Jim Chambers & Jim Martin | Designing a Successful Hybrid Practice at Shepley Bulfinch

As Chris mentioned, back when we started, everything was in black and white. This is actually one of our. This is our first office, the Coops. And this is in the 1800s. And we practiced architecture a lot different back then. So we've been working continuously on how Shepley Bullfinch needs to present itself as the ages kind of change. We've done a lot of projects and we've changed a lot of times and seen a lot of different stuff. Fortunately, we haven't been there the whole time, so we've only seen maybe the last X number of years. But we have a lot of stories from history. We have a historian who tells all these cool stories about things that we've done. I am the CIO of Chubby Bullfinch. I am a geek and I am a KA Groupie. I have gone to as many of these things as I possibly can and I learned something every single time and it's fantastic. I also occasionally tell stories on the stage about Shepley Bullfinch and the things that we do that fall into the weirdly shaped operations of what knowledge management is as we all figure out where those boundaries actually are. Sometimes I'm a main character in those stories. Sometimes I'm telling the stories on other people's behalves at Shepley. Jim Chambers has been a major part of several of the stories that I've told on stage. The two of us have worked on the launch of our Internet Finch. We've worked on Ask Finch and Baseball Cards. I had some part to play. Jim had a large part to play. Jim is an architect. He is in charge of all of our practice. He is the vp. He's a fanboy for K. I'm trying to get him onto the groupie chain. I might have oversold it at first and came across creepy. I don't know. Yeah. And. And Jim is basically the bridge between operations and the practice of architecture Bullfinch.

A lot of what we talk about here has been talked about a little bit. We are 150 years old. That is kind of mind blowing to think about. We do, contrary to popular belief, have five physical studios along with what we call our virtual studio. So that's where all the other bullfinches are that don't regularly go into a studio. We've been around a long time. We focus primarily in higher education, healthcare. We're starting to dabble in science and technology. And then we've been working with urban development for about a decade or so. Currently we're around 175. We've been hovering around there for the last couple of years. And bottom left, and we'll run. This is kind of what we're here to talk about today. So the thing to note about us, we have been somewhat, on a very minor scale, hybrid for a pretty long time. So we established our first flex time policy back in 1998 that gave people the ability to kind of, you know, you're still working your 40 hours, but you're taking off early here, coming in early there, and so forth. But so that kind of laid the roots for a lot of what we'll end up talking about today.

So we kind of understand what's going on with us and how we can tailor the stories. And also because I like sharing the work and I want to make you guys work for it, we're going to do several raising of your hand exercises. So feel free to notice who else is raising a hand around you. That's a good opportunity to reach out and ask them a question later. But I'm curious, like, who all here is working primarily in person and who all here is working primarily hybrid? And is there anyone here who is working primarily remote? Okay.

Yeah, that math doesn't check out, but I like it.

Yeah. Well, it's interesting because we made the decision during the pandemic to basically go hybrid, and we didn't make that decision easily. But as Jim said, we have done a lot of work over the last 10 years or so in trying to figure out how to do hybrid but with offices. And then when the pandemic came, we started saying, all right, well, let's just do that hybrid with offices, just with all of our individual people.

So I'll talk a little bit about how we ultimately made the choice to go all in on hybrid. Survey was as a lot of people in this room, I'm assuming, did a lot of surveys throughout the pandemic. Point of reference, the red is people that are really not looking forward to going back to an office, green, people that are excited. So not surprisingly, in 2020, people were not ready to go back to the studio. We did see that start to shift over 2021. So people may be more likely more inclined to go back to the studio. But then surges started happening and things started happening. I think people also started to settle into sort of their new normal, their new routine. So the sentiment definitely flipped back to, no, we really aren't looking forward to it, but we'll do what we need to do. And the second thing that we looked at is, all right, so what happened to our people and our project work. Throughout the course of the pandemic, from a people perspective, a lot of people stayed around our local studios. There are some people that chose to leverage the opportunity to move closer to family. Throughout the pandemic, we were very clear when they, they made that choice that this is not something we're going to claw back in six months. So if you want to move, you can move. We'll support it as long as we can. The other thing we looked at was how are we building our project teams together? So pre pandemic, only about 20% of our projects were split across offices. That was primarily between our Phoenix and Boston studios, but a little bit on other kind of more newer studios. But throughout the course of the pandemic, we definitely shifted how we were building our project teams to the point where that whole ratio was inverted. So 20% by the end of the. Or not by the end of the pandemic. By early 2022, when we were trying to make our long term decision, that ratio had flipped. And about 20% of our products were only 20% were staffed out of one office. So all of our projects, most of our projects were cross office anyway. We also then, as we've touched on, we looked at what are the lessons that we learned pre pandemic and have they started to infiltrate into our broader practice at large. So we did do a concentrated effort to share those using our, our Finch, our intranet platform. So we started to see those trickle and they seemed to be growing in adoption. They seemed to be people were more comfortable with them. It went from a few people doing these things to most people doing these things. So that was a sign that maybe we were ready and capable and had a chance to succeed in a hybrid world. So ultimately not really a spoiler because we've kind of titled the whole section on this, but we did go all in hybrid and, but it wasn't without a lot of work. We knew that we weren't ready to just dive in and just said, you know, we finished, we're done, we can do this. But we had to kind of ask ourselves, where do we need to start?

So we're focusing on, you know, evolving our practice and what are the things that we can do in our business to help make hybrid more successful because we are all in and convincing everyone that we know exactly what we're doing and we know exactly how we're going to get there and then just making it up as we go along, as usual. But one of the things that we kind of Found is not everyone had the same amount of empathy for everyone else's position as maybe they could have. And I'm curious if you think that anyone has had an empathy gap at your firm at any point in the last couple of years. All right, well, I was expecting all the hands to go off, but I get it.

For those of you that didn't raise your hand, find us after class.

Seriously. So if we can go on to the next one. The operations team was serving our people a lot because we were really very interested in what everyone was actually going through. And so we had a lot of information about what everyone was kind of thinking around and going through. We were serving them a lot, as you saw earlier. And some people, they wanted to work from home every day, and some people wanted to work in an office because they didn't have an adequate home environment that was conducive to them doing their work. Some people needed to start early or leave early. We had people with unpredictable travel and some people who did no travel at all. Some people were super comfortable with technology and didn't have a problem. And other people were like, please don't do this to me.

This is horrible.

And everyone was just everywhere. So wherever you were, it was a guarantee that someone else was completely in a different place than you were. And not everyone really understood that except the operations team, because we were the ones running all the surveys and reading all the responses.

So we challenged ourselves with trying to figure out how we can get people to appreciate the circumstances of others. So we cooked up this exercise. It's a Persona exercise, really. We're asking people to build a hypothetical bullfinch. We gave them sort of a starting point, so a couple of options to choose from, Be it travel, daily schedules, commute requirements, and the grab bag. Are those are things like the technology. We were also having a number of people that were still concerned about being out in the world during the tail end of the COVID pandemic. So things like that kind of made up the grab bag. And basically what we did is we broke the entire firm into small groups during a sort of intensive virtual workshop and had each individual in that small group basically build a hypothetical bullfinch. We asked them very clearly specifically to not rebuild themselves, but to build somebody that they put together a bullfinch that featured characteristics of somebody that they've worked with. So they kind of knew what that characteristic would entail and some of the ripple effects of that personal characteristic. And then we had the small team combine the bullfinches that they built Sorry, we call ourselves bullfinches. That wasn't abundantly clear from context. So we had that small group team build their, put together their team and then talk a little bit about the points of conflict and how they might work through those. So here's an example of one of the real products of this. Interestingly enough, in this scenario, the team members actually built a team that was across three studios. So three people across three studios. So they talked about what are the challenges this represents, what are the commonalities and how might they sort of work beyond those challenges. So it was an exercise in trying to get people to a understand and consider the circumstances that others are going through, but also to start working through those on an individual case by case basis.

So we started trying to do very specific things to strengthen what we thought were skills necessary in order to be effective at hybrid and understanding what were the practices that we've been relying on that were maybe not going to be as helpful or as effective in a hybrid world and trying to kind of figure out what all that stuff was. I'm curious if anyone in the last couple of years has made any changes to their practice that was specifically intended to make working hybrid more palatable. Yeah, well, good news. We did too. And we wanted to share a couple of those with you. One of the things that we did, this is one of the very first things that we did because while we had been working on a lot of cross project projects, cross office projects, not everyone in the firm had had that experience. It just depended on what project you actually were on and whether or not that happened to be one of the projects that had people staffed everywhere. So there were some people in the business who just didn't have that experience. And we wanted to try and figure out, well, how could we, how could we help everyone understand what everyone else has learned? So back to the futures are a lessons learned apparatus framework that we have kind of built. Jen Zagarella, who is in the audience today. And I kind of cooked them off of something that our CEO had done as a one off and try to turn it operational. And we basically just go through, collect a group of people around a topic. In this case, lessons learned from working on a hybrid team and lessons learned managing a hybrid team. And we would go through and we would collect people and we would ask them to share one thing or two things that they would do differently if they could go back in time and two things that they would do the same if they go back in time. So trying to identify the things that worked and the things that didn't and share those all around so that hopefully everyone else can. Can experience that. Everyone kind of talks through a little bit, give some context and make sure that we can provide some of that clarity. Even if you didn't get it firsthand, you can get a second hand.

So the result of these two workshops, it was really foundational to giving us a really clear starting point. We kind of realized a couple things. One, the struggles and the opportunities that both the people working on hybrid teams and people managing hybrid teams were very similar. So there was a lot of commonality there, which, which is a good and bad thing, but alignment is always good. The other thing it showed us is that there are maybe some quick wins that we can start to really adopt quickly. But there are other things that we really need to start to pay more attention to and be more intentional about how we solve and circumvent those issues. So I'll walk through some of the more easy wins and work our way up to the more challenging things. So, first and foremost, scrum boards. It's a tool that is really primarily built around tracking short term tasks for every person on the team. We use Miro. We have full board, jumped in on Miro, kind of to our detriment in early pandemic, but find us and we'll talk about what that was like. But so using Miro, which was the tool that teams were using already for design iterations, et cetera, wanted to keep it in the findable location that they were already in. So that process that kind of made its way around the organization pretty quickly. The other thing which I think has been stressed a couple times over the last day or so, is really making it more than just about business. So like John said, people are coming to work with their whole selves, not just their business selves. So we've been really trying to stress and encourage people to have conversations with their teams that are again, not about business. So these examples, the one on the left, the goats, is an example of a project team has they actually devote a day, a week to a purely no business team huddle. And so they just tell stories about what they're doing in their lives and what they did last weekend or so forth. Somebody talked about seeing goats. It inspired somebody else to go see goats. But then it sort of kicked off this funny, like we use teams for internal coordination, but it kicked off a funny little tail end dialogue between like people sharing their own experiences about farm animals. So it was more than just like in the moment, team bonding. It kind of helped to bridge gaps and to help the team kind of work a little bit more cohesively. Other things that we've done are sort of virtual baby showers, wedding showers, birthday parties, and the like. And again, it's all built around trying to really strengthen those bonds between each other so that when we were faced with challenges on project work, we can kind of get through them a little bit more easily because we're more comfortable with each other now, shifting into things that we knew we wanted to do differently. Communication protocols was definitely something that people thought, hey, we should actually probably talk about talking before we start talking. Sorry, I just amazed myself that actually said that clearly and broke my brain. So really the simple do different thing is to have that conversation early on. Are you okay if I text you? Or does everything need to be through more official channels? Is your preferred method of communication teams chat, or is it an email? And then, by the way, how late is too late? That's particularly important when we have people over multiple time zones. But also some people are night owls and some people are more active in the morning. And then also talking about like, hey, what about the weekends? Are you, you know, are you responsive? Or are you more like trying to maintain the separation of work and life? And then time talked a little bit about this piece of it, but really being conscious of time. So we had going back working with the Phoenix studio, it's always been or it was kind of on the forefront. We had to do a lot of work to get it to be the forefront. Phoenix does not observe daylight savings time. So every six months we had to like, recalibrate our own internal perception of, like, when is a good time to meet with our colleagues if they're across studio. So this is an artifact of something that we physically handed out to remind people that the time change happened for some of us, but not all of us. But it's. It became way more important throughout the pandemic and being hybrid because we also started to have people not in one of our studios, but more virtually. So we're starting to touch basically every time zone within the US So really just a reminder, be conscious of time because it's important. So now the more slightly more challenging thing, a lot of those things, the last couple of examples I talked about, we're really starting to talk about establishing social norms within a project team. We had a previous list of questions that we had out there pre pandemic that was really. It's a tool for teams to have a conversation about all of these things beforehand. But we did brush it off after the pandemic and kind of took the next iteration to us. And what we did, what we've done recently, is to basically seed all of those questions with potential answers. So this range runs the gamut from the stuff. Here is examples of firm policy. So, like, we. We want you to maintain your personal calendar so that people know where you are, when you are, when you're available. There are things that we prefer. We prefer not to be working 24 7. But we do understand that in this nature or in this business, it's kind of unavoidable sometimes with deadlines and other pressures. And then there's the yellow stuff, which is really, we leave it up to the team to kind of negotiate and figure that out at their own level. And then a couple other things, again, easier things. Our town halls, which I think a lot of people do. Town halls. We found ourselves with some awkward time at the beginning of the town hall while people were sort of rolling in. So we introduced the concept of Icebreaker. So some of these things are pretty off topic. What's your favorite Muppet? You know, that really doesn't have much application to the business other than strengthening social connections. But some of them are a little bit more pointed. So the first question up there, what are you looking forward to doing on your summer vacations? That's kind of a gentle reminder. Please take your pto. We want you to not get burnt out. We want you to use this. So as much as we sort of can feed that into. But also, again, it starts to strengthen those social connections. People understand that gyms favorite Muppet characters are Beaker. What?

Yeah.

That's a lie.

Well, that was not for me. That was Waldorf and stuff. That was actually our CEO's favorite. She couldn't remember their names.

You were finding the pictures.

I was hoping I was helping.

You're such a helper.

Yeah.

Okay. And then if you find Jen Zagrello, she'll talk to you about her passion for animal. She's out here somewhere. I won't necessarily point around. And then the other piece that we introduced into our town halls was a Bullfinch Spotlight. So we started by doing Project Spotlight. We thought then, hey, maybe we could apply this to the new people joining our business so that they could. Other people in the organization could start to get to know them over time. We kind of worked our way through all of the new hires, but then gave this as an opportunity for all of our other bullfinches to sort of volunteer to share a little bit about Themselves. So there's basically no structure other than a time limit, which are. I think our CEO still holds the record for the most, the longest time limit. She broke the rules, but she kind of gets to break the rules. But so basically we don't really give people much direction. It's just five to seven minutes. Talk about your life. Sometimes people talk about their professional career growth. Sometimes they just talk about I was born in this country and then work from there. But quite often in there they share some tidbits about things like I have a passion for photography or fun fact about me. I love Calvin and Hobbes. So this bottom, the bottom clip, the comic is a comic that I shared with the organization because it's something that I can look at in any moment in time, no matter how grouchy I might be. But it always kind of makes me chuckle. And then so what this usually, what usually happens from these is people leave their spotlight and open teams back up or look at the chat stream and you're always like presented with like 10 to 15 connections of other people in the organization that share some connection with you.

You.

There are really some funny small world stories that we have. So a person that shall be named or shall not be named turns out that she was in like a dance class with a. No, no. Another coworker's wife like 20 years ago. So like those really funny, like small world connections that we really, we would have struggled to establish without this mechanism. All right, so now the favorite thing everybody loves policy. To root all of this. We did actually end up writing a form policy. So Shepley is not a very big policy driven organization. But for this sort of fundamental shift in our organization, we felt that it was really important to establish some, some baseline. So first and foremost, this defines hybrid. So hybrid does not mean purely in person or purely virtual. It means a mix of the two. So we do stipulate that we expect people to get together when they need to get together and sort of give some examples of what those might be. And first and foremost, like, this is all about aligning the expectations between the employee and the organization. It's presented as a pretty high level summary bullet points. But each one of those bullet points we have a more detailed wiki that expands upon those. So when we say we expect you to meet your job commitments from wherever you are, we talk a little bit about what we mean by that. But it's all rooted in trying to make sure that we all have an equitable experience. And again, it's talking about balancing Expectations. So it starts with what the firm expects. We expect you to meet the needs of our clients. We're a service industry. It's kind of fundamental to what we do. But at the same time we give you the license to do that work from wherever you think you can be effective. And then the last little bit that we have developed from those early things is understanding that inner office, being in person together is important. We wanted to build a mechanism for allowing for that. So we set aside a small budget. We actually had like a six month period where we didn't have to pay a Boston lease. So that, that freed up a little bit of money in our budget that we could set aside for or what we call inter office travel. We started off with a little bit, probably too strict of a process and had too many rules. And what it actually resulted in is people not doing what we wanted them to do. So we took all the rules off and we said, get together with your teams. You don't really need much approval. We'll reach out if it's out of whack and have a conversation. But please be respectable, be prudent with the money. But we want you to not feel prohibited to be getting together with each other in person. So don't use distance as an excuse. Here's some money. Go book the flight if you need to. We have used that for a lot of project stuff. We've also used it as celebrating our 150th anniversary this year. We brought everybody into Boston and really also captured that time to be. We ran an in person sort of charrette with the, with the entire firm. So we also. That's another thing we challenge people to like, hey, if you are making the effort to go to a different studio, maximize your time as much as you can. So figure out other ways to connect with, with people.

I've also bought, I don't know, like 20 portable monitors. Because occasionally project teams will decide that the best place to then get together is on a client site or nearby a client site. So we'll frequently just say, all right, well here's 25 monitors, go set them up. And everyone can have two monitors sitting in a conference room in a hotel near the actual site doing the things that they're doing. So it's sometimes to one of our studios, sometimes to our clients site, sometimes to a third party location. The trick is get them together when it makes sense for those points in time in the project where that is the most effective way for them to get that work done. So I am Curious here. Who here has ever had the experience of delegating work to someone and having it come back? They come back, they're so psyched. They're so pleased to show you the thing that they have created out of their time. And you look at it and you try and find a tactful way of saying, that is not what I was looking for. And where was it yesterday when I needed it? All right, well, that was everybody.

Let the record show.

Yeah, let the record show. So in my IT department at Chubby Bullfinch is a little bit weirdly shaped. We are eight people, which is, I thought was a lot before Ellen went this morning. But half of my department is expected to rotate through. So they're. They're kind of. They're transient IT people. We hire them out of Architecture, interiors, design school. We bring them into the IT department. We. They do frontline support. They do application development. They do R and D for us. They do all kinds of cool stuff. And then we release them back to their career onto project teams after maybe a year and a half, two years, something like that. The trouble with that is that is the quintessential bill to do not buy. But that is hard on a department. So the four people who are like the core of the department, who are sticking around, are constantly answering questions from people who don't know what they're doing. And the new people coming in are experiencing the joy of not having any idea how to be good at their job for the first three months that they're actually here. So creating a support structure for these folks is incredibly important. And one of the things that I noticed is when I would ask them to do something, they would say, absolutely, I'm on it. And then they would show me what they did, and I would realize that I had not given them the correct direction because they gave me something that was not what I was looking for. And I could be perfect. That was an option, but it didn't seem likely. So what I did instead is I started an exercise where I would ask them, okay, great. It is not your job to say yes when I ask you to do something. It is your job to make sure you understand what the assignment is and then say yes if you think you're capable of doing it. So giving them the choice and actually putting a little bit of responsibility on their. On their heads, because that is way easier for me, honestly. So I would go through and I'd say, all right, great. Spend the next 15 minutes and write down all the questions you think you should Be asking anytime anyone gives you an assignment, whether that's in our department, in IT or eventually when you go into projects, worked your project manager. And then we'd go through that, and then we would actually sit down and we would say, okay, great, that's fantastic. So let's pick three. What do you think the three most important questions you need to ask are? And I went through, and I did that probably 15 times. And it was pretty effective. We got to the point where after we do that exercise, we would get many more questions before they would say yes to doing something. And I noticed a marked improvement in the quality of, and what my expectations were for the quality of what they actually were bringing back. So Jess Purcell, who's my director of digital technology, design technology, one of those things, she and I kind of took this thing and we did an experiment and kind of grew it a little bit, and then we handed it off to Jim. What was that like?

If you know Jim Martin, you know that he's convincing and he'll get what he wants. So he tried to hand it off to me a couple times. Times I was like, I don't know.

Wasn'T the right time.

Maybe it's worth. Maybe it's good for you, but not for us. So eventually he wore me down. But we have fully recognized that we were too slow to pick this up. So the better questions exercise again, kind of. Jim talked about like the basic prompt of it, but using the revised structure that Jess had built, we started to pull together emerging professionals. So those folks that are zero to three or four years into their career, those folks that might not know the right questions to ask when taking on an assignment, and then putting them into small cohorts and have them work through this exercise together. So very simply, we ask them, spend a couple minutes, identify a few questions that you should ask when taking on an assignment. And then we unveil this other part of the Miraboard, which we call our bingo card. So this is a tool that we use for people to then take what they have identified as their questions. And then we ask them to bucket that into the data, different pieces. And so what it does is we have. We ask each one person to kind of run through the deliverable section and talk about what the sort of themes are, what maybe they. That came up that they wouldn't have thought to ask, and so forth. We run through that for all the things, but it is not uncommon that one of the eight boxes is empty. So we still use that as an opportunity to say, like, okay, well, Nobody really talked about communication. What is the. What's important to talk about when you. When you need to talk about communication? So it's a way for them to kind of learn from each other, but then we can start to fill in the gaps a little bit and help them out. So again, sharing a real world example, of course, we had to pick one that didn't have a box filled in to prove to the few all that it actually does happen that way. So what we started to do recently was one of the things, points of resistance that I had when Jim was trying to sell me on the idea was, I don't know, it kind of might make supervisors feel a little bit pressured if their staff is all of a sudden asking these challenging, potentially challenging questions. Not that like, what's the due date? Is a challenging. Should be a challenging question, but you never know. So we thought, how can we start to get the supervisors to understand that their team members might be starting to ask them more clarifying questions as they go on? The natural one was like, let's just run them through the Ask Better Questions exercise. But then I was like, well, what if we just flip it and we just asked them to give better direction? So we ran through. We have a group of individuals, our organization called directors. They're all probably like 20 plus years of organization. They're subject matter experts. They're leaders in the organization. So I pulled them aside one day and I said, you're going to be my guinea pig. I'm going to run you through this exercise. And then ran them through basically the inverse of the asking better questions again, giving better direction or giving what information should you provide? I mean, it was really enlightening that people with 25 years of experience actually learned from each other. They were not one of them left the room without one or two questions or types of questions that they should be, or, sorry, information that they should be giving to their team members when they're handing out an assignment. So we fully plan on doing that more in the future from both ends of the spectrum. And of course, the challenge is like, okay, then what about the people in the middle? And it gets a little bit more gray. So we're going to figure that out as we go forward. Yeah.

So I considered trying to have something under everyone's chair so we could have an Oprah Winfrey moment here. But I didn't think I could pull that off. So instead we actually got K to upload a copy of the bingo card onto the mobile app. So if you go to this speaker Section at the bottom, there's a little link and then you can actually have what we think is currently the eight boxes in our bingo card for ask better questions. It'll likely change. It's changed in the last year. That's where it is right now. We will basically we'll tweak it based on what we're seeing from people running through it. So, you know, hopefully it's interesting for everyone. Then you don't have to take pictures of things on the screen. All right, so one of the things that I noticed that was a big change between working in an office and hybrid is I felt like it was impossible to see what people were going through. I'm curious if anyone else thinks that that's a similar thing. So we truly believe that if our people are having a good day, then they're going to make our clients have a good day also. And it is exponentially harder for our people to satisfy our clients needs and have them have a positive experience if they're currently on fire. So. But in a world where there is one hour chunks of time on a webcam, it's, it's pretty easy to keep your, your, your shit together for an hour and then who knows what you're doing after you get off cam? Um, when we were wandering around in the studio, you could see if someone was having a super bad day or they were having a meltdown or whatever. And you could provide some support or ask them how they were doing or express some concern or do a number of other things, but only if you kind of knew what they were going through. So we were surveying everyone. Hey, how's your day? How's everything going? How's it all feeling? And that went great. So we did some more surveys and that went great too. So we did some more surveys and then we got the feedback that, thanks for asking, but I'm not answering anymore because I have to work.

As it turns out, my answer hasn't changed exactly.

See last week's response? So we really, we kind of figured that the direct approach was great and still has a part to play, but maybe is not the thing we should be doing on a weekly basis.

All right, so we, we shifted to try to ask ourselves, where can we find potential indicators of this kind of stress that people might have? So I forget if it was said, but I oversee the staffing group at our, at our organization. I am also a nerd when it comes to data. So I was already starting to dabble in some of the, some of, some of our data passively employee data, time cards, and then project data and kind of triangulating all that kind of stuff. I use Excel. I don't know if there are other Excel nerds. There's at least one we can bond over a beer. Although I'm sorry, as it was said earlier, architects don't really love to interact with Excel.

Some.

Some. That's true. I guess I'm an exception. Yeah, there are some exceptions, but for the most part they like to have something a little bit more robust, a little more visually pleasing. The added benefit. So we have migrated a lot of this, this stuff to Power bi. The added benefit is it's a heck of a lot easier or harder, excuse me, to break Power BI than it is to break Excel. So we have again, we started our journey in this with looking at stuff from a staffing perspective. So the question that I started with first and foremost was what are people working on? And then we sort of started to slice that up by, you know, what is this specific individual working on? And then also looking at what are the pro, who's working on this project or who's working with this client. Over time, people started asking other questions and every time I asked, got asked a question, I added another dashboard to the suite and it grew and it grew. Somebody asked about like who has too much time planned or who's using or billing too much time. So we've built dashboards that look at utilization rates and then also we're starting to use that for looking at who might have availability coming up. So that's the under planned piece. So great from a staffing perspective. But of course, as people see these things, they start to say, hey, what about this? What about that? Can we use that? Can we answer that question? So over time it evolved into looking at some of our firm wide metrics. So utilization ratio. A couple examples here. Looking at things like our utilization ratio, we are probably in the middle ground here where we don't necessarily hold people accountable for a specific number, but we use that as an indicator for when things might be a little bit out of whack and then start to have conversations with folks about where that might be heading south or north. And then the other piece, things like hours by phase. So looking at how our future planned hours are allocated to different design phases, the thing, the sort of genesis or thought behind that is as long as our CA work is pretty steady and other things start to taper, it kind of represents sort of a healthy ongoing role of our project work. So kind of keeping an eye on that So a lot of other questions, a lot of other dashboards that I could probably talk for eight hours about this whole suite, but nobody would like that. So keep plowing forward. We then shifted from those firm metrics. We're like, okay, that tells us fine that we are maybe overutilized as an organization. But it doesn't really, again, start to get at are the individual people too spread thin? Are they working too hard? So these are our two primary metrics for whether people have been or might be working too much time. We call it over utilization. And so the little the emojis here represent people that are working more than 48 hours a week or people that are planned to work more than more than 48 hours a week. We use 120% as our like, yeah, we shouldn't be having people work more than that. But again, this is just an indicator for us to start to have a conversation. Similarly, we also look at how our people split across our organization. So we don't really have a very hard, studio driven, principle driven. It's not like they have a fixed team. Our employees ebb and flow over projects. So it's not uncommon that they're working for multiple clients or multiple principals or multiple projects. But obviously we don't want that to go too far. So these are some metrics we look at the time card data to understand, like how many people have billed time under too many principles, too many on too many projects, or too many clients. And then again, it's a source of conversation that we can go out, reach out to the individual, talk to them about it. Hey, is this a, like, what's going on? How are you handling it? Some people love it. I don't know. Some people like to have their hands in a lot of fires. Other people don't really like it. And so that's an opportunity for us to sort of step in, talk with their leadership, see how we can rectify that situation. Other times, it's just a quick transition between two projects. And we caught, we looked at the data just a one week where they were a little bit out of whack. So again, it's not necessarily a hard metric that we're tracking over time, but it's a way that we can periodically check in with people that might be working a little bit too hard or struggling. I mean, for me, the thing with, if you're working on too many projects with or clients or principals, it's a potential that the individual might be struggling with prioritization. So you got two principles. They're Both going to say, my priority is your top priority. Figure out how to get through. Not great. We don't want to do that. So helping people kind of work through that, navigate that is kind of where we've been using this. So that actually led to. When Jim and I were putting together this conversation, he challenged me in the topic of continuously evolving our organization. What if we combined all those things together? Could we make a burnout metric? Like a singular burnout metric that looks at all those things? So my reaction, of course, is like, no, probably not. But, okay, maybe we can. And we, of course, naturally started with, like, actuals. Like, are people working for too many clients? That whole spiel. Are they using their pto? Are they working too much? Are they having too much of their time on project work? Or whatever? So it's a potential. We literally haven't started building this dashboard, but probably in the next month or so, it'll have at least an alpha version of it. But the. The idea is that we would be able to look at that and say, okay, so, Aaron Eagle, everything's pretty good with her. Fred Finch. Maybe there's a sign that something might be a little out of whack, but, whoa, we need to check in with Betty because that's exceeding our sort of target metrics for those. Those areas. And then the ultimate dream is that we start to look at our plan data to predict this. So rather than saying, hey, I'm sorry that you just had a rough two or three months, it's, hey, it looks like you might be having a rough two or three months. So we're going to get ahead of it with you and resolve those points of conflicts before they even happen. That's the dream.

Yeah. I wish we had to cut a lot out of the deck. And Jim's. Jim's dashboards are pretty amazing. I've been very impressed, and I'm a little bit hard to impress, but they're very cool. And at some point, maybe at K, we will have not just Internet tours, but maybe dashboard tours, and we can all kind of share this cool stuff that we're doing. That'd be pretty fun. All right, so Carol Wedge was our CEO. She has moved on, and we have a new CEO who's amazing. But one of the things that Carol said at GA Connect, which really resonated with me, is that Shepley Bullfinish is a fixer upper. Again, none of the people who are working at Shepley saw Shepley start. We are caretakers. We are just carrying on the fight. And I have an old house myself, and it is in a constant battle against entropy for keeping that thing up and running. And it doesn't feel too much like different than actually working on Checkpley. So I'm kind of curious, like, raise your hand. Who here thinks that they're working for a fixer upper also? Yeah. Okay. Well, the good news is that this community especially is great for fixer uppers because we can all figure out what tools we are working on. Everyone is always incredibly generous. I know that for as much as I've been up on the stage at ka, I have gotten so much value from the things that other people have shared. So ask questions. Feel free to reach out to us. We are happy to kind of share things. Get Jim to show you his dashboard. If you're interested in that sort of thing. You guys can nerd out on it. And thank you very much for paying attention to us for the last 45 minutes.

Yeah. Nice job, guys.

Thank you.

All right.