In-Person, Online, and on the Road: Barton Malow's Autodesk Construction Cloud Training

ASHLYN HARRIS: Hey, thanks for joining us today, everyone. Today, Liz Fox and myself will be walking you through Barton Malow's Autodesk Construction Cloud Training.

So a quick introduction to guide today's meeting. So on our agenda, we've got introductions to both Barton Malow and your presenters. Then I'll give a brief background of Barton Malow's software journey and how we came to use ACC as our project management software. From there, Liz and I will walk you through the evolution of our ACC training program. Then we'll dive into a future state discussion of how we're guiding our training in collaboration with Autodesk based on feedback from our users. And we'll wrap up today with a quick opportunity for Q&A.

Barton Malow is a general contractor founded in Detroit, Michigan in 1924, which means that we're actually celebrating our 100th anniversary this year. And Barton Malow is an umbrella of companies. I'll give you a brief overview of five entities under that umbrella that Liz and I help support.

So first, we have Barton Malow Company, which is union, self-perform. It's focused on industrial and energy projects. Then we have Barton Malow Builders, which is traditional, commercial, and institutional projects. Barton Malow Holdings is our corporate support teams, including Finance, Legal, Safety, Lean, and other groups.

Then there's Alltrade, which is our Canadian counterpart, that's similar to Barton Malow Company. Focuses on energy, automotive, and industrial markets. And lastly, we have our LIFTBuild team. And that team consists of those working on projects using vertical manufacturing patent approaches to rethink how we're constructing buildings.

Some quick notes about your presenters. So hey, everyone. I'm Ashlyn Harris. I'm a technology implementation manager. I went to University of Michigan where I studied architecture. And I'm joined Barton Malow in May of last year. And my role here, I help find and create project efficiencies through software solutions that will help enable our project teams to better have success.

Prior to joining Barton Malow, I have eight years of experience in the AEC industry largely managing construction and design projects on both the client level, at UScellular, and prior to that, I was at RGLA Solutions, an architecture firm. Outside of work, you can find me outside in Chicago, where I live, largely just participating in outdoor activities and trying to remain active.

ELIZABETH FOX: My name is Liz Fox. I'm a technology implementation manager for Barton Malow. I studied construction engineering at Purdue University. Graduated in 2014. I joined Barton Malow for the second time in March of 2020 on the BDC team working to empower teams to use technology to disrupt our industry.

Prior to rejoining Barton Malow on the BDC team, I have six-plus years of project delivery experience, both with Barton Malow as a project engineer right after I graduated, as well as with Sachse Construction as a project manager in their Retail division. I'm not working, I love to be outside as well. Avid hiker, amateur gardener. And I own a century home in Detroit that I'm frequently trying to keep standing.

ASHLYN HARRIS: All right, so let's take some time to dive into Barton Malow's project management software journey. So as I'm sure you could guess, over the past 100 years, Barton Malow has used countless technologies. To give you all some context for today's conversation, I'd like to take a moment to talk through a brief snapshot of what that journeys look like relative to our chosen project management software over the past six years.

So as you can see on the timeline here, pre-2018, the company was using Prolog, as well as a variety of other softwares in our technology stack. They went on during that time to evaluate a project management software that would be a best fit for our needs, and landed on BIM 360. So in 2019, the team rolled out BIM 360. And the Business Transformation team sitting at the holdings level did so. They helped create an on-demand Skilljar training. This is a video training that's available to our team members. And they used that to facilitate the rollout.

In 2021, the responsibility of BIM 360, or a project management software in general, then moved from Holdings to an entity-specific level, which is how it was then determined that our roles were created, Liz and myself. And so Liz is supporting that company, industrial self-perform side that we spoke about earlier. And myself working with Barton Malow Builders team supporting our commercial and institutional projects.

And then in 2022, the team began to stand up projects in Autodesk Construction Cloud, moving over to that platform with its advancements. And following that, 2023 through present, Liz and myself have been working with the team on user experience enhancements.

So as mentioned in the timeline that we just walked through, Skilljar is where we started our ACC training, so that's where we're going to begin our conversation around training today.

So Barton Malow's utilized the Skilljar platform for several years to host training covering a variety of technology and skills. It was used to launch training materials in 2020 to support the BIM 360 rollout, as we discussed. And it seemed like a no-brainer to use it for ACC when we transitioned to using that platform in 2022.

So when a user accesses the ACC training in Skilljar, the user can choose between several learning pathways depending on the role that they'll have in a project. So there's the administrative training subcontractor and field team, project team member training, which is an abbreviated version of the admin training. Then we also have AE and owner training available in what we call our Skilljar Academy.

So this is available externally for partners that we'll be working with, and that's to ensure that all of the parties have appropriate training needed to be successful on one of our projects.

And when you click into Designated Training Pathway, then users are taken to a page of their courses. So this is what it would look like here. They can then register for the training, which will trigger Skilljar to begin logging the user's activity and completion on the backend side. And when users internal to Barton Malow register for a course, they're then given access to a sandbox project, and they're going to be able to use that to follow along within these courses.

So the courses are sectioned per module within ACC. That's with the exception of the Getting Started module that you'll see here in the top-left. And each of these have a timestamp, and that'll assist those taking it and understanding how they can fit it into their schedule.

We all have very busy schedules and understand that telling team members to take two to three hours of training to be a project administrator can seem a bit daunting, but if they're able to better understand how they can fit a module in between meetings and a jobsite walk, then we're going to be providing them the tools to better visualize their success and getting it completed.

Each of the modules leverages embedded links of the ACC learning environment training videos. And so we only needed to provide the custom text to support it. And then the Skilljar training also offers best practices, tips, and tricks for using the modules in accordance with Barton Malow standard practices.

And an example of that would be this right here. So here's an example of an embedded document that we have in the Getting Started module, and that helps supplement the existing material. It provides team members with a cheat sheet for getting their projects set up correctly across a variety of modules.

So the team launched this, and there were some clear wins for on-demand video training, first being customization. So although our core Skilljar website serves as a one-stop shop for Barton Malow and distributing many of their training materials, we're able to shuffle and alter that ACC content that was just shown to create catered learning experiences based on those four roles that we discussed earlier.

The next one here is flexibility. So this was key, especially during the early use of the Skilljar platform. Providing immediate support across all of the offices and job sites was an integral part of our success in mobilizing team members in ACC during COVID. And another helpful aspect of that is that the trainings available for employees to go back for a content refresher as needed after they completed their training.

And lastly, we have tracking here. So as mentioned earlier, once a user registers for the course, it begins tracking their metrics. Now, the backend of the Skilljar platform allows for individuals with account admin access to view the metrics of users on our Barton Malow account. So with that, Liz and I are able to gather metrics at both a company and individual user level.

This will prove to be helpful in an unexpected way as we continue to see users who had completed the project admin training send over questions around simple content. And after some deep diving, we found a common denominator in the data we were seeing with all of those struggling users.

So this is what we were coming across. The time that it takes to complete the modules varies, as you could see on the earlier slide, but on average, they tend to fall around 15 to 25 minutes, with the exception of the Sheets module that takes about an hour. So we often go to check a team member's training metrics to find completion data like you're seeing highlighted here where they're taking, on average, a minute or less completion time per module. So stark contrast to that 15 to 25 minutes that it should be taking.

With that knowledge, we went back to the drawing board to brainstorm how we could deliver training more effectively as it was pretty evident from what we were seeing that on-demand video training may not be the best tool for everyone.

ELIZABETH FOX: So with team members' learning styles in mind, as Barton Malow started transitioning out of COVID, we began functioning as a hybrid work environment. So we have team members on job sites, we have team members who are at home, some are in our various offices. And we were looking for a way to be able to engage these team members in training outside of these on-demand videos.

So in January of 2023, we began utilizing Barton Malow's Weekly Webinar Wednesdays once a month to reach people wherever they were with our first version of instructor-led training.

Baron Malow has been hosting Webinar Wednesdays even before COVID started. We offered two a week, one on Wednesday morning, one on Wednesday afternoon. Topics range from how to read drawings how to sign up for community week, project highlights, and case studies, and now ACC tutorials.

What's nice about these Webinar Wednesdays is that they're open to the entire enterprise to present and attend. So if you have a topic you want to present on, you just need to email the folks in charge of Webinar Wednesdays and they'll get you set up with the next available calendar date. They also send out our calendar invites to the entire enterprise, so we're really casting this very wide net to be able to get as many attendees as possible.

Earlier this year, we also-- our L&D department released our enterprise learning calendar, which is a really nice tool where our team members can actually go in and see any training that's being offered on any given day and what kind of platform it's being offered, whether it's virtual, in-person, on-demand. And they're able to actually get access to those meeting invites from this learning calendar in case they may be declined at an earlier date and now they have time to add it to their schedule.

So in 2023, we started our first iteration of Webinar Wednesday presentations. We chose to do one per month on the same day and time every month. So we did the second Wednesday at 2 o'clock every month so it was consistent and team members could easily attend our sessions. We try to cover one to two topics per webinar starting in January with how to set up your project admin settings, all the way through December and how to bridge data out of your site into your owner's site, or how to export a turnover package.

We would start one of these sessions with a PowerPoint just showing some of the overall information about the module. We show permissions or any workflows that Autodesk provided, such as for RFIs and submittals, those flowcharts online. We would then go into a live demo where we would start from a completely from-scratch module, show them how to set up their permissions, how to create an RFI or an issue, how to turn it-- how to process the whole tool, and then how to turn it over in the end.

We would then end half of our sessions with feature releases if it was the month following product releases from Autodesk. We were also able to record all of these sessions for future use so team members could reference them in the future, or if they missed it when it was live, they could still go back and look at the content.

What we were seeing attendance-wise, we were getting on average about 30 to 50 members each month attending our sessions. They were inconsistent users, too. Our original idea is that if someone attended every single session, then by the end of the year, they'd be fully trained on ACC.

But what we were seeing is that our attendance was higher on the months where we were going over feature releases versus the months that we weren't. So after a year of these webinars, and they're all recorded, we decided to start fine-tuning our content and made a pivot to a new model.

So this year, we switched from doing every month to doing every other month, and we're just doing them following the months of Autodesk's product releases. We no longer offer general training, we just focus on those feature releases, but this has given us the ability to really dive into some of those feature releases and give live demos on how Barton Malow users could use these new features inside of those modules.

We also really like to highlight when feature releases that came from Barton Malow team members, so that way, we can drive engagement with our feature request process, which Ashlyn will go over toward the end of our presentation. And what was been really cool to see is that we've doubled our team member engagement with these webinars, and we have, on average, 90 to 120 members attending every other month now. And it's a lot of the same consistent members each month, and they're building on it. So it's been really nice to see our attendance numbers go up.

ASHLYN HARRIS: So an additional instructor-led training opportunity that we facilitate is the Autodesk Roadshow. When joining the team in spring of last year, there was an effort in progress that some of you may know about if you attended Ryan Riley's AU presentation last year. This was an in-person office based training referred to within our company as the Autodesk Roadshow.

Ryan had already visited many of our offices offering training that best suited their site-specific needs. However, there were a few locations that hadn't yet been visited. And so after getting my bearings in the role, I took the baton and finished the tour across our offices.

As I was only six months into the role when facilitating the Roadshow visits, I saw this as a really great opportunity to better understand our team members' needs in the different offices we have and potentially gain some insights around the Skilljar challenge that we discussed earlier.

Now, before each office visit, I would send team members a survey to get a gauge of several items. And we've got a snippet of an example survey here that was sent out, the first being availability. So we want to drive the maximum amount of attendance at a Roadshow when we're in the area. Next, looking to understand existing ACC comfort level, and identify training needs on a per-module basis.

The survey also inquired about their knowledge of the Project Startup Checklist that I shared with you all earlier. And also gave an opportunity to solicit onsite project training requests if there were any jobsite team members knew of that needed additional training support. And lastly, the survey gave team members an opportunity to communicate their learning style preference, which was really helpful for Liz and I and guiding some of those future training decisions.

So once the roadshow was completed, we were able to facilitate trainings across our 14 offices in the United States. All of that training provided was specific to skills and workflows that were indicated as problem areas during the survey. And it provided an opportunity for immediate feedback and problem-solving, as well as it built the confidence of many of the team members in navigating the platform. As they were able to get that hands-on experience and ask further detailed questions as they went, it really advanced their skillsets to the next level.

It also provided an opportunity for myself to network with those who I hadn't been able to yet meet virtually. So in addition to that, enhanced collaboration efforts between subject matter experts in the office with their colleagues who might be less experienced in ACC.

And lastly, we learn from the survey that most employees prefer hands-on learning as compared to presentations or on-demand videos, which, as I mentioned earlier, was really helpful in guiding us in how we were planning our future training efforts.

ELIZABETH FOX: So with that in mind, in 2023, after Ashlyn joined the team, we took a week-long virtual Power BI bootcamp. We went from having never used the software other than using other folks' pre-created dashboards to becoming intermediate users in just four days, which immediately had us brainstorming and how we could translate this style of learning to ACC and possibly streamline some of our current instructor-led offerings.

So it took us nine months to develop our interactive lab training. We hosted a pilot for eight super users earlier this year in May to get feedback on how we could make these labs more effective. They gave us very valuable insight on how our end users are utilizing the software, which we were able to incorporate into these labs. So we weren't just teaching basic points and clicks, but we're actually offering insight on best practices as well.

This course is designed for project admin certification at Barton Malow, but can be split out for many-- any level of expertise. The entire course takes about 12 hours to complete, and we break it into three four-hour sessions. It covers every module and build and project admin except for schedule and assets, which are on hold right now as we get a better grasp of how we're going to use those tools at Barton Malow.

And we've created hyperlinked PDFs for each module, starting at the very beginning of a very fresh project. So every module starts with an Overview page, as you see here. It includes any of the workflows that Autodesk provides online. So any of those flowcharts. We reference our book of Barton Malow standard practices, as well as a link to the ACC learn page for that module so that team members have somewhere they can reference in the future.

We also include a Navigation page that highlights key features of the module so that team members know what each of the buttons and menus will open up for them. And we follow that up with an exercise that we actually demo live for each session, but also include a step-by-step guide with screenshots so that folks can use these at a later date, or if they fall behind during the live setting, they can catch back up.

But the point of these PDFs is for the team members to use after and for the trainers to use during. As long as they're in that instructor-led training, we're demoing it all live on screen for them, so they really just have to follow along with us, and we do welcome them to have an open dialogue with us so that we can tailor the training more to their specific needs.

One other nice aspect of this is that we do provide every participant of this training their own personal sandbox for up to 30 days. We bridge all of our hyperlinked PDFs to their sandbox so that their content is always up to date because we do update this every month that Autodesk release product releases.

And then after 30 days, we send them an email letting them know that we're going to archive their project so that they have time to get any content out of it that they might need. At that time, we then add them to a larger sandbox where we then bridge all of these lab files as well. And there could be up to 100 people in these larger sandboxes, but it keeps our system a little more organized, and we realized quickly that if we opened one and kept them open, it would bog down our account admin portal pretty quickly.

So the goal of our training is to meet people where they are in their learning journey. We offer this training both virtually or in person, but either way, it is completely instructor-led. One of us is on screen or in the room the entire time. We can offer this in a couple of different ways. We can go entity-based.

Earlier this summer, we did a tour through Canada and spent a couple of days in Ontario and a couple in Calgary training are Alltrade group. We were able to get 35 team members admin-certified in four days, which was really helpful, and learned a lot about how Alltrade runs as a company.

We can also do department-based training. Just last week, we led a virtual training for BDC, and we were able to get our entire BDC department trained with project admin status, which is great because we always have a member of the BDC team on a project team, so we have coverage there. We can also do this as a role-based training. We're currently coordinating with our Learning and Development team who are working on a project engineering learning journey.

And with that, they're teaching more of the theoretical steps behind things like how to write an RFI, who should be included on a submittal. And then we come in toward the end and teach the participants exactly how you submit that RFI in ACC and how you process the submittal in ACC, so it's been a great collaborative effort there as well.

We also have the ability to facilitate this entire program, but understand that not everybody has 12 hours to set aside for training. So it can also be set up as a specific module grab-and-go scenario, which is how we plan to facilitate our ACC Roadshow in the future.

The greatest takeaway from this interactive lab-based training is that we no longer have to reinvent the wheel every time we have a request for personalized training. If a team member needs help with RFI specifically, we can just grab the packet. We know exactly how long it takes to go through the RFIs, and we can set up a meeting with them and just get it done very quickly and efficiently for them.

And last but not least, on our ACC training journey, Ashlyn earlier walked you through our Skilljar on-demand training that we rolled out in 2019, which we have recently sunset and replaced with our new ACC Learn custom environment pilot that we partnered with Autodesk on. So prior to this year, with Skilljar, we had two options for on-demand training for internal team members. We had the project member or the project admin.

What we were finding, though, is that our team members have very different uses for the ACC software. Some folks, like project engineers, are going to use every single module, whereas safety folks might just use issues and forms. So we needed to find a way that we could make this more customized to our end users.

We were also working a lot to keep the videos up to date, and accessing Autodesk's embed links is a little difficult, so we were always trying to make sure that the content was up to date, but we were having a hard time keeping up with it.

So what we needed was a granular role-based playlists that are always up to date as Autodesk is rolling out their feature updates. We wanted to explore how we could utilize ACC Learn to help reduce our duplicating efforts and are using our own Skilljar, but we had no way to access their data from their public site, and we definitely needed the user data in order for this to be an effective tool for us.

So Autodesk approached us with a solution, which was an invested interest to develop this custom customer-specific landing page in the Learning Center. This would feature customer assets, curated content, a targeted FAQ to quickly enable and support users in their platform, and they would also be able to allow specific users access to user data in the backend of their Skilljar.

We began this process in early April of this year. We began meeting with them to build out our custom landing page for Barton Malow Enterprise team members, and I'll get a little bit more into the content on the next slide. But we launched ACC Learn for Barton Malow with a custom Barton Malow URL in June of this year, and we've been meeting with Autodesk at least once every three months to talk about some of the feedback from our end users, as well as sending emails back and forth throughout to make updates because we've made quite a few edits even since June when we launched this.

So this is what our custom landing page looks like. This is what team members are greeted with. It is based off their Autodesk profile, which is really nice. And it works with our single sign-on as well. So they log into this the same way they would their ACC site.

On the right, we have a curated FAQ created by Autodesk and Barton Malow during that those pre-launch meetings. And some of these questions are general to Autodesk's software, but there are a number that are specific to Barton Malow, such as how to get into a sandbox, which includes a link to request to be added in the answer.

Team members can also gain swag points by watching videos that they can then spend in the big room for Autodesk-branded prizes, which has been a really cool way to incentivize our team members to start learning and take more of these training courses. Team members can also access their entire library of ACC Learn content on here, but they also have access to a Barton Malow Curated Collection.

And inside the Barton Malow Curated Collection, we have a couple of filters on the left-hand side. There's role-based filters for things like our safety managers or project engineers, project admin. There's also some workflow-based filters near the bottom that are dependent on what part of the construction lifecycle you're in. So we have courses for design, some for BIM collaboration, there's also some in there for turnover.

And we review these internally fairly regularly, and we provide our updates to Autodesk, and Autodesk actually does all of the maintenance on our behalf inside of this custom learning page, so it's been a really fantastic partnership.

And as part of this engagement, designated individuals at Barton Malow have been allowed access to employee and partner data. This is the dashboard that is available in Skilljar. the ACC Learn custom landing page is using the same software that we use for our own-- our old on-demand training, so that's nice, we didn't have to learn a whole new system.

These data categories displayed are not configurable, and we're working with Autodesk right now to further our data exploration with being able to export to Power BI, which is not available at this time, but is going to be available in a future phase. So, again, this is a pilot program that Autodesk has partnered with us on, and there might be future opportunities as well.

ASHLYN HARRIS: All right. So we have all of this training available for team members now depending on their experience level and preferred learning style. So with that, Liz and I have been asking ourselves, where do we go from here?

So in looking at how we can guide our continuous improvement, we have a few tools to assist us in these efforts. First being we have two existing Monday.com boards that are in collaboration with Autodesk. The first being our Alignment and Roadmap board. So we use this board to track overarching initiatives with Autodesk. So think site visits, recurring issues, meeting with product teams.

The second Monday.com board being the Autodesk Feature Request Board that you can see here on the screen. Team members can fill out a form available within our intranet, and that will allow them to submit a feature request that they'd like to see in ACC. Now these populate to our feature request Monday.com board, and Liz and I track these with Autodesk throughout the year.

Both boards have been in existence for a few years now, but we recently transitioned to linking a public-facing version of the Feature Request Board to the Autodesk build page on our company's intranet. So this is another effort to generate collaboration and awareness so our team members can see how these product releases are tracking in Autodesk's pipeline.

Too often we were hearing the feedback that team members felt as if they were shouting their request into the ether only to go unresolved, so it's helpful for them to go in and see how many requests exist, the stages they must go through to be released in the product, and how the request that they've submitted are tracking in those stages.

So continuing to build on this approach of building communication and collaboration efforts between our project delivery teams and Autodesk, an item that we created this past year is our ACC Satisfaction Survey. And that'll now be sent out on an annual cadence to Barton Malow Autodesk Construction Cloud users. It's going to help us set a baseline and gather metrics around a few key areas. And that'll allow us to continue to improve our relationship with Autodesk and find ways for our team to better leverage our use of its products.

So as mentioned, the first one went out this year. Who are our survey participants? This past year, we had over 100 team members complete the survey, and here's a quick snapshot of the demographics of those who completed it. You can see that most of the participants are using this platform daily, and they've been in it for one to two years or more. And have completed some level of training, whether that be project admin or project team member.

In addition to all of this, we had a very large variety of roles at Barton Malow complete the survey. So because of that breadth of job responsibility and depth of platform experience that you're seeing here, we received a lot of great feedback that's going to help us guide our work both internally and with Autodesk.

And it's going to help us focus our objectives. So let's talk about the feedback that we're using to guide our future improvements. Now that we've established baselines across the following product rating areas that you can see here on the screen, it's going to give Liz and I an opportunity to gauge the effectiveness of our continued product training and support efforts.

And we also asked a lot of questions to understand how Barton Malow employees are using the platform currently and its integrations with other softwares, as well as gained insights on any of the repeated points of friction that they might be experiencing so we can work with Autodesk to improve that.

Now in turn, with narrowing the focus of our objectives, we're going to be able to better drive informed enhancements with training and support across several areas, the first being training and best practice development.

For example, we took those results and we're now offering a deep dive on the Assets module in ACC for one of our upcoming 2024 Webinar Wednesdays as it was indicated in the survey that many of our team members hadn't used the module and aren't familiar with its abilities. In addition, we're going to be creating standard work instructions for several processes within ACC this year based on the feedback that we received.

Next, for product release, development and tracking, we've used our survey results to help us in narrowing down our top 10 feature requests out of the approximately 250 requests that we are highlighting to Autodesk as critical and ensuring our team members' success. And lastly, we have a project engagement and satisfaction, as well as collaboration and communication enhancements.

So as mentioned earlier, the Feature Request Board is now outward-facing, looking to empower project team members by making their feedback and its associated follow-through with Autodesk visible. Requests submitted to the board have also and will continue to drive research and development feedback sessions that are hosted between our project delivery team members and Autodesk product teams that's going to inform future product enhancements.

And we're also taking what we've learned and launching an Autodesk Community of Practice internally. So this will engage team members in sharing their success stories in the platform, and that will be communicated out to the enterprise. And this group additionally will act as a sounding board to continue soliciting feedback from power users in the platform.

It's an exciting time for us as we continue refining our approach to drive engagement and growth, both internally and in our collaboration with Autodesk. So we're confident that continuing to give our project delivery teams a platform to voice their training and product needs is going to help steer us and Autodesk in the correct direction as we continue to work together and promote each other's success.

Thanks for joining us all today, we appreciate your time.