on, you know, we're on the Docket with Knowledge Architecture, we're going to do this, but to be able to start sending stuff out and say, hey, this is coming and all the information you need is going to be in this one central place, which never existed for us. Like nick said, Our SharePoint intranet was rough. So we started sending those out a month out and we had a couple of others focused on the fact that the information was going to be in real time. Like you would get real time updates, all of the information in one place. Like I mentioned, there's this wildly social aspect of the way the platform's built, and then the other video really highlighted how to use it and what it was or whatever. So that was one piece of how we were going to communicate it and roll it out. Second piece was getting beta testers involved and building sort of a team of champions. And we did that with like a three pronged approach, which I'll talk about a little bit later, but getting people in there and letting them see it, even if it was a month out and it was still a little bit rough, we got feedback from people and we were able to make changes based on the hiccups that they might have felt. But also we got them excited. Like, our CEO was one of the first people in there once the rest of us had done our part and she could not walk around enough and sort of proclaim to people how great this was and what an excellent tool it was. And that type of excitement, starting with our, you know, leaders, was a really, really big win. And then, you know, the last part that I think was a little bit unique is we, starting in mid April, started populating everything. Like we were using the activity stream as someone new got access that might have something to add, we'd work with them and say, hey, can you post this? Even though it's going out by email? Because employees couldn't see it yet. But what we wanted for that was by the time beta testers were in there, but on launch day in June, as people got in there, they're like, wow, this is how you use the activity stream. And this is what I can see this policy here. And hey, I'm going to find out about this in this place. And we really didn't want it to be like, oh, there's a chat feature here, but it's blank. And so we were posting stuff even though no one can see it. And I think that really helped it feel organic and real on launch day.