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About the author: Don Archibeque is a Project Executive with Planifi, bringing more than 25 years of experience in construction and A/E (architecture and engineering) Project Management, as well as associated professional managerial services. If you’re part of an Architecture or Engineering (A/E) firm leadership team, we need to talk for a second. Whether you want to or not, you own the critical responsibility of developing your firm’s next generation of leaders and project managers. Effective A/E project management is a great way to start preparing younger architects and engineers for tomorrow’s leadership challenges. Today’s teams are better served by more facilitation, coaching, and mentoring—behavior that supports all the attributes necessary for Agile A/E Project Management. Today’s environment is defined by the rapid pace of change in design technology, firm growth, geographically dispersed teams, and evolving cultural values. With so much change, we can only begin to imagine what challenges tomorrow will bring. However, regardless of industry, the following values help A/E firms thrive: Goals and Purpose over rules and processes Utilize Human Potential over conformity to preconceived outcomes Compassionate Courage over convenient complacency Practice and Progress over preaching perfection Focus on the Environment over controlling behaviors Recognize the uncertain nature of the environment in which we lead. Adapt to change while maintaining the goal. Encourage curious exploration and reflective experience that enables teams to leverage possibilities Approach new challenges with a sense of adventure and hope. Respect your employees. Help them build self-esteem and respectful self-confidence. Create an environment that fosters open and honest communication. These ten principles will help your firm increase profitability, deliver more successful projects, and encourage your employees to develop innovative solutions to tough problems. Most importantly, though, they will help your teams better serve your clients. Trust & Self-Directed Work Teams Your architects and engineers want to do good work. When set to a task and given the freedom to deliver a solution, they will come up with ideas that will save your firm money and distinguish you from competition. Now, that doesn’t mean blind faith. You need to provide guidance and stay within the bounds of the project scope and budget. However, enabling and trusting your project team is better than micromanaging ten times out of ten. How do you, as a member of leadership, provide guidance to every project team while still getting work done? Data. Accessible and accurate data is required for successful self-directed work teams. Senior leadership can’t micromanage anymore, there simply isn’t enough time in the day. With agile A/E project management, you rely on a burndown chart. This provides everyone with a single source for performance and says, “we need to deliver a solution, here’s what we have left to make that happen.” Data helps leadership and project teams alike prioritize tasks and deliver better work. A quick aside – Planifi’s Visual Planning tools help firms align to exactly this with real-time project actuals brought in from Deltek Vision. Learn more on our products page! Courage, Respect, and Communication Your firm must be an environment where open, respectful communication is prioritized. This will give your people the courage to present new approaches and solutions without fear of reprisal. And, in the end, this will help you deliver more successful projects. Communication starts by aligning to crystal clear expectations with the client. Then, maintain client participation throughout the project lifecycle; incorporating feedback and constantly re-aligning to goals and deliverables. This approach will reduce waste and improve client satisfaction, but also comes with the responsibility to be courageous and speak your mind at difficult moments. You and your team need to be willing to go against the grain. When you or a team member keep a new idea to yourself, it does no good. It doesn’t help the team, the project, or the client. Agile enables you to proactively manage reasonable asks/changes and always deliver to client expectations. Developing Tomorrow’s Leaders Some leadership qualities are timeless. Certain skills such as communicating a clear vision, possessing deep character, and utilizing a solid strategy were needed a century ago—and are still needed today. While the eternal skills of leaders remain, however, the style is always changing; and perhaps never faster than in the world we live in today. Perhaps the most important reality we must recognize is that established leaders are losing control. The more they attempt to seize control, the more a generation of “free agents” eludes a tightening grasp and choose to follow someone else. Our best leaders inspire their teams to do great work. I encourage you to consider these ten principles and embrace change to inspire your teams. Interested in learning how Planifi software can help your firm implement Agile project management? Improve client satisfaction, decrease overhead, and achieve higher profitability by scheduling a call today! #Agile #Architecture #Engineering #ProjectManagement

About the author: Don Archibeque is a Project Executive with Planifi, bringing more than 25 years of experience in construction and A/E (architecture and engineering) Project Management, as well as associated professional managerial services. Across the Architecture and Engineering (A/E) industry, effective project management is a proven element for firm-wide efficiency and profitability. Architecture and Engineering firms that implement agile project management practices consistently realize higher profits and deliver more successful projects. Project management professionals define successful project delivery as both completing the project on time and within budget, but also satisfying client expectations. First, what is “Agile?” Agile started in the software development world in the 1990s. This was in response to rapidly changing technological capabilities and ensuing disruptions to project delivery. (Sound familiar?) Over the past 25 years, Agile has become the method for managing software development teams. With the success of this approach in tech, Agile has steadily found adoption in other industries as well. So, how can your firm implement agile project management and start delivering more successful projects? Start off by aligning to crystal clear expectations with the client. Ask three simple questions: What is the scope of work? What did we propose? What are the time constraints? Creating alignment in a fast-paced and dynamic project environment — often with geographically dispersed, culturally diverse teams – can be challenging. However, when leaders and team members work together, you can create alignment and start on the path to more successful projects! Communication First, you must create an environment that encourages quality communication and being open to new ideas. Project Managers handle many diverse and ever-changing variables in today’s project environment. Project teams, culture, and the projects themselves are evolving. Today’s project teams, in particular, are better served by more facilitation, coaching, and mentoring—behavior that supports the attributes necessary for Agile. Solid principles to consider: Consistent traceability of practice to purpose. This assures integrity of your words and actions. Accountability to each other and your teams. Set goals and achieve them 1-by-1. You wouldn’t let your team down. Practice what you preach and preach what you value. Teams observe their leaders and follow accordingly. Alignment Alignment (between project team and client) is critical to consistent, successful project delivery. By answering the three questions above, you should have a clear understanding of: What did the client buy? What is your team expected to produce, when? Alignment on these two factors serves as the foundation for successful project delivery. Accountability, communication, and implementation are the pillars built upon that foundation. Clarity of project definition, absolute clarity of purpose is what holds it all together. If you can’t answer the “why,” then you shouldn’t be doing the project. Wrap-up Let’s bring it all together. First, “Agile” is a project delivery method designed to work in a dynamic, fast-changing environment. For Agile to work in A/E, we must answer three questions to work towards Alignment between project team and client. Lastly, Alignment requires an environment that prioritizes quality communication and clarity of purpose. Set a calendar reminder for TWO WEEKS and come back for our next article on Agile in A/E. We’ll take a deep dive into the differences between Traditional Project Delivery and Agile Project Delivery in A/E. Learn how Planifi can help your firm with consistent, project delivery – schedule a call.

“Forecast” is an interesting word. It’s one of those words that can be used as a verb or a noun. You can forecast revenue or you can create a forecast. This is an important distinction, as we think about how firms operate and approach “forecasting.” We consistently see firms that “forecast their business” are more successful than firms that “look at the forecast.” Firms need to be continuously working on their forecast. It can’t be a one and done exercise. By treating a forecast as a verb, you’re constantly taking action towards achieving your goals. At Planifi, we always use forecast as a verb. Plan. Manage. Forecast. So, how can architecture and engineering firms forecast successfully? Well, in most cases, firms rely on their most senior members for forecasting and projections. Senior leadership has the most industry knowledge, understanding of their firm, and of their projects. Now often times, leadership will use rely on “gut instinct” as a substitute for data, and that may work for a while. However, “gut instinct” without current, accurate data is a catastrophe waiting to happen. For example, after living in Chicago for 20 years you can probably get around easily without paper or digital maps. By instinct, you know the best way to go. However, your instinct or memory won’t tell you where there is a traffic jam or new construction. Nowadays, to successfully navigate the streets of Chicago, you need current, actionable data from applications like Waze or Google Maps. Now, take that same thought process and apply it to your firm. With modern technology available from companies like Planifi, shouldn’t you know when traffic jams are coming up for your project deadlines and deliverables? Here are some tips to help you and your firm forecast your success: Tip #1: Metrics & Standards There are a number of ways architecture and engineering firms calculate projected revenue. In this case, it’s most important that your firm aligns to a set of metrics, standards, and process for keeping information up to date. Typically, firms will use a combination of high/low probability opportunities, unbilled work/work-in-progress (WIP), and percent complete. Tip #2: Staffing vs Backlog How does staffing mix compare against backlog; do you need to hire? Architecture and engineering firms need their staffing mix to match what’s needed to deliver upcoming work. If your firm expects to win a disproportionate number of opportunities in Higher Ed, for example, maybe you need to hire a few PMs with higher-ed experience. With forward-looking and up-to-date data, you can make smarter hiring decisions and set new employees up for success. Tip #3: Take Action Remember, forecast should be used as a verb and you should always be taking action. Keep the data up-to-date and use projections to make adjustments so you aren’t blind-sided by a preventable problem. To wrap things up, if your approach is to use “gut instinct” in your forecast as a noun, you’re eventually in for a big, expensive surprise. Going back to our driving analogy, it would be like trying to drive down the interstate by watching your rear-view mirror. It might work for a bit, but sooner or later your project is going to go up in flames. To avoid these kinds of results, you have to look to the future, not to the past.

If you ask 10 people to define project management, you will receive 11 different answers. Defining project management is not as straightforward as you might think. This is especially true when it comes to A/E project planning. It isn’t as simple as printing off a report every few months and checking how much fee is left on your jobs. If that is your approach, you’re eventually in for a big surprise. It would be like trying to drive down the interstate by watching your rear-view mirror. It might work for a bit, but sooner or later your project is going to go up in flames. To avoid these kinds of results, you have to look to the future, not to the past. Successful project management is about being proactive. When you start with an effective project plan and keep key metrics up-to-date you can be better prepared for that fork in the road that will inevitably occur. Let’s face it, all A/E projects have so many variables that inevitably your project will have a surprise somewhere. But, with an effective plan in place, and the tools to manage and monitor the project, disruptions don’t need to result in lost revenue. In fact, one of the things we realized through numerous conversations with hundreds of successful A/E firms who had mastered successful project planning and project management was that they all followed essentially the same three rules. Rule #1: Have a Single Source of Truth Be diligent about maintaining a single source of truth for your project and invest the time to keeping your project schedules up to date. With one place to go for project status information, you are better prepared to make changes and can discuss options on the fly without first having to sort through a bunch of spreadsheets. If all the information is in one place, and is always kept up to date, it removes ambiguity from the equation. Discussions focus on actions, not accuracy. Reliable data provides actionable intelligence. Note: If you’re looking for a good way to compare schedules and deliverables across your projects, check out Visual Planning . Rule #2: Keep Staffing Resources Current Make sure you always stay up to date on staffing changes and availability of your key resources. Is your lead designer going to be out on vacation next month? Do you have a replacement? Maybe someone was out sick last week and we need a few extra hours to catch up. Typically, this is handled in a weekly staffing meeting, but having your finger on the pulse can ensure you have key resources for your projects and stay on schedule. That keeps clients happy. Rule #3: Proactively Track Performance Last, and most importantly, make sure you have a means to proactively track performance on your projects. This is why it’s crucial to start with a project plan – you need something to measure against. Standardizing on metrics like Plan vs. Actual or Estimate at Complete will create more productive conversations around project performance and status. While many people will have different interpretations of what project management is, the most important thing for you is to know what it means for your firm, and how to achieve project management success.

Over the years we have seen that there are many different ways that successful A/E firms handle project planning. We have seen that not only does each firm plan differently, but also disciplines within a firm plan differently, and even project managers within a discipline plan differently. This presents numerous challenges when firms try to synchronize on project status, staffing, and forecasting. It is no wonder that firms consider PLAN to be a four-letter word. However, with the right approach and the right tools, every firm can be successful at setting up Plans that work for them. As part of our structured approach with “Plan. Manage. Forecast.” this blog post will establish a few baselines to help A/E firms and the industry evolve project planning. Pre-plan: The Estimate The first step to every plan is to begin with an estimate. Every project manager does an estimate before a project ever becomes a project. Just like every firm handles project planning differently, every project manager has a different approach to how they estimate. Some use top-down estimation, others use bottom-up estimation. Many times it is based on experience and “the way I’ve always done it.” Whatever approach they chose, in the end, project managers are looking to provide a project fee proposal that is likely to both win the contract and make money. Plan: Step 1: Verify The Budget Okay, now fast forward to once an opportunity becomes a project. Now, we have a set fee to work with and we can begin to tackle the “Plan”. We recommend that firms start the planning process by verifying the budget and then break it down by phase. Step 2: Establish Schedule And Deliverables With the budget verified, the project is starting to take a more formal shape. The focus now is to assign actual dates to phase start and end dates. Also included in the process is to set the targeted dates for key deliverables of the project. Step 3: Create The Staffing Plan Now that we have some of the key dates and deliverables established, the next step is to determine the optimal staffing resources for the project. There are a number of variables that need to be considered as part of the overall staffing plan. This can be done one of two ways: We assign roles and assign actual resources later or If you have the capabilities to project staffing several or more months in advance, assign named employee resources. With the completion of these first three steps, you have progressed down the path towards a successful project plan. Having these steps completed puts you on the path towards accountability. While these steps may seem simple and straight forward, formalizing this process will help to create standards within your firm for successful project planning.

“Planning is bringing the future into the present so that you can do something about it now.” Alan Lakein, writer In our last blog post, “Delivering Projects and Supporting Projects Are Two Sides of the Same Coin,” we discussed the importance of getting everyone in the firm to use the same data. When this happens, project managers get the resources they need to run effective projects and have satisfied clients, and leadership has the information they need to make smarter strategic decisions and increase profits. In this blog post, we want to introduce the idea of a “Culture of Planning.” Now, before a firm can begin to adopt a “Culture of Planning” they first need to have a clear understanding of the relationship between project managers and leadership (hence the first article). A “Culture of Planning” means that planning is part of the foundation in your company culture. From the project level all the way up to the business strategy level, planning is an integral part of everything the firm does. Historically, firms have combined Plan and Manage into a single process. They either try to use one tool to manage both processes, or worse yet, try to Forecast without taking one, or both, of these previous steps first. This can lead to all sorts of problems. The key to success is to Plan first. Start out simple, and make sure it has some flexibility in it. You can establish a few simple requirements for your baseline of services. You should check out our estimating tool for some ideas to get started. The next important step is to Manage. Don’t forget you need to Plan to Manage. You should review the results and make iterations to your initial plan. Add details to the Plan as they become necessary. For example, you may not start with specific staff members for each project, instead you might use roles. Then, once you get closer to a project kick-off you can start incorporating that project into weekly or bi-weekly staffing meetings. Last, but not least, is Forecast. This is the end goal, it is what all the hard work in Plan and Manage delivers to the leadership team. But, while Forecast is the target, it is also the beginning of providing the feedback stream back to Plan and Manage. Getting your firm to adopt a “Culture of Planning” might be challenging, but we can show you the way and provide the solutions so that you are successful with Plan. Manage. Forecast. Schedule a free demonstration.

When most people look at a coin, they only see the side that is facing them. They usually ignore the other side, unless maybe they are going to flip the coin to come up with an answer. And, in that case, they only look at the other side to ensure it’s different. Then, they flip the coin and it indeed lands with one side facing up. However, both sides of the coin are equally important, even if only one side is usually seen. The reason for the expression relating to two sides of the same coin is essentially highlighting the fact that you can’t have one side without the other. Although people usually only see one side at a time, both are equally important. Okay, so how does this apply to architecture and engineering firms delivering successful projects? The two sides of the coin apply to delivering projects and supporting delivery. Delivering projects is one side of the coin, which is the side that project managers see when they look at the coin. They need to deliver projects on time and within budget. To achieve successful delivery of the project on time, there needs to be effective and clear scheduling. PMs need to know they have the right resources to complete the work, and that they are available. While this may sound simple in the context of a single project, it is one of the more difficult challenges in the broader context of firm operations. Delivering the project within budget is a similar challenge, and it requires effective time management and a good staffing mix. Both time and resources are always constrained and it can feel like a juggling act to ensure that all the projects receive the right resources at the right time. Supporting delivery of projects is the other side of the coin, that leadership see when they look at the coin. They need to ensure the resources of the firm are being used to maximum efficiency. In order to deliver profitable projects and run a successful firm, project managers and leadership need to support each other. To do this, they need to find a common view of both sides of the coin. The common view in this relationship needs to be data. Project managers create data by planning and managing their projects. With effective planning, PMs have the information they need to determine if they are on track, or if changes need to be made. Likewise, leadership uses that same data to plan and manage firm-wide resources, and forecast future needs and revenue. When everyone uses the same data, project managers get the resources they need to run effective projects and have satisfied customers, and leadership has the information they need to increase profits and make smarter strategic decisions. With a single view into the projects, both parties win, and more importantly, the firm is generating higher profits.

Russ Ryan, principal at Rusk O’Brien Gido + Partners, interviewed our own JJ Brantingham, co-founder at Planifi for the “Executive Corner” in the June edition of Informed Infrastructure magazine. They discussed how effective architecture and engineering (A/E) firm leadership starts with the understanding that we’re in the business of delivering projects, and these projects are managed and delivered by people. To effectively run the business, leaders need clear and reliable data on their people and projects. Russ Ryan: In today’s economy, A/E companies need to manage more complex projects under tighter deadlines. How can they ensure they’re delivering profitable projects? JJ Brantingham: Successful and profitable project delivery starts with planning at the earliest stages of the project. A/E firms that focus on effective and accurate planning tend to see better results: happier clients and higher profits. As you start every job, it’s critical to understand why a project is valuable to the firm—whether it’s a focus on profitability and driving cash flow or potentially losing money to generate more work with a strategic client. Planifi products have been built from the ground up to help A/E firms easily plan their projects and make better decisions. For too long, firms have been forced to rely on tools such as spreadsheets that are clunky, unreliable or just downright unusable. We are here to change that for good. Ryan: Why do so many firms still rely on spreadsheets when there are better tools available? Brantingham: Most of the firms we talk to that rely on spreadsheets do so because that’s been the status quo. That’s how the business has been run for years, and they never found a usable alternative. At the same time, however, everyone knows the limitations of running their projects and business through spreadsheets. They tell us about the cost and time burden of collecting, verifying and combining all the data. They also know that as soon as they have the spreadsheet finished, the information is outdated. And they describe the challenges of trying to have a conversation while everyone else is processing the endless rows and columns. That was one of the reasons we started Planifi. We listened to the firms that wanted a more visual way to view project performance. They also wanted flexibility—the ability to view project performance by office, project or principal in a graph or grid. This helped our customers have more-effective leadership meetings and meaningful discussions. As an example, Bill Keen, the chief operations officer of Clark Nexsen, shared with us the benefits they have seen with Planifi’s visual representations of data and the ability to quickly look at budget vs. actual performance. Leadership and project managers are on the same page with regard to profitability, staffing and potential roadblocks. Additionally, without the spreadsheets, Planifi frees up their meeting time to focus on real projectexecution issues. Ryan: When talking about project execution, does that include managing the resources to properly execute a project? Brantingham: Absolutely. One challenge we often see, especially with multiple offices, is how firms can best utilize available resources and proactively determine when they will need them. With Planifi, a firm such as Clark Nexsen can plan across the entire firm. Bill Keen shared with us that they now can do more worksharing on projects among offices; it’s rather common for them to handle the architecture work on a project between three different offices. It can be led out of one office, but they can bring in people from other offices to tackle certain project elements. Having the ability to see further into the future also gives firms a competitive advantage when it comes to recruitment. Firms always want the best talent coming out of colleges and universities, but it’s difficult to forecast for future work and staffing needs without a reliable source. Our customers tell us this is another major benefit of using Planifi. Ryan: What other trends relate to improving project performance? Brantingham: A common topic of discussion has been the need for more “intelligence” in project management. Everyone has the data, but the key is to show the data in a form that’s quickly usable—dashboards and graphs, for example. People’s eyes tend to “glaze over” when asked to dive into yet another spreadsheet. But when you can show them real-time data on their projects in a graphical view, they get excited—especially when they can zoom in and out as they please, starting at a firm-wide or discipline level and then drilling down to a project as needed. We’re clearly in the “age of data,” and the pressure is on for firms to use their data as a competitive advantage. Our goal is to provide firms with easy-to-use, but powerful, tools to visualize their data to make better decisions.

Ever since their first episode on March 22, 2015, we’ve been a big fan of BIM Thoughts. Bill and his team have done a fabulous job of sharing the best technology and techniques in the architecture, engineering and construction (AEC) industry. So, you can imagine how excited we were to share our thoughts on the future of project planning. As always, Bill and Charlie did a great job in getting the best out of their guest. In this case, it was JJ Brantingham, co-founder of Planifi. Go ahead and listen to a great podcast. Also, if you’re not a podcast fan, or just prefer to read, We’ve included the transcript of the podcast so you won’t miss a thing. We think you’ll really enjoy the conversation as they engage in some great discussion on project planning for architecture and engineering firms. Here’s what Bill, Charlie & JJ had to say: Bill: Welcome to another edition of BIMThoughts. Today we are going to do an interview with JJ Brantingham. He’s with Planifi. If you don’t know who Planifi is, well, you’ve probably never used Newforma or anything like that. JJ has a great thing with the Planifi product, but we’re going to be talking more about a talk that he did a little while ago at the Deltek Vision Large Users Group, where he talked about billing and things like that. I wanted to talk to him about that, and then we’ll see where the conversation goes. Also, we have Charlie Williams with us as well, and Charlie’s becoming quite the regular, so we’re proud of Charlie. Charlie: Hello, everyone. Bill: Well hello. Charlie: Hi, Bill. How you doing? Hi JJ. JJ: Good, how are you, Charlie? Bill: Let’s get started, JJ. We’re going to ask you to define yourself. JJ: Great. My background is in AE. I spent just shy of 20 years with an engineering firm called Sebesta. I was a CIO and partner there, grew with the firm from 50 employees to about 250, and went through all the life cycles in AE. It was a great experience. Since then, I’ve left to co-found Planifi with Tom Vandervort focusing on firm performance management with our software. Bill: Let’s get right into the nitty gritty here. I was at that Vision Large Users Group in San Antonio last year and saw a bunch of people get up there and talk about Vision, then you got up there and just messed up the whole thing. You didn’t talk about Vision at all, it seemed like. You talked about billing and a new way that we should look at things. Of all the talks, I think yours stuck with me the most. I don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing, but I think it’s a good thing. Can you bring us up to date on that? I’m doubt everybody listening to BIMThoughts was at the conference. Yeah, I guess I’ll let you get started and give us the background on that. JJ: Sure. Just one point of clarification, it was the Power Users Group session. Bill: That’s right. Sorry, Vision large firm, it was the Power Users Group. JJ: No, we’re all friends. We host conferences together annually and I’m one of the four leaders of the Power Users Group. That topic was focused on the theory behind firms’ management with regards to how they bill, how they price, and a little bit about how they’re managing the firm. It’s an underlying issue that we’re managing our firms around hours. If you peel that back and look at how that started, it’s sort of a wobbly foundation because it’s not fundamentally sound. The brief talk I gave starts with the history of the billable hour and its origin from Adam Smith and Karl Marx who both tried to quantify early labor theory around workers, largely factory workers and farmers, and trying to equate the value they spend on producing stuff, whether it’s a chair or tilling the field, into an hourly rate. Adam Smith later struggled with that postulation and went away from it. When we look at firms today, many have moved away from pricing services to clients on an hourly basis. We’re doing fixed fee work more and more. I think that AIA number’s around 70%, but there’s still a lot of that hourly service work. Then there’s the backside of that where we might price on a fixed fee, but manage on an hourly basis. The fundamental flaw with that approach is there’s no value to an hour. When you provide an hour of service to a client, it might be worth five or five million dollars to the client. You can point out a cost savings program where they’re ineffectively managing their energy services, heating their building too much and not cooling at the right time, all those things. I’ve seen great engineers do that in five minutes. That save clients tens of thousands of dollars, but we’re not aligning the value to that client with the time we’re spending. There’s lots of nuances to that, but that’s the two minute summary of what I was trying to get at. Bill: Right, so what I’m hearing is there’s no value to the hour, and I understand that, but there certainly is a cost to the hour. I think that’s why we started charging by the hour because we can cost by the hour. We just thought, “Hey, let’s just charge by the hour as well,” or try to give value in that. What I’m also hearing is the value to the client is in the project and getting the project done. “This is how much it’s going to cost to get my project done, and it really doesn’t matter to me, as the client, how many hours it’s going to take. What matters to me is: I get the project done on time, on budget, and for a cost that I can afford.” JJ: Yeah, that’s the general idea. There are some subtleties, in that we’re missing the opportunities to maximize value to the client if we’re still built on the foundation of the hourly system. For example, it gets to another theory that’s called Parkinson’s law, or maybe Parkinson’s theory. This says work will expand to the hours provided. While it might not be a law, per se, it’s pretty common. I think we can all see it. When you give someone 20 hours to do something, they take 20 to 30. That’s the foundational flaw that I see. Charlie: JJ, are you saying that a better way to start planning a project would be to look at outcomes versus how many hours it takes to complete a project? JJ: Yes, correct, and it starts with a tough question to the client around aligning value and understanding what you’re providing,. For example, “What piece of that building are going to be valuable to you?” It’s different in every case, right? A campus building provides different value to them than and apartment building than an office space than a high rise. [It starts with] figuring out those pieces and identifying the key value to the client, then translating that into the project and communicating the key milestones, tasks, deliverables that your team is going to perform, and putting less focus on those hours If our measurements are on utilization and hours, guess what you’re going to get? More utilization and more hours. If your focus is on the key deliverables to the client, then you can align your team with focusing on those tasks, items, deliverables, etc. Does that make sense? Charlie: I’m just trying to visualize how you would put together your project plan with that different way of looking at it. Right now we come at a project plan with, maybe, “I’ve got these phases and these disciplines involved and I want to separate them out over these various hours.” As an alternative, perhaps, I go in the direction of what you’re saying, “I have plans, sections, and elevations, but, again, it’s back to hours.” What do you conceive as the planning process if you come at it from your perspective? Do you try to say the end product is this building and this building is probably going to return a million dollars worth of value to you over the lifespan, so we have the means by which to charge you $500,000 to do that work? Is that what you’re thinking? JJ: A little bit. Yeah, that’s the question you work out with the client: “How is this going to be of value to you?” Is it going to be 10 years of rent? Is it going to be higher tuition? How is it going to be valuable to you? I’m not saying you can avoid the cost aspect to the business. You need to make sure you can deliver that solution to the client in a way that’s beneficial to your firm. Today a lot of that can be seen through task lists. A lot of architects and engineers have the list of things they know needs to get done to deliver that building. Sometimes they put hours to it, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. That creates a baseline of how much effort it will take to deliver the project. Then when the project gets into execution, I think there’s an opportunity to focus on deliverables and not necessarily the time. That’s a change in management in saying, “I’m going to manage my people to outcomes, not to how much time they spend.” Charlie: In my previous life, in the reseller world, we had a product called BIM9, a cloud based virtualization of machines. When we first brought that to market, we priced it in such a way that, okay, we think our day is worth X amount of money and it takes us three days to do this project, on average. As time went on, we figured out how to do it better and faster. So, what took us three days in the first couple of months then dropped down to two days, then to a day and a half of actually getting it done because we found better ways of doing things. We started reusing some of our recipes and things like that. What we decided early on is the value to the client for this product is the same. Just because we can get it done faster and it’s cheaper for us to build it doesn’t necessarily mean that the value of the product changed. Over time, we charged the same amount of money but we ended up making more money. Then we could use that money to better ourselves and better the product as well. Bill: If I’m following what JJ is saying, there might have been an opportunity for BIM9 to charge even more. I think what he’s saying is one installation of BIM9 is going to return $20,000 worth of value to that firm, so where BIM9 might have been changing $3,500, they could have maybe charged $5,000 because that still generates $15,000 worth of return back on the company, so there’s finding that balance point because how much value can the provider take away from what the user can generate before it becomes an even deal. Charlie: Right, and that’s the hard part. It’s trying to find how much money we don’t want to leave on the table kind of thing. Bill: Are we on the right track there, JJ, or did we just go off on a whole other tangent? JJ: I think that’s spot on and a great story because it reflects a few things in my mind. For one, you found a way to more effectively deliver those solutions, which is another opportunity for AE as a whole. If you specialize in certain spaces and certain practices or activities, you can be more effective in delivering those while still providing the same value, right? Bill: Right. Charlie: That’s interesting. We were talking about compensation on an individual basis and it was a similar idea. I think people come at compensation as the firm trying to pay them as little as the firm possibly can. Then somebody changed my perspective on that and said, “Well, really the firm wants to pay you as much as they can because the more they’re paying you, the presumption is that the more you’re returning in value,” so demonstrate how much value you’re bringing to the firm, and that’s a better argument towards, “How do I increase my compensation versus being need based, or just simply these are the things I did?” Demonstrating value is a really interesting idea. Bill: Then the value becomes between the employee and the employer as, “This is how much value I think you’re bringing to the firm, so this is how much I’m willing to pay you.” Then the employee needs to determine their delivered value to the firm and the appropriate compensation for that value. Am I giving more value to the firm and wish to get a raise? I hope it doesn’t turn into, “I’m giving more value to the firm, so now I’m going to do less work.” That’s where problems start to come into play. JJ: I want to highlight two management challenges that I often see in the hourly based world. With BIM9, you were focused on delivering more effectively. In the hourly management system, you are incentivized to deliver at the same level of inefficiency, to some degree, to keep your utilization up. Then, on that same topic of employee compensation, you’re aligned around utilization and how many hours people charge. In that case, we end up backing into that compensation number, rather than, what I’m suggesting, we start with the value delivered to the client, based on the feedback and the quantifiable deliverables. I’m not saying everything is going to be spot on, but it’s a more constructive conversation and, I think, better aligns compensation to the value delivered. The idea of this is not to be precise. There’s a gentleman, Ron Baker, who inspired a lot of these topics that I’m speaking to. He has a great point of, “You’re better off being approximately correct than precisely wrong.” That’s what I think about when we get to a utilization number times billability to calculate compensation, how much we can afford to pay you, that’s a precisely wrong number. It’s down to the cent, but it’s not aligned to let’s be approximately right, to how individuals are contributing. Bill: Right, and I think I’ve listened to Ron Baker. That’s the guy who’s doing the Soul of Enterprise, right? JJ: Yeah. Bill: His broadcast, the Soul of Enterprise? JJ: Right. Bill: One of his early podcasts talks about this thing. Yeah, there it is, the law of … Second one he did, it looks like. I think that’s where I heard it again. I’ll have a link to that in the show notes that nobody reads. JJ: I do highly recommend that podcast as well as Ron Baker’s books. They’re top-notch. Bill: Yeah, that’s a good one to listen to if you’re into that sort of thing. Charlie: How do you see these theories making their way into how somebody plans a project or how they plan to execute the building of the model that’s going to go into the construction documents? JJ: Yeah, so that’s a great question. It gets back to being approximately correct. I’m trying to find a firm that is either willing to try or is doing it today. I’ve yet to find one. I have had conversations with, ironically enough, accounting firms that are leading the charge on this as far as getting away from charging accounting services by the hour and charging commodity services. Frankly, they’re even moving to giving away commodity services like tax services for free. To answer your question, Charlie, I think it starts with being open to break down what you’re doing and assign some value to it and figure out … It’s going to be multiple levels. It’s going to take some effort to figure out what parts of the schematic design are valuable, but it’s similar to estimating, too. Estimating is not a precise science. I think if we take it from that perspective, that would provide estimates to that, break down those task lists, and provide our ballpark value and start managing and tracking to that. Charlie: When you take it to the modeling level where we’re establishing a team that’s going to build a model that’s going to make the construction documents, are you saying that they have to make a case for how much their model is going to contribute to the value of the project or the drawings or are you saying how much that model is going to contribute to the value of what the owner receives at the end of the project? JJ: It should be translated to the owner and client. I’m fascinated. I’d love to have this conversation with the team because I think it would drive all sorts of innovation about what else could we do with that BIM model to provide more value to the client because it’s an interesting thing. To a lot of clients, the BIM model isn’t of value. With others, it might be tremendously valuable. It all depends. I think you could challenge the team to figure out what else or what more could we do to this BIM model to make it more valuable. Charlie: That’s when you move into facilities management. There’s always this case we’re trying to make as people that are interested in BIM and understand the lifecycle of it. There’s this third component of operate over and above design and construct that we’re always trying to get to. I, personally, can’t seem to get alignment with the clients very frequently, so coming to the table with a better story that says, “By giving you this model, we anticipate it can provide these types of features with your facilities management, which is going to save you a million dollars and therefore value of that effort of us putting in the information into that model, the constructing that model in a way that it’s usable, if you’re going to reap a million dollars from that in savings, then it seeps logical that the design firm should reap $100,000 of that.” I think that would be a really compelling story for a client to say, “Oh, you’re right. I didn’t realize I was going to reap a million dollars savings in that.” JJ: Another way to phrase that is, instead of saying, “We think it’s going to be worth this,” we could say, “And to get a model of that detail is going to cost this amount of money,” because the model we build is for the construction documents, but if we’re finding that owners are using the model in this way, in order for us to build a model in that way, it is going to take this amount of effort to do that. Bill: I can see how that can help you arrive at the fee that you’re proposing for the project because you can take the component parts of the project. The design has a contribution. The construction of the model has a contribution. The observation and construction has a contribution that returns this overall value of the building whether, like JJ said, it’s increased tuition, more productivity, whatever it may be, to come up with your fee. I still haven’t gotten to the point in time, and this hearkens back to an episode or two ago where we were trying to figure out how much time somebody should put onto doing a task, but I think JJ is saying, or the theory that JJ’s talking about, is do whatever time is necessary to deliver that product that provided that value and then the architectural firm, the designer, is incentivized to do that in more effective time. It’s pushing that pressure onto you that if you do it in fewer hours, then it returns value. You get more profit. If you do it in more, you’re losing profit. JJ: Right,and it’s a two way street. One, we need to sell that service because, let’s be honest, we’re all trying to … We’re all salespeople and we’re all trying to sell our what we do for a living, either we’re selling it to the company to hire us or we’re selling our design for someone to build it, is to add value to that design in such a way that it becomes more valuable to them. If I’m adding value to this model by allowing you to use it for facilities management or do some statistical analysis on something or energy analysis or things like that, in any of those cases, the model must be build in a different way than just construction documents in order to get that to work. I think we’re all leaving money on the table, if you will, by not offering that as an added service or an added value to the client. Charlie: JJ, you said you’d be interested in working with a team to work through this. Let’s say a team gets presented to you. What is the first thing you would challenge them to do? JJ: We would break down everything: the cost based management, cost based accounting management. We’d want to dissect and look at how you’re managing the firm as a whole, getting away from hours, talking about how to align effort with the value to the client. There’s a lot to do. The challenge is going to be having more conversations with clients and becoming more client focused. I don’t think most employees are going to have an issue or challenge not focusing on hours and, instead, focusing on the challenges that are being better articulated to them by the team leaders dealing with the client. We’d have to break apart some of those things and look at … Fundamentally, the way we manage in accounting, and I spent lots of time in accounting, so this hourly utilization target and everything sort of treats employees like they’re part time workers and that it’s not a fixed cost that can go up and down, like if I don’t charge by hour, then it doesn’t go to the bottom line or something. It’s largely a fixed cost, I guess is my point. Let’s treat it as a fixed cost. Let’s move into, then, how we focus on delivering projects to the clients. How do we break it down and value that work breakdown structure and go from there? It wouldn’t be an overnight transition, I imagine. It would be a year plus transition for a firm, or at least a group. Charlie: Let me ask a question that’s going to go off of the theories that we’ve been talking about. What I’m hearing you say, you’re challenging people to think about something different. You also said, when you defined yourself as Bill likes to say, you talked about your past history of being a CIO at a company and a lot of this, and I’m sure a lot of people who listen to this podcast, are responsible for motivating those changes. What are your tactics and how are you helping educate your clients, the software that you’re selling now, and how did you work as a CIO to motivate people to make these … What you’re talking about here is really a drastic change, so how do you motivate people to do that? What’s proven successful for you? JJ: I don’t know if we’ve achieved success yet, but what this opportunity has allowed me to do is to step back, work with a larger group of firms, and look at what they’re doing. I think firms are doing this in different ways today, but they’re doing it intuitively. Moving from hourly work to fixed fee is one example of that. Firms knew that charging by the hour with no upside and no alignment to the client was not the right way to perform work. Delivering work on a fixed fee basis makes a lot of sense and it is largely value driven. Now it’s stepping back and saying, “Okay, let’s not do this on an hourly basis. Let’s start aligning to what we’re delivering the client. To some degree we also see that in time sheets. Most firms I go into now and look at time sheets, it’s slammed with eight hours a day and no time sheet comments. The employees are mysteriously doing this work and doing great things, but who really knows what they actually did during the day. They were focused on just solving the problems of the clients. To answer your question on what are we doing today, it’s going to be a nudging, an evolving process for us, because we still support in our products all of the hourly based management. What we’re starting to do is provide more ways to align the teams around the tasks that they’re doing and managing those tasks, the tasks really being the deliverables that produce the final product and a little bit less focus on hours, we hope. That’s going to be an evolutionary process and it’s going to be a part of this ongoing dialog with clients as to how we can do this better and more and maybe start even automating those time sheets, for example. There’s some things that we’re working towards, but it’s not going to be an overnight change. I view it as probably, in an industry, probably a five to ten year shift, probably longer in different sectors of the industry. Charlie: I guess another good question to ask you because you have exposure to so many different firms that you’re working with, what do you see as characteristics of firms that can evolve and change more effectively? I’m sure you have some firms that you’ve worked with that the tool has fallen flat. You’ve had other projects that you’ve worked with and they’re wildly successful. Do you see anything characteristic of firms that are signals to you that this firm is going to be successfully able to adopt change, whether that change is something as drastic as what you’re talking about, changing your accounting method or changing from CAD to BIM or adopting some other new technology? Are there characteristics you see in a firm that signal a good or bad likelihood? JJ: Yeah, I think they tend to be more holistic in their view of everything. That goes from everything from how innovation can fit in with having innovation departments and groups that will spend time in innovation, not delivering to client, and they view that innovation group as spending time to create more value, etc. That’s a willingness to view how that innovation department fits holistically in the firm, just like another example would be project planning. A firm that views project planning as just sitting in for PMs to report back financials is not seeing the forest for the trees. They’re doing this one little thing instead of looking at the opportunity to take what it would mean to do project planning to then look at capacity. Do they have the right people or enough people? Can they start hiring months in advance and have steady growth instead of bumpy growth? How many problems you can solve with just planning, it’s not just reporting back financials and are we going to come in under budget or over budget. It’s how we can project and manage an entire firm with planning. Firms that can see the forest, if you will, and have a more holistic view tend to be able to adopt and lead the technology because they can explain it to their employees versus just saying, “We’re going to be doing this because I say so.” Bill: I guess the first step is to get an accurate tracking of what it really costs and then try to figure out what it’s worth as well, unless I’m completely wrong. JJ: Fundamentally, Bill, it’s pretty simple. Those two things need to be in alignment for value. The value in the sense that it’s going to take the firm so much effort to create the value, if that’s out of balance with what it takes to deliver to the client, it’s a bad fit, right? Bill: Right. We need to have a good way to track it. We need to have, also, a great way to analyze it, or to see the data in order to make any of this work. Getting at tracking is the hard part. I think analyzing it’s fairly easy. There’s good software to do that. I know a good guy who makes some. Getting them to track it right is the hard part, to track their time. Any final thoughts? JJ: I think that the last point I would make, just around value to clients, is consider where risk fits in there. Risk is both an opportunity and a risk, so think about where that fits in that overall conversation. You could do more stuff at risk and get more value from your client through doing that. Then I would challenge firms to maybe take a step back and think about what are the fundamental theories underneath your business that you’re basing thoughts and decisions around. They’re misaligned, in my opinion, today, but I’d be happy to hear from others and be told otherwise. It’s a conversation I’d love to have, so thanks for having me on to do that. Bill: Charlie? Charlie: Thank you. That was really insightful. It’s been a lot of talk lately about thinking about things more and the idea of outcomes, hat are we trying to produce, than how many hours do we need to produce it. I think just that subtle shift makes you a little bit more focused on a project and the quality of your work. JJ: It is a fundamental shift, and I think it’s the right direction for both the client and for the design professional. Yes, there is some risk involved, one, am I overbidding and is my competition going to be doing the same thing. That’s a big risk as well. The other risk is are we spending too much time now getting the thing done, which this ups my cost. Bill: Thank you, JJ, for being on and thoughts. I’ll probably have to have you on again as we digest this a little bit more and as we come up with new and great questions for this kind of subject. Thank you. JJ: Thank you. Charlie: Thank you. Bye, everyone.

Let’s face it, nobody likes project meetings. In many cases, they just feel like a waste of time. This has been a problem in the industry since the beginning of time. Clark Nexsen, a fully integrated architecture and engineering firm with nearly 500 employees, 10 offices, and a global reputation for excellence in markets ranging from infrastructure to K-12 were facing that challenge. However, by using Planifi Project Analyzer & Project Visualizer, they transformed project meetings into something that delivered a better end result for both the client and the firm. Through our regular conversations with Clark Nexsen, a longstanding Planifi customer, we realized that we needed to share their story with other architecture and engineering firms. We sat down with Clark Nexsen’s Chief Operations Officer, Bill Keen, PE, LEED AP, to learn more about how Planifi Project Analyzer and Project Visualizer helped their firm manage continued growth, made their meetings productive, and delivered the data their leadership team needs to make better decisions. Visibility into projects and revenue, either on an office-by-office or principal-by-principal basis has enabled real conversations about performance. Since Planifi is deployed and utilized enterprise-wide, firm leadership has the ability to analyze revenue from numerous perspectives. This same visiblity has enabled leadership and project managers to become more proactive in planning resources. With a clear picture across offices, assigning the best resources for the job (regardless of location) has become commonplace and improved project delivery. This level of collaboration is something that Planifi Project Analyzer and Project Visualizer brings to the table. We are always happy to hear success stories from our customers and how Planifi has helped. Bill provided so many great examples we had to write a case study, and are happy to now share that with you. Click here to download the case study.

Every now and then a customer comes to you with a request that is so simple, yet so powerful, you wonder how it wasn’t built in to the product from the very beginning. The Planifi Outlook Integration is that feature for Planifi Project Analyzer. Planifi is proud to announce that we have introduced a simple, yet powerful integration between Planifi Project Analyzer and Microsoft Outlook that allows project managers to view their assignments, project deliverables, and project schedules from within their Microsoft Outlook desktop application. “Giving Project Managers the ability to check their project responsibilities and due dates where they already work is pretty awesome,” said Aaron Askew, Director of Resource Management at Moody Nolan, Inc. a leading A/E firm. “While it seems like such a simple thing, this makes it easier for them to stay on top of the ever-changing complexities of managing projects”. This sentiment has been repeated by many other customers who have enabled the integration. They love the straight-forward approach and having project responsibilities in context of their other commitments has been a hit. This really is one of those features that came about because we listen to our customers. And, when you listen to your customers, good things happen! Oh, and the icing on the cake is how easy it is to setup. We made the installation super easy. With a couple of clicks, the connection is made and the project manager now has visibility into all of their assignments, all of the project deliverables, and the project resources. It is pretty powerful stuff, yet presented so simply!

Schwarzman College at Tsinghua University, Beijing Chine Photographer Credit: Peter Aaron / Otto for Robert A.M. Stern Architects Robert A.M. Stern Architects (RAMSA) continually found themselves asking the fundamental questions about their projects: Where are we now? What people do we have available? How are we going through the next week, next two weeks, and so forth into the future? Like so many other firms in the industry, RAMSA didn’t have the data-driven answers they could trust. That is, until they saw Planifi Project Analyzer. After they standardizing on Planifi Project Analyzer, answers emerged for past and current projects, as well as providing insights looking into the future. Before starting with Planifi Project Analyzer, most of their resource planning was done through Microsoft Excel spreadsheets. While spreadsheets can offer great value to firms, there are certainly limitations and hazards that come with relying on spreadsheets for planning and forecasting. We had this conversation with David Freedman, CFO of Robert A.M. Stern Architects (RAMSA) and he shared the leadership’s perspective on why they made the switch from Excel to Planifi Project Analyzer. As David put it, “I think what RAMSA recognized was the need to put something more robust in place, something that enables us to look almost as far into the future as we possibly can and really get a feeling for, not only what have we got and where it’s going, but if there’s any trend changes.” Now, for some firms, getting people to use a new system can be a challenge, especially when they have established practices in Excel. However, a key factor in driving usage for RAMSA was the intuitive and visually-appealing interface. The designers and project managers enjoyed seeing the visualization of their real-time data in easy-to-understand graphs, instead of hunting for answers in an endless matrix of numbers and hidden formulas. As David put it, “One of the big things that Planifi offers us is the visuals, which for architects is a beautiful thing. They’re not necessarily all that keen on looking at the numbers, but they can see a pie chart and they can see when it’s got a red piece in it because it’s under-performing your expectations. That gave them a whole new perspective on project performance.” We’ve always said there is a big difference between data and intelligence. Data is data, but when you can visualize the data, you get intelligence. And that intelligence allows principals and project managers to make strategic decisions with confidence. Since everyone at the firm was willing to look at the data and use the powerful tools that Planifi Project Analyzer delivers, it became a core component to their meetings and decision-making. This allowed leadership at RAMSA to get more and more benefits from using the system over time. As David said, “I think it has really progressed, and it has progressed in order for us to use it to make senior-level decisions on staffing, on things that, even project pricing, on competitions is another big way that it’s really helped us, the ability to plan out what a particular effort might cost, but also to be able to plan out what the eventual project might do for us.” For us at Planifi, it has been exciting to see how RAMSA has benefitted from using our product since joining as a customer in 2014. We look forward to sharing more real-world results from RAMSA, and our other customers, who are seeing improvements in project planning and business performance. Read the full RAMSA Case Study here.