In this conversational segment, Christopher Parsons and Speaker B discuss the advantages of staffing a synthesis/knowledge‑management initiative with a pair of internal champions rather than a single individual. They argue that pairing champions from distinct parts of an AEC firm—typically one from operations/HR who understands systems, change‑management, and strategic planning, and another from the practice side (architects, engineers, or marketers) who has deep empathy for project delivery, code research, and standards—creates broader coverage of knowledge, larger internal networks, and complementary skill sets. The operations champion can more easily allocate time by folding the effort into existing strategic initiatives, while the practice champion brings user‑centric insight and connections to those who need the knowledge. Together they can navigate obstacles, coach each other, and balance analytical versus relational strengths, making the implementation more resilient and effective.
I think I've heard you say this, like, a 2-person implementation is better than a 1-person. And if you're going to have 2 people, having them come from different parts of the business is really useful. Can you unpack that a little bit?
Yeah, absolutely. I was on the phone with someone yesterday who, again, very excited about synthesis, trying to figure out how they're going to staff it. And I shared this bit about, you know, it should be someone who really gets the firm and is good at change management. She's in HR. I've been talking a lot about HR today. Interesting. It must be on my mind. She's in HR and she said, oh well, I can do change management. I know a lot about the operations side of the firm, but I don't know a lot about our project delivery. I'm not an architect or an engineer, like, so maybe I can't do it. And it's like, aha, point 4, whatever. Get a co-champion. This is actually the best, in my opinion, of the structures is to have someone who really gets how things work behind the scenes, who like gets your systems, who gets how the business operates on a, you know, a system level. And frankly, since they're on that operations team, part of their job are these kinds of improvements.
So getting their time isn't as hard.
Exactly.
Yeah.
You can fold it into your strategic planning. It's like they're going to be working on some strategic improvements this year. Let's make it this one. Yeah. And pair them with someone who's on the practice side, who has a lot of empathy for how it feels to go find a code, right? Right. And knows other people who need to find codes, knows other people who are storing standards, and knows other people who have the calcs that really should be on the internet because that's just part of their network. And again, they've done it before. If you pair two people like that, Talk about knowing the business and like knowing about business, how the business ticks. Like you really have a lot of coverage in that knowledge. You have a lot of coverage across relationships and then they get to play off each other. So people, you will hit a wall, right? There will be an area of content that the person who kind of needs to be involved is on a deadline or they're, they're just, they're not connecting the dots like they're not bought in and you need to figure out how to navigate that, right? You always have, you myself or my colleague Sarah Davies is great. We lead implementations. We're happy to coach you through it. But if you have a champion pair, then they can talk to each other and they, they know all the people and they have bigger networks inside the firm, right? So they can be strategic support.
Yeah, I like that for a lot of reasons. You know, they can also— you've seen more of these than I have, but I think one thing I've also observed is they have different— they can have different strengths and weaknesses, like you know, there's an internal commsy component, there's a more structured data component, there's an analytics component, and maybe one of them is analytical and maybe one of them is more feelingy kind of person. And so you can also balance each other out a little bit that way too.
Yeah. One of my favorite implementation teams was very early in our journey, probably like my third year at, uh, KA or something. They're a structural firm in Seattle. And their champions was someone in operations who really wanted Synthesis— well, his role was like operations director, but he wanted Synthesis to support structural engineers. He was like, we need to document how we do really great steel structures and how we do really great mass timber structures. Though mass timber probably wasn't a thing at that time, but that sort of thing. Like, we need to give a space for these— are these technical communities to capture and share and learn with each other. And he had a lot of empathy on that side and he was like a feeler. And then we had a marketing director who had been cultivating Deltec vision at that time and had really great project data and data about their clients. And she was like kind of the only person who could get to it. And she was very analytical and she wanted to expose that and get that in front of people, daylight it so that people could interact with some of this project history. Data that like they have and would be really useful to understand what steel structures we've done right in Vancouver. When we're going to do another one in Vancouver, we'd like to give that to our engineers. So they had different kind of starting points, different objectives, but also different personalities. And together it was just fabulous. They could pick up where the other one left off. It was a joy to work with them.
