Launching Synthesis @ Fuscoe
Featured Guests
Jeff Stempson, Director of Information Technology
Brandon Norton, Senior Graphic Designer
Webinar Summary
This month’s Office Hours featured an intranet tour of Fuscoe Engineering’s Synthesis intranet, ARC. Launching a Synthesis intranet in the fall of 2016 was an important milestone in Fuscoe’s knowledge management journey. Highlights of the new intranet include:
- Analog Communities of Practice got a digital home
- Disconnected and siloed key information about employees and projects is now accessible to all employees in a single system
- Employees can now find fundamental information about how work is done at Fuscoe via a single, informative toolbox
In this webinar, Jeff and Brandon give a tour of Arc and share their insights on brand alignment and employee engagement. If you only have a few minutes, we recommend jumping to two intranet tour highlights: Engineering CADD Standards (21:40) and #AskARC (38:45).
Streamline Your Operations with the Essential Content Checklist
Clients often ask us, “what content is essential to a successful intranet?”
Because we have built over 100 intranets for architecture, engineering, and construction firms over the last seven years using Synthesis, Knowledge Architecture is uniquely positioned to answer this question.
We find that this question typically arises when a firm is either:
- Preparing for the launch of a new intranet, or
- Conducting a content audit of an existing intranet
Both of these events provide an opportunity to step back and evaluate how your intranet can give employees what they need, when they need it. Our Essential Content Checklist will help you do just that.
Establishing a Firmwide Q+A Program Using Synthesis
In this article you’ll learn…
5 Benefits of a Q+A Program
3 Key Roles in a Q+A Program
9 Steps to Roll Out a Q+A Program at Your Firm
“If you can teach people to help themselves you get an additive effect: they not only help each other; they grow themselves as experts. Essentially, you have little experts pop up left and right and they sort of grow on their own. Over time, you raise people up from basic competency towards expert level.” — Jack Chaffin, LMN Architects.
Four years ago LMN Architects hired Jack Chaffin to lead the firm’s transition from CAD-based MicroStation to Revit. They knew they had an expert to guide the process because he’d led similar transitions twice before. Jack’s expertise met such a critical need that after a short while, Jack found that “help desk issues were taking up an increasingly larger portion of [his] energy; taking focus away from other strategic activities” related to the transition.
When it comes to this problem, LMN is not alone. According to research published by Rob Cross, Reb Rebele, and Adam Grant in HBR, “up to a third of value-added collaborations [in any organization] come from only 3% to 5% of employees.” As a result, often the people who are most in demand (those with the answers) are becoming increasingly over-taxed by the burden of responding to requests for their expertise. The really scary thing is that in most organizations leadership doesn’t even know who their top collaborators are. As many as 50% of an organization’s top collaborators can’t even be identified by the organization.
Enter a Q+A program. Increasingly, we’re seeing more and more firms successfully implement formal Q+A programs inside Synthesis to identify and activate subject matter experts. We’ve learned from firms like LMN, brainstormed what this looks like at previous Synthesis Workshops, and shared some successful programs through our Office Hours webinar series. In this article we’re going to share the benefits of a Q+A program along with some of the roles and steps necessary to roll one out in your firm.
KA Connect – The time has come for a Knowledge Management Tribe in the AEC Industry.
Last fall I called Doris Pulsifer after reading “A Case for Knowledge Management in the A/E Industry,” a viewpoint article which Doris wrote for the October, 2008 issue of AECBytes. In the article, Doris comprehensively outlined the state of Knowledge Management (KM) in our industry, addressed the definition and history of Knowledge Management, listed common techniques and systems for managing knowledge, and shared insights into her approach as the leader of the Knowledge Management Department at Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill, LLP. (You can read the article here.) Doris and I discussed the need for a Knowledge Management community in the Architecture, Engineering, and Construction (AEC) Industry and I agreed that I would look into the next steps of getting one started.
Over the years, I have had similar conversations with others who were equally interested in the idea of starting an AEC Knowledge Management community. We all agreed that while Knowledge Management tends to appear on the agendas of various AEC roundtables and conferences, we could all benefit from a community and/or conference exclusively dedicated to the advancement of the practice.