Launching Synthesis at SMRT | Nicole Rogers and Graham Parker

Hello and welcome. My name is Sarah Davies and I'm the Director of Client Success here at Knowledge Architecture. And today you are joining a Synthesis Spotlight where we share stories of how KA clients are using Synthesis to help accelerate learning and scale expertise inside their AEC firms. And today I am so pleased to be joined by two colleagues from SMRT Architects and Engineers. We've got Nicole Rogers, who a senior principal and director of architecture, and Graham Parker, who is their knowledge manager. And we're going to be spotlighting SMRT's recent launch to their synthesis intranet Calvin, but as well as the firm's journey towards a more codified knowledge management program that's backed by executive sponsorship and daily stewardship. So their path to success really is grounded in the firm's recognition that internal work is real work. Their Synthesis implementation wasn't just an internal side project, it was a real commitment. After 3 previous intranet iterations spanning nearly 2 decades, they approached the Synthesis implementation with full project discipline. So it had a project number, tracked hours, and people assigned specifically to do the work. And that message was really clear to the firm, that their firm deserves the same level of excellence and stewardship that they provide to their own clients. I think that mind shift was really pivotal, not just for the future of the firm's intranet, but also for SMRT's maturing knowledge management program. So today we are so lucky to hear kind of what happened as a result. For those of you joining today who are already using Synthesis, I hope that you'll take a little inspiration from SMRT's work with you today. And if you're new and not yet using Synthesis, today's session, I hope will help you understand, really what goes on behind the scenes of a best-in-class implementation. So Nicole and Graham, thank you both so much for being here and sharing what you've been up to with Calvin. I'll turn it over to you.

Thank you. Great.

Thank you.

Great introduction. Yeah.

Yeah. We're happy to be here.

Let me figure out how to share my screen. I did it earlier. I know I can do it again. That's called learning. Alright, are we in?

Coming. Nearly. There we go.

There we go.

Alright, today we're going to talk to everybody a little bit about our intranet, Calvin. But first, we're going to tell you a little bit about us. Nicole, who are you?

Well, Sarah already introduced us, but I am Nicole Rogers, Director of Architecture, and I have been here at SMRT for 15 years.

My name is Graham. I've joined SMRT 4 years ago, and I was originally part of the finance and accounting team here. I joined SMRT as the data manager, specifically in our Finance Department, but I am happy to say that I have moved into a full-time official Knowledge Manager role here. And we are excited to share some of the work that we put into developing that role as well as developing this platform. But first, Nicole, I'm hoping that you can tell us a little bit about SMRT.

Sure.

So a little bit about us. We are a full-service architecture and engineering firm Founded by John Calvin Stevens back in 1884. So we are over 140 years old. Originally started in Maine, but now we have 4 offices across the Northeast. We have around 130 employees and we tend to focus on complex, high-performance environments.

That is excellent. And as Nicole just mentioned, we were founded by John Calvin Stevens. The name we did settle on for our intranet is a nod to that legacy. But we also wanted something that would act as a bridge to our future. And so I'm going to share a secret with the audience today. This is actually not published anywhere on our intranet, but internally our implementation team did think about the name Calvin as doing double duty, kind of as an acronym. For what we want Synthesis to be used for. We kind of shoehorned this in after the fact, but we refer to it internally as the central access to learning videos, information, and news. So today on this tour, we're going to share a little bit about how we got here, why we insisted that implementing a new intranet could not be treated like a side project. We're going to talk about some of the choices that we made during the design process and what ways we've driven adoption of the platform internally, both during implementation and after go-live, and we want to talk a little bit about what's next for Calvin. Now, Nicole, you've been here for longer than I have. Can you tell everyone what this journey's been like?

Mostly, mostly. I haven't been here for the entire journey because the journey started more than 20 years ago. I think the good news is we knew 20 years ago that knowledge management was important. The bad news is It took us 20 years to finally find the right solution for us, which was Synthesis.

Yeah, it's been a long time coming.

So kind of talking about our, our journey here, starting, starting in 2006, we've tried it all. We've done a lot of research, we've watched all the demos, we've built numerous platforms. Think of us as like your guinea pigs. We did all the work so you don't have to. But I'm happy to say that our 20-year research phase is finally over. And we have concluded that phase and have successfully implemented synthesis this past year.

Wrote down a sentence here that I particularly like. I think we're not intranet novices. I feel like we're intranet survivors. It really has been a whole journey. And it started back in 2006.

So our, our very first intranet, um, was— which I'm sure many of you have had in the past— was a self-made web page that hosted a lot of internal reference documents. So you'll see a couple examples here because this page actually still exists, um, in our company, which is funny. So we can access it, um, but CAD Tips with 2 Ds. And what the way this worked was everything had to go through our IT director. So if you wanted something uploaded to it, you had to send it to him. He often had better things to do, but that, that was, you know, one downfall to this. And you'll see here on the right, what we have is a bulletin board. So this was our first attempt at like a news feed. But there's a little note that says if you have anything here that you want to add to the bulletin board, email it to Darryl. Well, when I started in 2011, there was no Darryl. He didn't exist. So that made it kind of hard, hard for us to, to use this system.

This bulletin board kills me. I absolutely love it. We use this for a very long time. It probably outlived its, you know, helpful lifespan long before we sunset it. But in 2017, we moved to a new intranet platform. And Nicole, you were here for this one.

I was, yeah. So even without Darryl, that intranet lasted a very long time. But then in 2017, we decided it was time to make a change. So at that time, we actually considered Synthesis. But we didn't have the structure to support it. So we didn't— we were using the old school Deltek. We didn't have OpenAsset at the time. So we decided to pivot and try out ThoughtFarmer. And we called it Get Smart. It was a step up from our old intranet. It looked very nice, but many users found it quite difficult to use. It was hard to create posts. Formatting images was really difficult. And I think ultimately this led to it going kind of stagnant and not being used that much, which was unfortunate.

And in 2021, only a few years later, we tried it again, this time with SharePoint.

Yeah. So because Thought Farmer wasn't a huge success and we didn't have high engagement, And since we already were using the Microsoft platform, being the frugal Yankees that we are, we thought, why don't we just use something that we already have access to and it's free? How bad can it be?

Yeah, it was free and we got what we paid for.

So this, I think we had even less engagement than Thought Farmer. Unfortunately, many of our pages and much of the content that we rolled out on go-live day in 2021 remained exactly that. It was never updated, it didn't get touched. So that was a really good learning moment for us.

I'm sure it's hard to see in this screenshot, but the— our go-live date for SharePoint was July 28th, 2021, and that is the last modified date of all of these resources. Which leads us to—

not great. Finally.

2025.

Finally. So I guess a few things happened before we got to Synthesis and before we, we created Kelvin. A few things happened between 2021 and 2025. We had new leadership in finance and marketing, and they were both really working on modernizing our processes, creating new systems. We finally had Deltek VantagePoint. We finally had open assets. So a lot of things were starting to come together. Also on the studio side, we were moving away from the manager-doer model and we started to create roles for specialized expertise. So we had a sustainability leader, design technology, project delivery. So those things were starting to come on board too. I think what was still missing though was the, the knowledge transfer. We were growing in the time that I had, had been here. We had doubled in size. And I think 40% of our staff had been here less than 3 years or fewer than 3 years. And now we had 4 offices. So it was harder to connect with people one-on-one. The impromptu learning wasn't happening as naturally as it would when we were all under, under one roof. So we needed to find a way to really promote knowledge transfer among everyone. And so I attended my first KA Connect in 2024. I met a lot of great people. I got super inspired. I think I maybe even called our director of operations from the conference, like in the middle of the day, and was like, when I get back, we need to do this. We're doing this. So we had a lot of good momentum going with all these changes that were happening in the organization, and we saw the benefit of it. So we just wanted to keep that momentum going, and we finally signed a contract with Synthesis to start our new intranet. So 20 years later, we finally did it. So Graham, how about we take a look at what we've got so far?

I think we should do it.

All right.

I'm going to start this tour on a page that we call Core Values. And the reason that I want to start here is actually because several of the of the design elements that you're going to see as we walk through this site, as we tour some of these pages, actually came from a process that took place outside of this implementation. Last year, we went through a strategic planning phase where we really distilled down the particular handful of things that we felt were core to our beliefs. We wanted to streamline our core values, and we ended up with 3, which we felt did a very good job defining us. We have an in-house graphic designer who is absolutely wonderful, who took our new refined core values, and she created some iconography, some styling that goes along with them. Bold colors, simple shapes. And the concept here really is we have projects that we design which ground us, and thus the arrow pointing down. And innovation is how we are driven forward, and thus the arrow pointing out. And it's our people that really lift us up, and thus the arrow pointing up. This was, I think, originally intended kind of just as a one-off slide deck that was part of celebrating our new core values with the rest of the firm, but we really loved the style of it. And so what you're gonna see is that we've taken it and we asked our in-house graphic designer if she wouldn't mind doing 1,000 more things in the same style. And you're gonna end up seeing it everywhere across this site, including right on the homepage. We start with this beautiful big banner image that I really do think kind of grounds the experience here. One of the things that we particularly love about Synthesis is how visual it is. A lot of us are visual people. We're naturally attracted to something that has a splash of color or something to it. And this is a thing that I stole from another firm. Thanks, guys. But you're going to see a lot of our pages have this kind of banner image, hero image floating at the top. I'll click over to the way we've arranged some of our project directory pages just as an example here. We really like the interaction between different elements of Synthesis. So here, all of this information, the data and the project description is sourced directly from Deltek, integrated fully. Everything is automatically updated here on Calvin as new updates occur in Deltek, including things like the project location. We love the related posts tied to an individual project. This has given us an opportunity to really make a lot of our information more available to most of our staff. All of our HR benefits, medical insurance, healthcare, all of these things used to be buried in an employee handbook that was 50 or 100 pages long. And it wasn't that you couldn't get the information, it was that it was a whole to be able to get the information. It required work. And so this has really lowered the barrier to making this information available the rest of our staff. We've even created some pages that are specifically targeted towards the onboarding experience. So one of the things that we're able to share now with new employees when they come here is an entire schedule that walks them through their first day or their first week or their first 90 days here at SMRT, including human contact points, including to-do items, including things like scheduled time to take your CliftonStrengths assessment because we are a strengths-based organization here. I'm gonna jump back to the deck, I think, and we'll talk a little bit more about some of the other choices that we've made along the way. But we will return to the live look throughout. Let me find the right button here. There we go. All right. So the question is, how did we get here? And the answer is by doing work. It's really not much harder than that. I have nothing that I'm about to say that you guys don't already know. Honestly, successful project delivery requires dedicated ownership, and a successful intranet implementation is no different. Ultimately, we needed someone that was responsible for structuring and designing the system, for ensuring graphic design consistency across the site, for getting into the weeds. We tried the fit it in when you can model for 20 years, and it just didn't work. What's crazy to me is that we deliver projects the right way to our clients all the time. The switch that got flipped for us was recognizing that we needed to treat our own firm like we were a worthy client, like we deserved our own time. And when that light bulb came on, we did very normal things. We set up a dedicated project team. Nicole acted as the principal in charge. I acted as a project manager. We defined roles and responsibilities for every other team member. We established timelines. We established deliverables. We scheduled regular meetings. We had small group working sessions. We had biweekly whole team check-ins. We managed the progress of this project actively, not reactively. And treating this like a regular project also meant doing things like evaluating design precedents and using familiar design tools. We created a Miro board, we took screenshots from this webinar series and laid them out in different arrangements. We looked for patterns that would work well for us and we identified individual elements that we liked from different preexisting examples. We sketched out the page structure that we wanted and we mapped the relationships between different pieces of content. We traced out how users might move through our digital space. In my head, I kind of think of it like reverse Hansel and Gretel. Like instead of dropping breadcrumbs behind us, we were throwing them out in front of us. Every time we created a page, we also asked the question, okay, given this content on this page, where might a user want to go next? And then in answer to that question, we placed links to those related resources on every page. And it wasn't just familiar design tools that we leveraged, it was also familiar reporting tools. One of the first data products that I built when I joined SMRT was a centralized firm-wide semantic model, which now drives all of the Power BI dashboards we use for our internal reporting on client-facing projects. And the key for several of those dashboards is a Deltek project number. So for our Synthesis implementation, we created a Deltek project number, not so we had something to put on our timesheets, but so we could reuse a reporting pipeline that already existed Our firm is an incredibly powerful machine. It accepts user requirements as input, it processes them, and it outputs designs that meet unique needs. And we ran this implementation through the real machinery of the firm—real team, real design tools, real project controls. Do you want to know how many hours we invested? About 500. That investment will certainly be different for every firm, And to some, that might sound like a big number, but also realize that this was spread out over 6 or 7 months. It averages less than 100 hours per month. For each team member, it was less than 2 hours per week. Honestly, half of the time was my own. I particularly like this timeline, because if you look closely, you can even see a pretty typical project development curve. We had, like, an extended concept and schematic design phase in the first few months, followed by a slowdown as we went into a review cycle, and we had a design a design development bump followed by another review cycle. And then it was like out straight on CDs right to the end, including that peak moment, the uh-oh, we have a deadline this week moment. I know that this cadence is a familiar one. And next, I wanna talk about some of the individual design choices that we made during implementation that led to some of the other things that I'll share with you in the live look. One of the things that I think about a lot, or thought about a lot during this implementation, is the old adage in web design that I bet many people on this call are familiar with already: Jakob's Law. Most people spend most of their time on other websites, right? And of course, the key takeaway there is that you build a space that contains familiar elements so users will have an easier time finding their way. As a matter of fact, our interior design team makes similar considerations for physical spaces all the time. Familiarity is a strategy, not a coincidence. For our implementation, what that meant was adapting a few of the Synthesis-native page templates and then strongly encouraging everyone to build within that framework. There is a balance. We want enough structure that every page feels familiar while also empowering our community managers to feature content that matters most to them. We want discipline at the core and flexibility at the edge. In practice, there are a few common elements that we really like. I mentioned this earlier, but we really like main pages to have a hero image or a banner image that grounds human users. Like, when you see this, you are here. We also like a text-based page description containing keywords that act kind of as a hook for AI search. We like a human contact point on every page. We like links related to additional content. And then a thing that I'll talk more about in depth in a moment is we really like the smart block feature of Synthesis, which allows us to use a hashtag filter to service particular relevant content on pages. Let's bounce back to Calvin for a moment, check out a couple examples of this. Here is one example, the page built by our sustainability team internally. They've landed on a hero image that is a nice visualization. They have a page description that adds a hook for the AI search to kind of help find this content when it receives questions. They've personalized this page with a couple extra things here related to the commitments that we've made in the sustainability space. And they have, among additional content, a block here that surfaces hashtag sustainability posts. One of the things that I particularly like is using the hashtag in the title of the block. This sends the signal to anybody that lands on this page that like, oh, this is how this content gets here. Okay, I get it. We do the same thing elsewhere. Our Portland page, which you saw on that slide for a moment, this is our Portland main office. Again, in this case, we happen to have a nice slideshow of images. We have a little description of the office space. We have several links about the area. We have posts that are directly related to this office space. And we have a spot here for some required HR items as well. All of our office pages are designed similarly. So if you bounce over to the Andover page, you get the same experience. Just different content. We have a number of committees internally, and I'm gonna call attention to one particularly well-developed committee page. This is our Creativity and Innovation Committee. Their hero image is actually like an image on top of an image. This is a link that brings you into a particular project that we did that was in a pro bono work in the community here. But this committee does an enormous amount of work in our firm. So they have posts that they do in a variety of different contexts. They publish newsletters on a periodic basis, and they make posts about those as well. They host Pecha Kucha presentations that are like rapid-fire slideshow things. That's a fun thing to do during lunch here, you know, once, once a month or something like that. And so there is a library of related content there as well. This is an extremely well-developed page, but it starts with the same underlying framework that we use for, or try to use for, all of our main pages. There are some minor exceptions, or this is what I mean when I say we give people a little bit of flexibility. Here's the Power BI page. I made a slideshow as a hero image. We've got a description, we've got me as the contact point. Now Power BI is a, an additional service. It's a license cost that not everybody in our firm has. This is mostly used by our project management team, so we don't post about it a lot. And therefore the post block is not a relevant piece of this particular page. We want it in most cases where it's relevant and we allow for different content to be surfaced here. When that is more applicable. Bounce back over to the deck here. Let's talk about posts. Before we kicked off our implementation, Sarah, our very dear, very patient implementation partner, described some of the features of Synthesis. She was suggesting ways that we might consider implementing them, and she started talking about posts and the posts feed on the homepage. And I'm really sorry, Sarah, I think I fully interrupted you. I basically said like, oh, Sarah, I don't care about posts at all. In my head, I was thinking, I get it. We all have LinkedIn. And Sarah, you were so kind. I mean, I think you said something like, hmm, okay, but maybe give it a chance. I was very wrong. I care about posts maybe more than any other single feature of Synthesis. Without a doubt, posts are the lowest barrier entry point for new content on Calvin. Gone are the days of send all your information to Darryl and he will post it when he gets to it. A thing that is true is that there are many right ways to use synthesis. And I know there are other firms who take a different approach, who approach posts like, we want our users to create posts in individual communities, and then we'll use the homepage to roll those up and make them visible. To everyone. And if that's your approach, I'm happy that it works for you. But I am also so happy to recognize that the Synthesis development team very clearly considered all of the different ways that information can flow. Here is our approach. Our homepage acts as a very prominent single point of entry. Anyone can post, everyone is encouraged to post. And for any given poster, I don't need you to be an expert in applying tags to your post. It's fine. Just create a post. Just share something. Global administrators are trained to go behind and add relevant tags to all new posts. For example, for a post about a person, we want to tag our People and Culture community. We want to tag the post with the discipline that the person belongs to. We want to tag the post with the office the person sits in. We have additional tags that are context-sensitive and optional. And a moment ago, we saw how every primary page on our intranet includes a block which surfaces these relevant posts. And the result is that from a single point of input, we get several outputs with no duplicated effort. Content across the site updates dynamically. Individual pages stay fresh. You visit the architecture page and you see posts about about people who are architects and designs showcasing a particular architectural feature and interesting product developments that might serve our architects. You go to the Portland page and you see posts about people in our Portland office or events in the greater Portland community. We have a structured communication stream that we call Good News. You go to the Good News page and you see posts celebrating achievements by our people or awards earned by our projects or big wins with new partners. It turns out that We value posts so much that we went out of our way to reduce every possible bit of friction, which might discourage someone, anyone, from creating a new post. One of the ways that we did that was with a thumbnail library. Something that we identified early in internal testing was that posts without images felt like they wanted something. This is particularly true for users who view the feed in grid format, When a post lacks an image, it doesn't look like it's absent, it looks like it's missing. I'll show you what I mean. If I bounce back here to the Andover Office page for a moment, here is a handful of posts in grid view. And here is a post that happens to not have an image. Okay, no big deal normally, right? But next to everything else, it looks like it's missing something. One of our major concerns was that a person, not everybody, but some people might think, oh, I want to post something, but I don't have a good picture to go with it. And so therefore I'm not gonna do it. If I don't have a pretty picture, I might not post. So how do we resolve this? Well, our in-house graphic designer created a library full of pretty pictures, placeholders that can be used as thumbnails for post, which would otherwise only contain text. For fun, I have prepared a quick post. I'm calling this post, "We're live! If you're watching our Calvin internet tour right now, hello!" This is a post that is short, sweet. It only has text. If I published this right now, it would have a blank space above it. But if I click next and I go to add thumbnail images and I select a thumbnail from a library, what we see here is an enormous number of placeholder images that share the same bold colors, solid shape iconography that we really liked and ended up using across our site. Let's find a relevant one. I think I'll pick this one. And let's publish this. One way of reducing friction. You know what? I'm gonna take a moment and promote this. Feels relevant. Let's get everybody in here. Back to the deck. This brings us to another thing, which is that if you want people to use your site, we felt like we had an obligation first to make it useful, but second to treat adoption like maintenance, not like it was a one-time thing. For us, one of the ways that we did that was committing to building in public. There was no part of our implementation that was a secret. We announced it upfront. We gave regular updates throughout the implementation process at a firm-wide meeting that we call the Quarter Connect. In the month leading up to go live, we held an enormous multi-round contest where everyone in the firm had the opportunity to submit names, their ideas for naming the new intranet, and we voted repeatedly eliminating the bottom vote getters each round until we ended up with our final 5 and ultimately with a single consensus. And now this is only one example, but I had two primary objectives when it came to publicizing our progress during implementation. First, I wanted our staff to feel a sense of ownership of Calvin, even if they weren't directly on the implementation team. And the second thing that I've thought about the entire time was I want launch day to feel like an aha, it's finally here moment instead of a like, oh, what's this new thing? And we've actually continued the commitment to building in public through the use of placeholders and icons on incomplete pages on Calvin. For example, this is our hardware requests page. Not much on it right now. We're still in our first year. We're not done building. There's plenty more to come, but that's not a secret. We want people to know it. When a user looks for a resource, I never want them to see a hole. If the content isn't there now, I want to signal that it's coming and I want them to understand what they can do in the meantime. We use an under construction banner as a placeholder. We describe the content that's on its way and we provide a human contact point for now. We were even pleasantly surprised to find that the page titles in the mega menu support the use of emojis. So we were able to send the under construction signal before a user even lands on the page. All of the under construction pages have these emojis next to them to signal that this is a work in progress. And as a matter of fact, this was unplanned, but it's turned into kind of a fun rite of passage to take down the crane when the page is done. Anyway. I've talked a lot, Nicole. Let me pass the mic back to you. And if you would please tell us a little bit about how you've continued to drive adoption in the months since go-live. You've been encouraging other members of leadership to create new posts. Yes? Absolutely. Yes.

I think, you know, we did two things differently with the implementation of Calvin than what we had done previously. The first was really getting leadership engaged in the process. So I used our shareholder meetings as the forum to provide continuous updates on our progress, educate them on what Synthesis could do, and also build excitement. I did maybe encourage— I don't want to say assign homework because I would never do something like that, but encourage people to do one post a month. Month or at least a comment or some sort of engagement.

Now you say that, Nicole, but I know that I get senior principals in our firm make a post, reach out to me, say, first, did I do it right? And second, if so, will you tell Nicole that I did my homework?

Great. That's great. So that, yeah, has been successful, as Graham said. And even after implementation, I continue to do that and to talk about Calvin with the shareholders and at our shareholder meetings, give shoutouts out to the person who has the most posts for the quarter, who got the most likes, build a little healthy competition. So that's really helped. On screen here are a few examples of some of our leaders who have done posts. And I think this was something that was lacking previously in our attempts with the internets that we tried. But I think what really also helps is, like Graham said, it's very easy for anyone to do this. And I think that was a huge shift for us. And everyone, no matter how tech savvy you were or not, could do this and has really made it a huge success.

And I'll add a daily adoption tactic statistic worth revealing. We use the promote and send email notification feature an average of about once per day. We've actually kind of landed on timing it to the like 8 AM to 9 AM window. This is where post analytics show the highest email click-through rates. People are getting to work, they're catching up on email, they're making a coffee. It's an ideal time to drive a little extra traffic to the site and to kind of tee up the rest of the workday. We used to use email for basically all firm-wide communications, but using it deliberately now helps us to bridge the gap between email everything and post everything on Calvin. And what we are finding is that there's also a trickle-down effect. We don't need to promote every single post, not even every single, like, valuable post or every single senior leadership communication. They don't all need to be promoted because when users receive a promoted post notification in their email and they click through to the homepage, they read that promoted post, and while they're there, they also read the ones below it. That is knowledge management in action. And Nicole, I know that this particular topic has been of interest to you for a long time. What are some of the other things that helped you recognize the value of a dedicated knowledge manager role?

Well, so much, Graham. So I think, yeah, going into this project in general, we weren't thinking of this as a tech solution a new intranet. It was more of a knowledge management project. So in order for us to really succeed and do this right, we needed to formalize the role. And we needed someone who thought about how information and data flowed through our office and how we used it. There happened to be this guy in our finance department named Bram, whose reach had really started to expand far beyond just finance and into a lot of project management and even project work that we were doing. He had the innate ability to connect people, systems, workflows. So he was a natural fit for this. So we didn't have to go looking for, for someone to do this. But I think ultimately, you know, our goal with, with all of this and with knowledge management in general is to connect our systems eliminate silos, and get the right information to the right people at the right time. Obviously, Kelvin is a critical tool in this, but really having someone in that dedicated role, I think, has really made the difference to make all of this a success. So thank you, Graham.

You're absolutely welcome. Anytime. I'm going to go back to work tomorrow, as a matter of fact. So That brings us to what is next. For us, a major component of what's next is adding to our knowledge base. And that means at least a couple of things. As Nicole just said, Synthesis is one tool in our tool belt. A major part of unlocking the value of Synthesis for us was connecting it to all of the other AE systems or AE systems that we are relying on day to day here, including Deltek, including OpenAsset, and including others. So one of the ways that we need to enhance our knowledge base is expanding the data that we're capturing in Deltek so that it can flow into Calvin and so that it can also flow to other connected systems. It also means that we need to create new learning resources. And I'll talk a little bit more about this in a minute. I want to stress though that when I say I say developing AI-ready content here, I don't mean developing AI-only content because we're going to grow the knowledge management team in several contexts. A new KM team member might be an AI agent. A new KM team member might be additional headcount in the department. But a new KM team member can also be anyone and everyone in our firm that's willing and able to develop resources that we can pass on to the next generation of SMRTers. On the Deltek data side, the integrations that make the old, that the old platforms lacked are what we're really loving about Synthesis today. Data entry in Deltek, I think for anybody that used this, used to feel like dumping stuff into a black hole. You would put it in and then you would need like a complex multi-join SQL query to get it out. And for the vast majority of our staff, there was just no tangible benefit to doing this. There was no reason to enter anything beyond the minimum required fields. Now, when a PM asks me, "Hey, how come my project location says it's a random dot in the middle of Vermont?" I can say, "Let's fix it." Now you enter your data in Deltek and you refresh the project directory in Calvin and you see your input appear. Seeing the result of data input creates an immediate positive feedback loop. It's a virtuous cycle. Filling the gaps is useful to PMs and technical staff who are trying to find project precedence. It's useful to the AI search feature and upcoming AI knowledge agents. Our marketing team is gaga for it. For years, they were the only ones who actually needed the best data, so they were the ones stuck in the trenches digging through Deltek. Now, entering better data leads to getting better outputs, leads to increased trust in our data, leads to increased adoption of the platform, loops back around as an incentive to enter better data. It compounds and our other connected systems like Power BI, like OpenAsset, reap the benefits as well. And finally, let's talk about AI. I love it, I hate it, I'm sick of hearing about it, I use it every day. I have completely stopped trying to understand all of the conflicts. I am at the point where I'm just letting let it wash over me. It is part engineering and part magic, and that's just fine. Honestly, we could all use a little more magic in our lives. What I have found to be powerful is the idea that there's no hiding from AI. It shines a light on everything. Take, for example, our knowledge base. People mask a mediocre knowledge base. It may not always feel like it, but people are actually very smart. Give a person mediocre instructions and a person will still usually figure out the right thing to do. We've done it for years. People will filter mediocre instructions automatically. They will infer things from their own experience. They will quietly work around the gaps, but that's the problem. That is what masks those gaps. AI agents do not do that. Give an agent out-of-date instructions and it will cheerfully and confidently tell you, creating a new post is easy. Just send all your stuff to Darryl. Darryl. While a person will read the bulletin board and roll their eyes, Darryl hasn't worked here in years. To maximize the benefit that we get from AI agents, we are being forced to create clear, relevant, detailed instructions that accurately describe the way we work. How-to guides and training videos and standard operating procedures, knowledge resources of all kinds. Writing them and stress testing them as grounding knowledge presented to an agent is one of the fastest ways we can find out where to improve our documentation. And the beautiful thing is, do you know who else benefits from clear, relevant, detailed instructions? People. Thanks everybody, that's all I've got. Cheers.

Amazing. Thank you guys both so much for, for kind of taking us under the hood and sharing your journey with Kelvin, um, and the evolution of this, um, knowledge management program at SMRT. Um, we do have a Q&A panel, so just to make sure everyone is aware, if you haven't already dropped your questions into the Q&A panel please go ahead and do so. You can also help us prioritize by upvoting the questions that are already in there if they're most important to you, and we'll get through as many as we can before we have to wrap up at the top of the hour. So let's take a look. I think, Chris, we've got you in there. Yeah, we've got some.

The first question is, what do you guys think Darrell is doing today? He's gotten so many shoutouts.

Darrell's on a yacht somewhere. Darrell's on a yacht.

Amazing. No, No, for real. Isabel asks, how did you approach governance? So deciding what kind of information belongs in Calvin versus other systems. And the example she gave was that many AEC firms manage highly confidential projects and client information. And how did you navigate that?

Well, I will say that we're still figuring out how to navigate that on the confidentiality side. We do employ confidential flags. There's a checkbox in Deltek, yes or no, is this project confidential? We do pass that information into Synthesis. There are a handful of examples where a particular project record was of a degree of sensitivity, had a level of confidence or a level of confidentiality required that we made the choice, don't sync that particular project into Synthesis at all. But for the most part, we treat the platform like it's an internal tool. There are very few projects that we work on that everybody in our firm doesn't have or shouldn't have access to. And it is the case that in most cases, we want to present everyone with the information and allow them to make the correct informed decisions. In cases with confidential projects that may have an NDA but aren't, you know, some sort of— require some sort of government clearance, for example. We have projects that we shouldn't talk about publicly, but that we can talk about internally. And we We pass that flag into Synthesis, and you probably saw it on one of the projects page— pages here that I had a moment ago, right? So we highlight this on every single one of our projects. Does this particular project have an NDA or a confidentiality agreement associated with it? We use this as filter criteria when we ask AI search questions. Give me a list of projects. I'm looking for precedents to put into a letter proposal, and please make sure that all of them are not confidential.

Great answer. Anything to add to that, Nicole? No, I think you covered it. Sam Horton says, forgive me if I missed this, but who made up the implementation team?

Our implementation team initially was entirely, let me scroll back here maybe, was almost entirely overhead people. So Nicole was our only billable person on this project who had to do a little bit of extra stuff that she wouldn't ordinarily do. But Jack too. That's true. Jack as well. You're right. You're right. So we had a human resources person. We identified essential content up front. So we wanted, we wanted, you know, HR content in here. We wanted accounting content in here. We wanted marketing content in here. We wanted IT content in here. That was our our primary focus for go-live. And so we selected 1 or 2 people from each one of those areas. And I will say one thing that we found was in most cases what was helpful for us was kind of getting like the number 2 person in a department, if that makes sense. A thing that we found was you might want somebody that is a director or a senior principal or something like that because they have, have all of the information. But the same people that have all of the information are also the people that have the least amount of capacity. The people that already overburdened already. But at the same time, we needed somebody that knew enough about their particular domain to provide value to the team. And we also needed somebody that was able to make decisions without having to constantly go through multiple levels of management above them. So the right balance for us was often somebody at a manager level in one of these non-billable departments.

And I think too, this was kind of the essential content team. Now we're— so that was kind of for, for go-live date. Now we have the next phase, which we're focusing on our disciplines and our markets. So we have people identified who are leading the implementation of those areas right now.

Yeah, that's exactly right. Even leading up to go-live in the final weeks, we brought in a crew of early adopters, but pitched it to them. Like, we'd like to bring you on to this in the final few weeks of implementation before it's shared with the rest of the firm. We'd like to get your take. We'd like to get you to test things. But also we want volunteers who are interested in learning how the platform works on the backend and who are interested in helping us create and develop the content moving forward. So the initial implementation team was primarily overhead staff and then Because our next focus, like level 2, step 2, is building out discipline-related pages, project-related pages. All of the people that we took for that part of it are volunteers from our technical staff. Trying to get them all.

But in the kind of like spirit of running it like a project, you launched Calvin, and now you're going to phase 2 with these technical experts. Are they billing their staff like their time? Like, are you still tracking it with that level of precision now that the launch is done?

We are, as a matter of fact. Yep. So we have, you know, we enabled multiple phases in Deltek for each one of our projects. We had an implementation phase that is done and over, and we have multiple ongoing phases right now, either for the addition of, you know, Calvin content, or because Chris, you were kind enough to invite us to of the beta project for the knowledge agents. We've got a knowledge agent pilot program phase where we're tracking that time independently.

You mentioned the taking down of the crane as becoming this kind of rite of passage. And I'm curious how that like work in progress content is prioritized.

Yeah. How is it prioritized, Nicole?

Oh boy. Well, I wish it were easier, but often it comes to who has time, which disciplines might have a little time to put into it. So it's very challenging. But I think obviously the essential content was the priority. And now it's the resources. Now that people, especially now that people are using Calvin on a daily basis, it's getting the engineering-specific content, the project-specific content, and all the stuff that people want to reference on a daily basis in there. And I think it's just keeping it kind of front of mind and continuing to think of it like a project. That this is important. But it can be challenging when people get busy for sure.

Thank you. We have a question about the tag adder person. And who is it? How much time do they spend doing it? It kind of sounds like a snake, a tag adder. So that wasn't in their question.

That's just mine. But it's not poisonous. I'm not poisonous. Yeah. So who is the person that does it 90% of the time is me. And we did go through a very mild training process where a couple of our other global admins expressed interest in doing something similar or, you know, how can I help organize my content after the fact? And the answer is tags are the ideal way to use it. Now the question of how much time does it take? I do it once a day and it takes 5 minutes.

Awesome. Do you bill that 5 minutes?

15-minute increments are the minimum. Okay, got it.

All right, just so we're clear.

Every couple of days, Chris. Every couple of days.

So Kristen asked kind of a compound question. I'm going to try and break it down. So like how many people are in the firm and how many locations are there? You said 130 and— 130-ish, yeah. And 4 locations. Yep. Correct. Okay. You've clearly done a great job with Synthesis at SMRT, but this seems like a lot of work. Mm-hmm. Are you using any of the learning courses for an external audience or only external? So internal. So you guys didn't really touch on the learning management system piece of this. So for people that don't know, there is a learning management system component to Synthesis. It was not part of your initial launch, but maybe you can kind of talk about why it wasn't part of your initial launch and what your thoughts are about learning going forward.

Yeah, I'll absolutely talk about that. So the reason that it wasn't part of our initial launch is that it didn't exist yet. And the reason that we didn't talk about it today is because that's step 3. We are so enthusiastic about the learning management system. I am watching videos that are coming out of Knowledge Architecture. I am in touch with all of the content that you guys are producing and sharing with the rest of the community. And I am in love with what is coming down the pike. Right now, it's just too many things going on at the same time. That is definitely what is next.

Great.

Yeah, everyone's very excited about it.

One of the— can I— I'm gonna circle back. There's been something in my brain a little bit about the lot of work part of this. Clearly, there were some hours. But, like, one of the things I've always thought about with a project like this is, is this creating net new work, or is this just work being done in another place? In other words, you have to document your process. You have to do a communication. You have to do something somewhere. It's just being concentrated now in one place versus being distributed out over emails and documents and stuff people didn't see. Does that, does that resonate with you too?

You know what, I'll actually push back on that a little bit, Chris, because I think you said something there that I don't agree with, which is that you have to document something and you have to do it once. What we found out for 20 years is that a lot of people don't document their work and every time staff changes, we lose something. That was a specific fear of ours that led to the selection of Synthesis and the recognition that knowledge management had value in general, like agnostic of any platform. We are in the very, very early stages of proving out the value of investing time upfront, saving you time later. I feel this very, very strongly because I know that every time I get asked a question, I answer that question and I write down the answer and then I get asked the question again and I have the answer ready to go. I do a lot of work with our project management teams. I do a lot of training specifically on Deltek. We went through a different implementation about 2 years ago now in the summer where we turned on the resource management features, which for anyone in the audience who uses them, you should know that they are robust but quite complex as well. And 2 years later now, I still get almost daily questions from our PMs. How do you use this feature? How do you use that feature? And it is only the presence of documentation that I created while we were going through that process that I'm able to answer those questions at all now. And I can't wait to turn that into a learning management course that I can say, here's how.

Don't answer the same question twice. Exactly. So now, okay, I want to build on your pushback. So I, I totally appreciate what you said. I guess I would argue that person ended up documenting it 20 times times. Yeah. Because they answered it one person at a time instead of writing it down once. Yeah. Exactly. Yep. Last question we have is from Dion. Great presentation. Can you speak to how you break down the silos with AI and the intranet designer workflows? Yeah. There's multiple questions in there. Pick whichever one you like.

So I mentioned knowledge agents for a moment there at the end. Knowledge agents are an upcoming feature of the platform here. We are in the beta program. Thank you guys again. And And one of the things that we did to start taking advantage of that or to start figuring out how we might take advantage of that was to throw out feelers to the entire firm. I'm pretty big on just like soliciting volunteers. I want people who want to be there. I want people who want to contribute. And we received a bunch of volunteers who said, you know, I'm interested in learning how to build an agent and trying to kind of figure out what that means for my workflow and how I'm, how it might help me. And in our first team meeting, our first internal group meeting, somebody put their hand up and said, hey, did you do this deliberately? We have like one person from every department. And the answer was no, it was a complete coincidence. But it's just, it's such, AI in particular has become like so ubiquitous. I mean, you can't walk out of the house without hearing about AI. You can't turn on the TV without hearing about AI. We have interest coming from every different group. And all I want to do is just fan those flames.

I know we're just at the top of the hour, but I have one more question. I'll stay. Yeah, thank you. I was fortunate enough to have a somewhat front row seat to your implementation. And I saw not even all of it, but a lot of the work that went through in executing your implementation and then the work that you've invested over this last year. Leading up to your upcoming anniversary. I'm curious how you at the firm are measuring the ROI of this project, like tangibly, intangibly. How do you know what good looks like?

Yeah, I mean, it's definitely an intangible thing. One of the things that you brought to the implementation was a couple of ideas for how to more tangibly measure things like engagement or adoption. And we do rely on the page analytics that are part of of the Synthesis product. But one of the problems, this is like a good problem to have, was the recommended measurements were like, okay, in the first 3 months since go-live, we hope to have 50% of our users engage with the platform. And 6 months in, we hope to increase that to 75%. And 9 months in, we hope to increase that to 90%, right? Measurable things like that. The problem was our chart just went like this. On day one, we had 95% of our people engage in the firm, you know, across the firm, engage some way in the platform. And it has made all of these like measurable metrics a little less meaningful because we're comparing like, what's the difference between 96% and 95% this week? Intangibly though, you know, how we're measuring this is really like, more like, is it useful? Does it continue to be useful? Every day, can we add new things to it? And, you know, I mentioned even just like how we used to do everything via email. And one of the problems with that being you send an email, it contains a firm communication, immediately it just starts getting pushed down people's inbox, then somebody new joins the firm, they never received that email, they never know anything about it. Simply by taking 99% of that and moving it into the post stream, something that our president has jumped on top of, something that our board of directors has jumped on top of. Senior principals across our firm have recognized the value in creating a statement that is essentially permanent. I mean, it does get pushed down the feed as well, but it's always findable. And when we have new people join the firm and they walk through the onboarding process and they see the content that's available to them, they are amazed by how much is there. And it's only been 9 months.

Awesome. Yeah, Nicole, anything to add?

No, I think that was good.

I'll add final word here. It's been a pleasure to work with you, Sarah. You are an excellent implementation partner, and I am looking forward to continuing this relationship forever. Nicole and I said last night when we were doing our final run-through, we're going to go to KA Connect for the rest of our lives.

I love it. We would absolutely love to have you. Well, I will pause this there. I know we're a couple of minutes over, so thank you all for being generous with your time. Thanks for everyone who stayed. Yeah, Nicole and Graham, thank you so much for just sharing your journey. You know, Chris had made a comment earlier, like, you just don't have 20 years to build the 20-year intranet anymore. And I think this is just really compelling to hear the road that you've been on. So thank you.