A conversation (podcast/video) led by Christopher Parsons about intranet projects—particularly the Synthesis platform—and their role as firm-wide change-management tools in AEC firms. The speakers argue intranets function like a company ‘Grand Central Station’ for knowledge management, are highly visible across a firm, and are commonly launched to address business pain points such as leadership transitions, post-merger integration, and the need for standardized knowledge and project directories. The discussion emphasizes that technical setup is straightforward but aligning people and processes is the harder change management work.
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It's funny that you say the thing about information architecture as it relates to websites. I used to think it was like a fun little parlor trick to do in a first new business meeting with a firm and say, I feel like you have some problems with prioritizing what's the most important thing in the firm and that this department, that department. Maybe you don't see eye to eye on what's most important. They would go, how do you know that? Because everything is equal footing on your website. There's nothing that looks the most important. But I feel like once you get a tool like synthesis implemented, there's probably this level set of like, okay, now I can get out all these things. But then also there's probably this next step of like, oh, what's the first thing that I'm going to do once I have access to this? What do firms find that they can do with this? That was so much work before.
A lot of what we do in the beginning is we try and understand that question you asked about pain points. So for someone to do a new intranet, there are so many parallels to websites that we could spend a whole, you know, episode talking about that. But one of the ways I like to talk about it is a website is to marketing what an intranet is to kind of knowledge management, right? There's a lot more to marketing than a website. But it's Grand Central Station, right? Like a lot of things like connect there and it drives people out and it is a destination. And the same thing is true for an intranet. It's a destination, which means it's highly visible to everyone in the company. So this isn't a tool you roll out for just a department, it's a firm wide platform. So if firms want to change the way they're doing things to build a new firm wide platform, there is some defining moment or critical burning issue that's underneath it. And so it could be and oftentimes is around a leadership transition. And with leadership transition can be, I'm just talking to a firm last week. We used to be more command and control and kind of tightly held to the vest under our old leadership. And the new leadership really wants us to be democratic and collaborative. And we really want a change in the way that we share knowledge and interact with each other. We want to raise the trust level up higher. And so for a firm like that, like a big point of emphasis for launching synthesis is going to be knowledge sharing. It's going to be our internal blog, right? Comments, people can share. We Encourage people to share the CEO's writing. They're talking about values and mission and purpose. And that's what it is. It's about becoming like a more connected practice where if there's another firm where the thing is, it's like we've done two or three acquisitions over the last five years, so we're like 400 people, but we're really three firms that are 120 people and whatever. So like coming together to act as one firm and getting all of our policies aligned, all of our processes aligned, all of our people so that we know who each other are, like really just a good employee directory to even know who works here and getting a good project directory to understand our portfolio that came together across those three firms. So if that's the big business challenge, that would be what people would be a point of emphasis on for launching the platform. So it's back to what you said. It's the thing that's keeping somebody up at night. Like we try and connect that work directly to something big like that.
You know, as a side point, those are my favorite kind of branding and video kind of clients when they're working on telling the story of either going through a leadership transition or post merger or demerger even just like getting their arms around this multi office culture and multi office brand is such an incredibly interesting business problem. And I have to imagine that it's incredibly valuable for those firms to get their arms around the knowledge management side as well.
Yeah, I mean, because oftentimes we're like a trojan horse for a bigger change that needs to happen. So the act of like putting your project management standards into synthesis and creating the 20 or 30 pages and uploading some videos, that's not hard. What's hard is getting 200 something project managers or whatever it is to agree that this is the way we're going to do things. So like synthesis can be a change agent tool. But like really we all have to agree or to agree that we're not going to force a project management methodology and we're just going to have loose guidelines versus standards. So there's just all this alignment work. And I think you're probably saying kind of the same thing. It's like to watch firms get aligned on. Here's how we're going to work. This is the now the CJP design, that's the fictitious firm I use all the time. Right. The CJP design way is X or the CJP design way is we don't force you into a way whatever it is. Making that clear is a really important thing to do, regardless of how structured or unstructured the actual thing ends up being.
