Kristina Williams, Design Technology, Lionakis | The Power of Embedded Change Agents

So as the Director of Design Technology at Leinakis, Christina Williams' aim is to incorporate technology in a way that makes staff feel comfort with and excitement for the rapidly changing applications that help her firm deliver projects and communicate design. She works closely with all levels of the firm to strategically drive the implementation of current technologies while also exploring emerging technologies for future use. In her role, she wears many hats, including delivering training, researching new tools, and advocating for professional development and knowledge management. And I can say that I have known Christina for several years and have always loved her combination of strategic thinking, creativity, and humor, which I think you'll see play out today. So I'm very happy to welcome Christina Williams to K Connect. Christina, will you please turn your camera on, unmute yourself, and then you can go ahead and share your screen. The stage is all yours.

All right, thank you so much, Chris.

Sure.

And let's see, I'm sharing my screen now. Let me get this bar out of the way so you don't see a little blob there.

Okay, and then, all right, so screen looks good?

Screen looks good.

All right, um, so thank you everyone for taking the time to spend with us today. So glad to see all of you here.

As Chris said, I am Christina Williams, Director of Design Technology.

I actually started out as a little old Revit specialist at Lionarchus, and I'm coming up on my 9th anniversary here. Been in the industry for 12, and just like Chris said, and I'm sure a lot of you also wear many hats, primarily design technology, but also helping to lead our knowledge management efforts Standards, and I've just joined our EDI committee as well, and I'm really excited about that.

A little fun fact about me, and very coincidentally, the last 3 cities, or the only 3 cities I've lived in in my adult life, have all been capital cities, so I don't know how that happened.

A little context about Lyonakis so you can get acquainted with us. We have a rich history with over 100 years of designing for our communities. Our original founder was George Sellon, who's the first state architect for California. So this position was formed in response to the great 1906 San Francisco earthquake.

And George Sellon later in 1909 founded our roots with his private practice.

So it's always been an exciting bit of history for us. We are an architecture, structural engineering, and interior design fir— firm with 185 employees and growing. We have 4 offices, all in California, and our core markets of higher ed, K-12, healthcare, civic, commercial, and most recently science and technology.

And a little Design Technology 101 for those of you who may not have this type of department in your firms.

I like to describe it as a combination between IT and design. So if you take your IT team and you give them some design background, then you have them do similar tasks like researching and implementing technology, providing support and training. That's basically design technology, but We focus on design and production-related software. So our backgrounds allow us to really relate more closely to our project teams and understand their needs.

And I know in other firms, it can be called different things like digital practice or design applications, or maybe even at a smaller firm, you might have a BIM manager that does a lot of similar things that we do.

And what I'm here to share with you today is a program that's near and dear to my heart, and it has been for 9 years now, pretty much my whole time here at Linearchus. And this is our Design Technology Bootcamp program. It's an annual training program that we hold, but you'll see very shortly here that it's so much more than just a training program. So in a nutshell, we basically take select individuals from across the firm.

So these are our own internal project team members.

They're architects, designers, structural BIM technicians, and we provide them with advanced design technology training. And all the while, they're still remaining in their same studios or markets, they have the same title. Just when they graduate from the program, they have an added role of Design Technology Support Specialist, or DTSS. It's kind of a mouthful. Honestly, I wanted to change it a while ago, but now it's stuck in, and we still love using it.

So Basically, these DTSS are an extension of our design technology team.

They help advocate for technology that we implement. They help us demo and test new software. They provide support and training, and they help manage content in their markets.

And before I get into—

before I get too much further, I wanted to kind of remind everybody to keep in mind that although this is for focused on design technology, this could really have an application in many other practice areas. So if, if you take it and maybe have a different larger or smaller scale or a different structure, kind of just keep that in mind if you're part of a different department. And I'll look forward to discussing how you might see it take shape at your firm too. So we started in 2013 with 3 individuals in our Sacramento headquarters, and the next year we added several more individuals and we branched out to other offices. We continue to train DTSS, and we didn't really know how it would take shape over the years. The numbers just grew and grew. And before we knew it, by 2018, we had 28 graduates that had been through the program, and then 35 in 2019, and then last year it was 39 individuals that had graduated. And I say graduates because, as you might expect, not all of these graduates are still with the firm today. So today we actually have 23 DTSS. And though comparatively it seems small compared to that 39, when you consider that this is 25% of our production staff, it's actually quite big. So, um, also those graduates that aren't with us anymore, we still had the pleasure of working with them for several years after their respective graduations. And we like to think that by sharing our knowledge with them over those years that we had a a part in helping to improve our industry in a small way too. And so that 25%, of course, means that for every DTSS, there are 4 production users. And remember that they're sitting in the studios when we are back in the office. And that means that there's a DTSS sitting to the left, right, or across from any production user at any time. And these are peers assisting peers, so they can jump in and help out on support or discussing some sort of workflow anytime it's needed at the time that it's needed. And this also accounts for 54 hours of invested dedicated training for these DTSS, 24 hours of support that they provide, around, um, 3 hours of instruction from the DTSS and 24 hours of participation in DT efforts. And this is only the overhead hours that we budget for them, not to mention all of the hours that they spend on billable projects, both on their own becoming more efficient in those and also jumping onto other projects and helping out where needed there. And so more than just the numbers, these individuals are those that we help develop in their careers, and we're giving them opportunities to lead change within the firm.

And I really love seeing all of them grow.

So what really happens during boot camp?

This is what I like to call the boot camp effect.

It's the beginning of the transition for these change agents, a change agent tadpole, if you will. Of course, there's the curriculum, but this could be any curriculum for any department.

So definitely more than happy to talk about the curriculum afterwards, but, um, I really just want to focus on that boot camp effect here.

So first, we're in a room together for a lot of time, and this is a small group of individuals from different markets. And just a little background on our markets is that if somebody's in the education market, they focus pretty much 100% on education projects. So somebody from our civic market getting together with an education market representative, they don't usually collaborate in other avenues. So getting in this room together, sharing experiences, and really getting to know how they do things on their projects really forms a bond with each other. And I truly don't think that this would happen in a larger group or in one-on-one training, of course. So that small group of people that have different experiences and backgrounds is really essential to that bootcamp effect. We really dive deep into the topics. We don't just cover the hows of the picks and clicks, we cover the whys. We get into their heads of what it's like to work on their projects, and then they get into our DT brains too. So there's really empathy that's formed between us. We cover things like how to be patient when doing technical support and how to think bigger picture outside of just their own projects in their own markets. And with this bond that's formed and all that time that we're spending with one another, it really feels like every year we have our own little DT family.

And we, of course, we keep it fun and we play games.

That's a big part of our curriculum for retention. And what you see here, actually, one of our DTSS created their own Revit Chutes and Ladders game, and she did that from what she learned in boot camp one week. She took it back to her own office, and of course, we played it in the next boot camp session. And now it's an official board game that we play year over year. Like I said, retention is really important, so we do a lot of recap quizzes. And of course there are prizes and gold stickers, and we even have a graduation where they receive a certificate and a card.

And I even see— it makes me so happy—

but I see the certificates that are posted up on the DTSS's desks throughout the office and They're, they're really proud when they graduate from boot camp, and as they should be. Of course, we finish with our favorite team building exercise, an escape room, and we're actually trying to figure out how to do that virtually. If anybody has any ideas or has done something similar, we'll talk about that after. So just to recap the boot camp effect, that foundation is formed through the curriculum. There's an appreciation developed for best practices by getting into our DT brains. There's camaraderie, cross-market collaboration, and a sense of belonging with one another. And that's really just the start of their change agent transformation. So then what happens next? This is where the magic continues as the change agents take shape. The DTSS are now empowered. They see their markets and their studios through different lenses, and they have full support from both DT and leadership to affect change.

Like I said, they're embedded in their studio, so they're kind of our eyes and ears out on the floor, and this is kind of how I picture them when they're kind of looking out for inefficiencies on projects and finding opportunities for improvement.

They advocate for our design technologies, so more than just our core programs, but also new technology, production standards, best practices, and so much more. And I interviewed some of the DTSS a little over a year ago, just curious how it's been going for them as a DTSS. And something that really resonated with me is that they felt that some part of their behavior had changed. Something was instilled in them where, because they're now expected to look for those inefficiencies, they have become proactive problem solvers as part of their DNA. They can no longer just sit back and not improve things when they see something going in the wrong direction. They also emphasized a brotherhood and sisterhood that they felt with one another. Remembering that, you know, there's not a ton of collaboration across markets right now, at least at the production level. If they notice that one of their projects is going down the wrong path, they feel completely comfortable to walk over to another market, find their fellow DTSS, spark up a discussion, and it just feels so natural without a need for a preface or a reason for the consultation. They just know exactly who they want to go to, and they can grab from all markets markets from their classmates from that year's boot camp, and, and they get to know DTSS from other years too. So that change agent mentality is that they feel they're empowered, they are empowered, they're proactive, they're aware of the happenings in their studios, and they're connected to their network of fellow DTSS, and they're advocates for all things DT. And some of the more tangible things that the DTSS do, they provide training for one. And a little nod to a previous KA Connect talk from Sarah Kazi from Ratio, not sure if she's on today, but her talk about microlearning and having embedded experts teach training sessions inspired us to have our DT time sessions. So these are short 5 to 15 minute training tips that are presented live weekly by our DTSS. And they're also recorded so that they're made on demand. And our current platform now is through Microsoft Stream on Teams. So they're very easily accessible because we're kind of living in Teams nowadays. They also provide technical support, so both in person when we're in the office and then on Teams and via email. They help us create intranet tutorials or wiki pages. And this is actually a brainstorming session that we had in boot camp one year where we were trying to figure out the gaps in our intranet tutorials. What were we missing? What did we not have to point somebody to when they needed help? And these are very Lionakis-specific workflows, not like Revit 101 or things like that. They also, over the years in boot camp, we've developed the production standards document, and this is a very highly successful— it's one of the most viewed documents on our intranet. It's a full 35-sheet set where we have a mock project, and then we have all these red notes pointing to the drawings, and those red notes are instructional for production standards and best practices. And we even have little hyperlinks to refer back to the more in-depth tutorials on our intranet. A little bit of a closer look on that with our detail sheet. So the black is what would typically be on a drawing, and then the red is the instructional notes.

And we've actually carried this into our typical detail library as well.

Having, you know, code references or things to look out for before you actually confirm and verify this in your project. They help us with product testing and also workflow experimentation. And now that we have so many DTSS, we started to think, what else can we do with their roles? We started 2 years ago with the content champion role.

And this is kind of like a specialty for those DTSS.

So select DTSS are in charge of managing the Revit content for their markets. We in DT, we meet with them biweekly to guide their efforts and also provide them support where needed, see if they need any help with, you know, advocating for them and what they're trying to do with that content. And we invest anywhere from 20 to 60 hours per champion annually, depending on the needs for their market. So we're looking to see what other specialties might be of value in, in a similar fashion, and we're trying to identify gaps where we can have some of those DTSS step in. Model management for one, production standards awareness, visualization and the management of our Revit detail library.

And this wouldn't be complete without talking about how we handled boot camp in 2020. So we were able to fit in our first week, fortunately, in person.

And probably as with anybody else, we held off as long as we could to hold the rest of the weeks, hopefully in person. But of course, that didn't happen. And as with everything, we went virtual. With boot camp. We still kept it fun playing DT Jeopardy. And this one I like to call like VR inception or virtual inception because we were meeting on Zoom virtually, but also in our headsets virtually. And that was really fun because we were able to use our multi-person VR tool to meet together in the same space.

And it, in a really small way, felt like we were together again because you can talk talk to each other through the headsets, and it was really great.

This is our tool called The Wild, by the way.

Of course, we continued with season 2 of DT Time, and there was an easy transition because they were virtual to begin with.

We were now just in people's homes, and we had a little bit more hair, a little bit more casual attire. So a lot of you might be wondering, how did we get here? So taking a few steps back, what was boot camp created for? How did it evolve over the years? And what were some of the lessons that we learned? First, it was created out of a need. So we were in our early years of adopting Revit, and we knew that we needed to elevate the technology skills of more staff than just DT as we were taking on such a big adventure. We needed a support team that was in the trenches helping peers on all the day-to-day support that would come up on our projects as we adopted Revit. And that's still a big part of the program today. Our requirements for candidates started out pretty simple. We just wanted representation from market services and locations, just willing and able soon-to-be power users that can help out.

Our—

it was actually funny to look back on this because I had kind of forgotten, but our original schedule was very ambitious.

We had 3 full days of training over 10 weeks, and the curriculum was basically any DT topic that we could think of: lighting analysis, clash detection, Revit troubleshooting skills, presentation skills. Just everything. We basically wanted these people to be clones of us in DT. And of course, the studio leads were skeptical. This was 240 hours of training from billable staff in just a few months. It was definitely difficult to get buy-in. I wasn't originally as a Revit specialist, responsible for getting that buy-in, but I did help develop the curriculum, develop the plan, and it was, it was hard, but we had to keep in mind that as a firm, we had committed to Revit, and we knew, leadership knew, that with that commitment, we needed something to get us there more smoothly.

And so I think that, that was really a lot of what helped us get that original buy-in.

And over the years, we would still get a lot of pushback, especially with those early graduates that were no longer with the firm anymore. So we would constantly hear the, "What if we teach them and they leave?" And I was so thankful that I had been at KA Connect many times and I was prepped with the absolutely perfect answer of what happens if we don't. And they stay. So that really resonated a lot with our leadership, and it really enforced the importance that we see in developing our staff. So we ironed out some wrinkles. We listened to feedback. It was difficult for staff to be in and out of projects in the same week because we were only doing 3 days a week. And so we switched it to be fully focused without project distractions. And it was full weeks, 30 hours a week for one full month. So this also was pretty exhausting. It was exhausting for us as instructors because we were prepping classes in the evening for the sessions the following week. It was hard for retention from the staff, from the DTSS, because they were cramming so much into one month and not really taking it back and applying it to projects right away. So the stuff that they learned in week 1 had to be re— you know, brought out of their exhausted brains at the end of that month. And so many factors led us away from this schedule too. It was also taxing for the studios, as you can imagine, to lose their staff for a whole month.

It was hard to really work around that.

So we adapted again. That was so important about the continued success of the program is just adapting and listening to the studio's needs. When somebody comes and tells you like, hey, this is— this was really hard in our studio, you don't say like, oh, well, this is how it needs to be.

You just have to kind of deal with it.

You listen and you compromise and you make it work for everybody so that there's less resistance to the program.

And so when we adapted, we stretched it out.

We tried to trim off a little bit of the fat from the curriculum and also not not dive as deep into some of the topics. And with that, over many years, we were able to, you know, massage the curriculum down to 54 hours, which was a pretty impressive drop. But, um, I think just not diving as deep as we normally would have, it became more of an exposure to some of those topics. As, um, and we knew that instead of being clones of us in DT, they just needed to be aware and to be a bridge for us to those studios. So that's where really helped in getting that curriculum down, and then spreading it across 3 months was a lot more easier on our project teams. And this is actually where we found our groove. I can't remember what year it became this, but we've been doing this schedule for several years now, and it's been pretty successful. We also learned a lot of lessons in selecting candidates for boot camp.

So if you remember, at first, it was just about representation. And now we have learned a lot more. So timing is really important.

We started to see a trend of people selecting their all-stars for bootcamp, and these were all-stars that were— that already had some experience under them and were ready to take on more project responsibilities too. So we lost a lot of people to immediately after graduating bootcamp. They started taking on more and more project responsibilities and they just weren't able to handle the project responsibilities as well as the day-to-day support. So getting in on the right time where our DTSS are still all-stars for sure today, but they have a little bit more room to grow and they're not immediately jumping into, you know, CA work or something like that. It's also important The loyalty with the firm, we do look at that because we don't want to train somebody who's maybe just here to test out a market and then they're off to another firm.

But at the same time, it's actually not as crucial as you think.

We hope that sometimes maybe if somebody had that thought at first, by going through the program and realizing how much we invest in them and seeing our firm culture, that they'll stay regardless. Another big lesson we learned was personality traits. So the DTSS really have to have a certain comfort level of being vocal and sharing knowledge with their peers, and we found that some of the more reserved DTSS that became more isolated in their work, they didn't disperse the knowledge as much, and, um, That said though, we still want to take into consideration of being inclusive of everyone in our program, and that includes introverts, that of which I myself identify with.

So we're just trying to find, as we move forward, a way to fit them in as well.

And I think that'll really shine in the, the specialties that I mentioned before, like content champions. Thirdly is the interest level.

So the selection process starts at the leadership level, and you really have to be mindful of, do these candidates even want to be at DTSS? So if you select a few potential candidates, then you really want to have that conversation with them.

Are they ready to step into that role right now, or do they want to grow in another area first? We had some DTSS that didn't want to be a part of the program originally, but as they saw it evolve, they were ready to be a part.

And now sometimes we— not sometimes, but actually a lot of times we find that the DTSS are really excited about it.

So that's how we can be sure that this is a two-way investment, that they, they're honored to be a part of the team and we're honored to have them as part of it.

And then skills.

As much as I'd like to say that there's really no requirement and that anybody could be part of this program, they really have to be able to pick up skills quickly. It's a fast-paced program. And we tried one year to have somebody who was brand new to Revit join. It was just overwhelming for them. It was hard to teach mixed levels of skills, and we just need to expect that they have a certain foundation in technology and a knack for picking things up quickly. So over time, the success of the program and our ability to adapt to needs really turned these conversations year over year when we're selecting candidates into more collaborative conversations and not so much buying in and selling the value of it. Now we can just come and say, hey, it's time to select your candidates for next year's boot camp.

What do you think?

So I'm proud to say that in 2019, for the first time selecting our candidates for 2020, a studio lead had proposed their candidate to us long before we went out selling our campaign for gathering our DTSS. And that's when I really realized that this had become part of us. It's just part of our culture now, and people expect and know when to select their candidates for the next year. So what's next for our program coming up on its 3rd year? This 9th year. For one, we are not stopping. We want all the DTSS. We're going to continue even as we gain more and more. Some of the more experienced members, like I mentioned earlier, even they now are gaining more and more project responsibilities, and they've taken on more of like a senior DTSS consultant type of role. We need to continue to elevate the skills and develop our staff, keep the momentum going and the energy fresh. So we've added 5 more individuals for our 2021 boot camp. And a few other things we're looking to grow with as we continue to do the program. One is, of course, those DTSS specialties. I'm eager to see how those are going to take shape.

This year, we've actually already identified individuals for those expanded specialties.

Also, I want to explore the, the long-term path for those DTSS. So what does happen with the senior DTSS? Does anyone ever retire from being a DTSS? What happens when our earliest DTSS become PMs, associates, principals. How can we leverage that opportunity of having them be a DTSS in that leadership role? We also want to look into the metrics. So a lot of our value, to me, it's perceived and implicit.

So how can this be measured?

How can we know whether the program is not of value anymore? That's kind of one of the tricky things of this program is taking all those implicit benefits that I went through in, in trying to quantify them. And I also want to make sure that those that are really engaged, the DTSS, that they're recognized for that.

So to include it in their performance plans as they're billable on projects or in their studios.

I am not their supervisor, so I want to be sure to have more discussions with their supervisors and make sure that they know how much that they're they're being engaged and leading change in their firms. So with that, I just want to thank all of you for joining, and I'm really looking forward to hearing if any of you are up to something similar or want to be up to something similar. Just looking forward to chatting. Thank you.

Awesome. Thank you so much, Christina. That was great. Um, I, um, want to remind folks that if you've questions. We've already got 4 in there. If you want to add questions into Q&A panel or kind of vote some of the ones up, we'll be referring to that. I want to start things off by just asking Christina, where you go to learn about design technology? Are there, you know, conferences or online communities or people on Twitter? You know, where do you learn?

Yeah, so definitely conferences because that's where I see my peers.

In the industry, other people doing similar things at their firms. And really networking is probably the, the biggest place.

Of course, there's the, the classes where we can brush up on new technology, but that networking, there's just no beating that and, and growing your network of individuals that do similar things.

And for folks that are— some of the registration questions made it clear that some folks are new to design technology or building a function. What of those conferences have you found over the years to be the most useful to you in line office?

BILT, definitely.

And they have some actually all over the world, but there's a BILT North America, that's B-I-L-T.

And then they have a pre-conference for, it's called Design Technology Summit. And that's where we can get, we can dive deep into a lot of those discussions with with each other. Autodesk University is a good one.

There are some actually some like VR conferences that I've been wanting to explore.

That's what I like about the conferences being virtual now is you can actually go to more than you would have normally where you're trying to budget maybe 1 or 2 conferences a year. But now you can do so many more. And I wasn't able to get into that, that much last year, but I'm looking to start that this year.

Yeah, right on. I see that there's some other people putting some, uh, some other conferences and programs they like in the chat, so that's, that's awesome. Um, so our first question is going to come from Jason Shingledecker. Jason, I'm going to go ahead and allow you to talk so you can unmute yourself and ask your question.

Okay, great. Um, So I'm just wondering in terms of, of staff, what sort of— are there any in your, in your DT group that are full-time? And then outside of that, do you have an IT department as well? And how many full-time, or sort of what the full-time staffing is?

Yep.

So definitely, um, I do want to shout out, I think he's on today, but, uh, Hector, he's our design technology specialist. So he is, uh, full-time in design technology with me.

We also have two other people full-time in Design Technology. One of them focuses more on project information management. So not so much the design technologies that I've gone over today. And then the fourth one was brought in to focus more on computational design for us and to do a little bit more research. And he's actually going through a master's program.

So we haven't had him around actually for the last year or so. And he was pretty new, so we're looking into how that's going to develop.

But so long story short, we've got 4 of us.

One's not really here and one's in project information management. So really Hector and I are holding down the design technology for full-time. And then what was your second question about the specialists?

Well, just wondering about the IT side of things.

Oh, the IT, yes.

Full-time IT staff that's separate from that?

Yep. So we have 3 full-time IT.

Staff, one IT director, two—

I'm not sure their exact titles, but they help with help desk and researching new technologies. And then we also outsource some of the more advanced network and systems tasks to another company. But that's led by our IT director too.

Great, thank you.

Yep.

Thanks, Jason. Next question is from Ron.

Hello. Yes, I was just kind of, you know, part of the problem we have with design technology here now with education is determining who needs to get what kind of education. And, you know, your boot camp seems to be pretty generic, so I was wondering, is it And your firm is multidisciplinary. Do you have all the disciplines learning the same content to become DTSS?

So, yes.

So it's, uh, so architecture, structural engineering, and interior design, and they are learning the same topics, but many of them, when you get into Revit, are very similar and can carry across the disciplines. But we also have that opportunity where we can have one of them host a course for the others, so exposing them to what they do in their discipline.

And so I think that that really helps.

And, and yes, the boot camp is very general training, but remember that the goal is to kind of form them as DTSS, as that connection with us. And so they're going out there with a different mentality, and they are actually the ones now that help us figure out what the rest of the staff needs. So now they're kind of more in tune with us. And when they hear things out in their own studios on their own projects, they can kind of say it back to us like, hey, I've been noticing that there's been a lot of problems with this issue on our projects. You might want to hold a training session for our studio or for this project team. So that's that part of the eyes and ears in the studios for us.

Makes sense. Thank you. And is there anything other than technical training in that boot camp in terms of, you know, being the eyes and ears or navigating different personalities or things like that?

Yeah.

And so in that first schedule that we had, we actually had like 10 hours of presentation skills, 10 hours of a book club where we read How to Win Friends and Influence People. We talked about soft skills and dealing with people and That was part of what we kind of trimmed down in our curriculum. And we do still cover it, but just not 10 hours of each so that we can be more adaptive in that shorter schedule. But we do, even if something comes up, like let's say we're talking about shared coordinates or linking CAD files or something, we bring up like, here's the like behavior that you'll see with people, like with shared coordinates, it's so complex that people avoid it. And here's how you can make it seem, you know, more approachable and remind them that we have tutorials and just the main thing that you need to know is when it comes up to involve us.

And so you're making that connection in that way too.

Okay, thank you.

Yeah. Chris, you're muted.

That's an unusual thing. Brad Novak has our next question. Hi Christina, how are you?

Hi Brad, good, how are you?

Good.

Um, uh, knowing what you know now, how would you begin a program? How would you start it differently?

Obviously, um, you jumped in with both feet initially just to test the waters, but with your knowledge now, what do you think?

Uh, I think it depends on your firm. Every firm is different, as everybody knows.

You really want to find out what are your pain points.

So for us originally, it was adopting Revit. What's your pain point now?

Does it need to be something like this?

Maybe you started off as just addressing that one pain point, but then you find the value in it, and you expand it to go bigger. So almost going in the opposite direction as I went.

So it really depends on also your firm and your culture.

How difficult is it going to be to sell this to leadership? Do you have any champions on the leadership team that would help advocate for this for you? You could also even start small, maybe start with one market that might be more progressive than other markets.

And I find that when there's peers even at a leadership level that are doing something really cool, then it starts to make them feel behind in their market.

So just analyzing your firm, that's a big part of our, our role in design technology is knowing your people and knowing your pain points and kind of connecting them all together.

Thanks so much.

Yeah.

Christina, on the kind of the theme of lessons learned, like we had, um, Ed Hoffman shared a program from NASA a few years ago at K-Connect called My Favorite Mistake. So if you're thinking about like something you all tried in this journey of 9 years that didn't work, what would you, what would you point out?

That's hard to say because when I really looked back and analyzed it, it was those two of the curriculum and the way we selected candidates, because I found that Maybe it's the way that we selected candidates.

The, the candidates are so important.

So, you know, like, it's graduating the program is one thing, but then becoming that change agent has to—

it's so dependent on their personality and us tapping into that, that I'm still learning every year on how to select those candidates. At first, I feel like we were really just like, yeah, yeah, you want to send someone? Sure, let's do that. I bet that'll work. That'll work, right?

Like when the— some—

when that person didn't have any Revit skills, I was just glad that they wanted to send somebody. They had already put through 3 or 4 people and they didn't know who to put through.

And this new—

he was actually a new hire without Revit skills. And we were just eager to just have the continued support.

So, um, just really selecting the right candidates is huge.

Yeah. And it sounds like what you're saying is at the right part in their career journey, at the right part in their career, and they're interested.

There's a lot of factors, but at the same time, I mean, don't let that also stop you if you're not as in tune with that right candidate, because over the years, you know, it's—

you're, you're still developing that individual. They still have those skills and are more efficient on their own projects, and you're just kind of developing energy around it too.

So, so don't let that like paralyze you in any way.

Yeah, that's great. Thank you, Christina. Um, Rich McFadden, um, you should be able to unmute yourself now.

There you go.

Thank you, Christina. Appreciate sharing. And I think you actually already answered my question, so I'm going to take the floor and ask a slightly different one.

Okay.

Sounds like your question— my question was, who manages the project file storage standardization? Does that fall under design technology? And it sounds like that falls under your project information manager that does that work.

Yeah. Are you talking about like NuForma and file exchange and file exchange and all that data? Yeah.

Yeah, we're an MEP firm, so you can imagine having lots of design technologies across the different firms, but this need for this common piece. So my question, I guess, is a little different then, which is, um, KA has, you know, taught us a lesson's not learned until you embed it into your standard processes. Um, I think our marketing group and our BD focus would turn around and have a different spin on that and would tell us the lesson isn't learned until we know how to sell it.

Right?

You can't share the information. Does your group or the project information manager, how do you guys take this design knowledge, these design lessons, and get them over to the marketing side of the house and sell them?

So, I wouldn't say yet that we really market it that much, to be honest with you. It's not an external a people-facing program for us.

This program is about our people internally. It's about developing them.

It's about improving our practices and improving our projects and making it a better place to work for everyone.

So right now we really are just very internally focused with this program.

And there's been a few, you know, like, you know, tweets or LinkedIn posts about the program, but we're not, we're not selling it that much.

And maybe Maybe we should be.

Um, yeah, my question was a little bit different in that, okay, the, the people that you train that come up with, you know, these great design standards and great abilities often create services that your clients want to buy, right? You're able to solve a problem differently for those clients, and we do it and we can repeat it and we can do it for the next client when it comes in the door, but we have a hard time getting that information when the next RFP comes in, when the next client is asking for you, it's, it's how do you pull that knowledge?

Oh, I think you're—

Out of the production, right?

Yeah. So there's all these great things happening, but you don't really know about all of them. So it's hard to kind of pull 'em out. That we struggle with that too. I think a lot of firms do, but I think, um, that's part of where having this connection with the DTSS helps too, because I'm meeting with them on a regular basis, inquiring about what they're working on, what they're—

what's happening in their studios.

Here's a new tool that we have.

Would you use it on this project?

And so that conversation is kind of pulling out a lot of the project's goings-ons because like it's kind of like that little hierarchy where I too don't really know what's going on until I talk to people. And when I talk to DTSS, they know what's going on in their studios from their peers.

So, maybe finding like that middle person to connect you to them and finding many of them in each market or discipline.

Got it.

Thank you.

Yep.

Awesome. We have a question from Sam. So, Sam, you should be all set to go. Yeah.

Um, so, you know, a lot of people are going to try to, you know, start and they're going down this path. So how did you, or did you face like the old timers, like coming around and adapting, usually reluctant to the change?

That's a good question.

Um, I think it, it, it goes back to A, the peer thing.

So, you know, some of their peers had already bought in and they're, developing their staff and seeing that benefit right away.

Also having full support at the top was really important. So sometimes it might be up to them to send somebody in a particular year or not, but I think if we—

we haven't had this yet, but if I think I— if we had a certain market just stop sending people year after year after year, then I would imagine it might actually become a requirement for them at one point because we have such support at the top. I think that's really important.

Marjan Pierson.

Hello, hello, it's Marjan.

Hi.

Christina, it's nice to meet you. I'm very interested in what you've done. It's a terrific program. My question is whether this is part of a framework that has been developed for your firm in terms of overall developmental initiatives. In other words, are the, are the DTSS the only people who are getting this kind of program, or is, is it a broader program that includes, um, the role description, the KPIs, and the performance plan that's, that's being used throughout your firm?

It—

there is a broader plan.

It's our professional development group, and that's led by an individual in our structural discipline. And it actually—

DT kind of naturally fell into this professional development overall plan because of all the training that was going on. And that individual also leads our emerging professional trainings with EP universities.

And so it's almost like it feeds into that because with the professional development program, they take a lot of our experience that we've had in training individuals.

What have we found the best way—

is the best way for people to retain information, you know, that microlearning kind of thing.

And they kind of pull from our experiences and put that into the professional development program, and then vice versa, the professional development program helps us budget hours for all of that training too.

And so we do have, you know, PD, a PD matrix that we have for every individual that outlines how much training they are to receive each year, and we make sure to advocate that they actually take advantage of that. It used to be, you know, don't use your PD time, it's not billable.

And now we, we, we really strongly recommend that they pay attention to actually using their hours.

So I hope that kind of answers it a little bit.

That answers most of it. I'm gonna, I'm gonna flash back to what Richard McFadden was just saying about marketing as well. Are you finding that through this firm-wide personal development program, professional development program, that it is feeding back into competitive strategy in terms of all of the new ideas and innovations that are being developed throughout the company?

I'm not so sure about the new ideas and innovations, just other than just opening up the floor to having more discussions, because that's what a lot of the training programs are, is having those discussions and spreading those lessons learned.

It has helped with our recruitment though, because we put a lot of the professional development, our DT program, EP program, in our recruitment brochures and in our conversations too.

Are the discussions cross-platform? Do they go— in other words, are there discussions with DTSS and with other functional elements of the company?

Uh, yes.

I mean, a lot of our DTSS are emerging professionals as well, so they're kind of—

because they've become those, you know, proactive individuals, they're often helping in the emerging professionals program and helping spread that knowledge in, in different ways too.

Thank you.

Yes.

Awesome. Uh, we have so many good questions still coming. I invite all of you to join us in the after-party, the virtual hangout afterwards. Christina, I just want to thank you so much for your time and your generosity. I think it was an amazing presentation, super great program, and thank you for, for being willing to share with us.

Thank you, Chris, and thank you, KA, for giving me a platform to share it with everyone.

Um, for everyone here, we'll be sending this recording, the slides, chat log, all that kind of stuff out in a couple days. If you want to join us in the virtual hangout, I've put a link in the chat. Just click on it. We'll be there in about 60 to 90 seconds. It's going to take us that long to walk over. If you have any trouble getting in, please email us at connect@knowledge-architecture.com. And thank you again, Christina, and we'll see you guys in the hangout if you want to stick around.