Model-Based Design: Modernizing Our Design Process

BRIANNE BELSCHNER: Hello, everyone. My name is Brianne Belschner, and today, I will be presenting on model-based design-- modernizing our design process. A little about who I am. I am Brianne Belschner. I am the Autodesk model-based design lead at VHB. I am located in the greater Boston area. For those familiar with the area, I am from Watertown, MA.

I have 12 years of experience in the civil engineering industry. All of those 12 years were at VHB. I spent about seven years in the land development group, two years in highway, and the last three years, I've been in IT. The first two years in IT, I was a design technology specialist. In the last year, I've been in the role of model-based design lead as VHB is looking to transition our industry into model-based design.

So here are our learning objectives for the day. Our first learning objective is learn how to implement training to advance model-based design company wide. We're also going to learn about building a community of people with advanced knowledge to connect people, teams, and departments to the best practices. We also learn about connecting the tools available to achieve large corporate goals to advance technology. And finally, we'll be learning how to create efficiencies by maximizing automation and connected workflows.

So I figured I'd start and talk a little bit about VHB so you can get a feel on how our company works and how that can relate to your own companies. So we are approximately 2,000 passionate professionals here at VHB. It includes engineers, scientists, planners, and designers. We were founded in 1979. We have over 30 locations up and down the East Coast. And those are divided into our four regions.

Our structure of our company is, really, core services and markets. So our core services are transportation, planning and engineering, land development, planning and design, environmental, and applied technologies. And our markets are transportation agencies, real estate, county and local governments, institutions, federal government, and energy. And think how this works for us is our markets are really focused on our clients, while our services are focused on what we deliver to our clients.

A quick example would be, for our real estate group, they leverage the services of both the transportation planning group as well as land development group as they bring our clients along. So we really focus on integrated thinking, integrated services so that we're giving our clients the best product available. So why are we here today? Let's talk a little bit about what is model-based design?

So model-based design is using a model to guide our design process. So, really, we're not just building a model. We're creating a modeler so that we can gather more information and make more informed decisions quickly and effectively during the design process. This model is not just a physical representation of our design intent, but it's also embedded intelligence to help us with cost, environmental impacts like embodied carbons.

It allows our design teams to make better decisions as our design evolves and really meet our clients where they need us to be. To do this, we need to be leveraging the technologies and the tools that are available so that we can make a more effective design. This allows us to not only meet our client needs, but exceed our client needs. We want to be a trusted advisor to our clients, and this is a really important component of what we do at VHB.

And VHB is so understanding and recognizing the value of model-based design that their intention is that model-based design will be our default practice by 2025. So why model-based design? Why the change? This is a question we get all the time. And, really, it's-- the industry is changing so rapidly. We're going from 2D plans down to 3D models. We're changing how we've approached doing everything in our industry. And we want to be at the forefront of this change.

We want to invest in our future. We want to understand what digital delivery is, what a 3D model can really accomplish for our clients and for our industry. We want to improve the design process. We want to make it efficient and effective and, really, to allow us to bring our design to that next level. We want to be trusted advisors to our clients. A lot of times, we get the response that the client isn't asking for it. Why do we have to provide it for our clients?

And a lot of times, our clients, they don't know what they don't' know. We want to be there to help guide them in navigating this change. This is a big change, and this is something that is happening worldwide as we really moved across and change how we do things in our industry. And as we start really digging down and trying to figure out what changing our default practice at VHB really means, we can't do it with just a corporate staff saying this is what we're going to do. That's not an efficient way of doing it.

So we really have to start figuring out how we can embed more change agents into our work. And that leads me into what's the scope of this change? So what does this mean for our company? I talk about this as an industry change. This is no small task. Well, here at VHB, it's no small task because we have 1,000 Civil 3D users. We have 70 Revit users. We have 250 Autodesk Docs users.

So if we look at-- and I'll throw the number. We have maybe three to five people in our corporate IT staff that are positioned to help with training and move that training along. And if we have a goal of 2025 and we have about 1,000 Civil 3D users, the math really doesn't work out to get us that our default practice would be model-based design. So we really needed to figure out a way to get us to that next level.

And we looked at our numbers, and we said if we had 10% of our CAD users become what we call a model-based design coach, then we would have resources available to all of our staff. It wouldn't just be somebody could stand up at their desk-- and in this virtual world we live in, not just stand up at your desk, but look at your teams or your Slack or whatever you're doing-- and find a resource and not just have that one resource.

We previously had what was referred to as a CAD manager, and we had a handful of them across the footprint. But we need more help, and we need more people who are looking into that future and understanding more than just how the technology works, but how we're going to shape and change how we do things in our industry. So as we, now, have decided, we needed to create change agents. And this was a realization of, all right, well, how do you create a change agent?

So we locked ourselves in a room, like any normal people would do, and we really started writing things down. And this is the board actually from that room where we were just throwing things. We weren't' talking specifics, but we were really talking very high level of what we would need to do to get our change agents into this model-based design coach's role. So we knew that they would need technical skills. We also needed them to know and learn about new technologies and tools.

We also recognize that soft skills-- when I say soft skills, we're talking about the interactions and communications that they're presenting and how they present themselves and how they're interacting with their groups and their teams and our company. So, really, we wanted-- we knew shaping that was going to be a really important component of what we were doing and, really, time. We have a lot of very smart individuals at our company who are all extremely billable, and we really wanted to make sure that we were giving them the time to be that change agent and change into this model-based design project coach.

So the next step was, after we figured this program out, is we had to define what is a model-based design project coach. So we started with the selection criteria. And like I said before, we didn't want someone that was just technically competent. They needed technical competency, but there was more to it than that. We're not talking about somebody who's just showing someone how to use the program. We want them to be passionate about the technology, passionate about changing the way we do things and advancing model-based design here at VHB.

We also wanted people that had a desire to help others learn. This wasn't something that isn't non-negotiable-- this was a non-negotiable for us. This was something that they needed to do. Like we said, the default practice would be model-based design. We weren't just training some people to do model-based design. So we needed all of these individuals who got trained to then go back and really spread the word.

So once we figured out the selection criteria, we had to-- what are the expectations of this role? And when I refer to time, we wanted to give them 10% of their time back and what they would do with 10% of their time to help advance model-based design. And that first thing that they would do is they would become that first line of defense, the first line of support, in their office, on their team. They would be that resource so that no one felt that they didn't have the support they needed to move forward with model-based design.

We also needed them to be able to share their knowledge, and this was in a multitude of ways. We needed them to recognize where their team needed additional support and be able to give them that support. And we needed them to also look and see where sharing their knowledge was going to be most beneficial and how it was most beneficial. And we really, also, needed them to develop and document workflows.

We're changing how we do things at VHB. We're no longer in that 2D world. We're in that 3D world. And much of our documentation is completely directed towards how do you create a 2D plan set. So we really wanted to create documentation so that, when people were coming into our company, they understood where we were going and what we were doing. A And the final one here is managing the VHB and the client content.

I was in the design world for a long time, and I understood what the clients needed. I had efforts and time and energy put towards that. But as I've moved into a corporate role, I recognize that I don't have that direct connection to our clients to understand exactly what they need. So I really wanted to be able to lean on our coaches to help us really elevate that piece and understand what we needed to be providing our clients.

And another consideration to all of this was, as I mentioned, time. We needed our corporate support so that we were able to reduce billability for our coaches so that they were able to teach and mentor and move along our design process and change the way we do things to be a better approach. And by changing our design process-- we explained to the corporate industry, and they understood is we're reducing risk. We're providing our clients not only with what they're asking for, but what they actually need. And this was, really, a big change and shift in how we operated at VHB.

So I'll shift into-- and I know I mentioned that soft skills component. And this became a really important piece to what we were trying to do because we recognized how valuable it is to understand not only yourself, but how you interact with the world. So we reached out to our learning and development team, and they helped us to administer what we call the core strength, which was an SDI assessment. And that was basically a personality test.

I'll walk through. The first level of this was on an individual level. So it walked through your motivations. So it broke you down and it questioned you and it placed you in a category. This is actually mine because why not show you who I am? But it had people, performance, and process. And based on those questions, it put you in a category of what motivates you. So this was really important, for an individual to understand what motivates them.

The next was conflict because we all have conflict. So what happens when conflict happens? And that shows that arrow. And where I go is I go to analyze. I go down to the process. I want to understand why it's happening, and I want to resolve it. So that's when I go into conflict mode. And the other one was strengths. And this listed out what my strengths were, and it gave details on how those strengths played into how I operate and how I work in this world.

So this was incredibly valuable, for all of our coaches to take this assessment and be able to see who they were on a personal level. And then we took it to that next level and we talked about, all right, how do they engage with their team? So this put everyone that was in our most recent coaches program on the chart. So it showed not only, now, you can recognize where you sit and you fall within this, but you also recognize that not everyone is exactly like you. And everyone has different motivators.

And everyone reacts differently to conflict. And this is all incredibly valuable for our coaches to understand, not only with other coaches but understand that, as they move and integrate back into their offices post to this program, that they would need to recognize that what they're dealing with is always different. The other really important one that I, myself, find incredible value in is you can actually compare yourself to someone. So actually, this is a comparison of me and my counterpart in the Bentley side.

I'm blue. He's red. And I showed you conflict because it really brings out and it shows you examples and quick tips in how to engage with these individuals who may not align with how you have in your personal experience. So, again, this is an incredibly valuable tool that we were able to provide all our coaches. And I think every single one of them saw that value more than I think we could have expected to see.

So now that we've gone through assessments and we've talked about the big picture, now we actually wanted to put things on paper. And what does this program look like? And I will go quickly through the 12 weeks. And then, I'll get into more detail on each of the components. So we start. And we decided 12 weeks seemed like a really good number. So the weeks one, weeks five, and weeks nine, those were all in-person weeks. So we would fly everyone to the same location, and we would train everyone in one location.

And then, those weeks in between is, really, personal mentoring weeks. And that was times that they would spend with either an instructor or another coach or another resource that we identified to help them advance their knowledge on model-based design. So that first week in-person, we talk about core mastery. And I'll get into more detail on this. But then we transition. After the core mastery is that personal mentoring is directly related back to that core mastery.

So they're picking content and topics that are related to that first week of learning. The second in-person week, or week five, is the technology integration. So this, really, core mastery was Civil 3D. And technology integration is everything except Civil 3D. So it's all the components that work around it to advance model-based design. And then, again, personal mentoring. We send everyone back, and we want them to really focus their time on the technology integration.

And then we have the last week, which was soft skills. Again, as we just went through, we spent a lot of time in making sure that people were supported and understood this change not just from a technology perspective, but from a vision perspective, from an industry perspective so that they were comfortable changing the way they've done things for the last few years-- or in some cases, their entire career has been doing it in a certain way.

So this last personal mentoring piece was not soft skills. But, really, week nine was graduation. It was the last week in-person, and we didn't really just want to send them out and not give them the support that they needed. And we really understood that this was a big change, going to these offices. So we really wanted to make sure that they all had a comfort level going back to their offices and their communities and how they would integrate back in there.

And I'm sure all of you are thinking, as well, what's the total time devoted to this? So total time for the training is about 100 to 120 hours, and that was broken down. And it's about 60 to 70 hours of the in-person weeks and then 40 to 50 hours on the personal mentoring side. So now I'm going to jump into the in-person core mastery and what we talked about with core mastery. So the in-person session was three days, seven to eight hours per day. And we divided it we broke everything down into technical sessions and general sessions.

And we spent most of our, if not all of our time in Civil 3D in that first week in-person. We really had individuals starting-- when we go think back to our selection criteria, we picked individuals that had technical competency. But we really needed them to have a very solid foundation, moving forward, in confidence, as well as comfort in the main tool we use, which is Civil 3D.

So these technical sessions in Civil 3D, we talk about feature line grading. We talk about grading objects. We talk about surface analysis, vehicle tracking. We get into corridor grading. We also get into how do you use corridor grading for non-corridor elements? We talk about the gravity pipes, pressure pipes, as well as all of the analysis tools built in for both of those components, as well. And then we really also encourage everyone to be using Project Explorer. All of these pieces of the puzzle were really important that we wanted them to all have that solid foundation on Civil 3D as they move forward.

In the next piece here, we have general sessions. So again, this SDI assessment comes up, and we really wanted to integrate-- we engaged with our learning and development team, and they have a standard presentation that they give for people who have completed this. Basically, you'll see that they're included in every in-person week, and they are-- in each of these in-person weeks, they're taking the time to work through what knowledge exists within this assessment and how that affects them in moving forward.

The next piece to the general sessions was a quality panel. So this was meeting with our chief engineers, our quality engineers. We recognize that, as our coaches are moving forward, we are engineering models. We're not just building models. And to engineer and use the engineering where-- and we want to make sure that everything is aligned with our QAQC process, our quality process. And that was really important not only for our coaches to understand, but also our quality engineers to understand.

So we gathered the best we could find, and we threw them on a panel. And, really, it was a very open and engaging conversation between the two groups. So that the quality engineers have an understanding of what we're doing with the coaches, as well as vice versa-- the coaches know that they have support in the quality engineers. And finally, we actually had the CEO come and chat with the group.

And this was really to make sure that this group of coaches recognizes that what they're doing is not just something I decided VHB should do, but something from a leadership and from a corporate level is the direction we're taking this company and to really hit home that this is what we're doing and they have the full support of the CEO, as well as leadership at VHB.

So next, I'll talk at personal mentoring piece. So the personal mentoring piece was three to four weeks between these two in-person sessions. We gave everyone about four to six hours per week. So we spent the last half hour, hour of our in-person session really dialing into everyone's passion topics. And it becomes abundantly clear when individuals really gravitate to-- somebody wants to know more about corridors. Somebody wants to know more about vehicle tracking.

And when we say advanced model-based design, it was whether it's advancing their knowledge of model-based design on a personal level or advancing model-based design for VHB. We gave that as an opportunity to figure out where they fit in the puzzle. Some individuals wanted to spend more time to get comfortable with corridors while others really wanted to dive into the pipe networks and the pressure networks and understand what components are missing and what we need to build to really meet our needs at VHB for model-based design.

So this was a time that we talked about, making it challenging and balancing it with the time they were allotted and figuring out where they needed to go from there. So then, the next was technology integrations. So the in-person, this was, again, three days, seven to eight hours per day. And our technical sessions were Infraworks, ArcGIS Connector, grading optimization, subassembly composer, Dynamo, ACC, and a bunch of others.

And I'm sure a lot of you are thinking, as I've listed all of this and I said three days, seven to eight hours per day, that's a pretty aggressive list for that short period of time. But really, when we talk technology integrations, we didn't necessarily need everyone to be a master of any one of these topics in this week. But we wanted them all to be exposed to all of these tools and technologies in this week. We wanted them to see and recognize that there are multiple avenues that they can take and understand how these tools work and how they can integrate into their work.

And really, we were also going to fall back a little bit on that personal mentoring. Again, that where we'll talk in a minute. But those passion projects for those individuals and allow anyone to hone in on one of their-- the topics that they're feeling more passionate about. This week, also, when it came to technical sessions-- I won't pretend to be an expert in all of these topics, but this was another opportunity to, then, engage with some of our other subject matter experts at VHB.

Or sometimes, it was engaging with Autodesk and bringing in a guest speaker. And this really, also, in my mind, hit home, in the sense that we don't want anyone not feeling the support and feeling like they're part of a team. And that's what we were building. We were building this community of passionate individuals about model-based design. And we wanted them to recognize that their resources expanded, and they had resources beyond their group, beyond the instructors, and really, even beyond VHB. So that was a really important component to get in that technology integration.

Then we have our general sessions again. And again, we have our personality SDI assessment review in there. And the other one we have is our technology leadership panel. So again, we gathered. This is the CIO, the CTO, and other technology leadership that we have at our company. And we did a panel discussion. And really, they were focused on talking about change management, digital transformation, and VHB's vision for the future and what role technology played in the future of VHB.

And again, incredibly important for our coaches to hear and understand that this wasn't, again, something that was a brand really felt like learning about model-based design and pushing it to everybody. This was something that us as a company really wanted to move people-- move towards. And we see the value. We see the need to do this. So I mentioned the personal mentoring weeks. Again, we had that three to four weeks and the four to six hours per week and, again, that passion topic.

And this was, I would say, an easier week, in the sense that we have a lot of people that gravitate to one of these programs. And when we give them time, a lot of these individuals-- because they're passionate about the technology, because they're passionate about advancing their knowledge but advancing VHB's knowledge, it was pretty easy for them to find a component of what they did and take that personal mentoring time for that.

And again, we aligned. Whether it was an instructor, a coach, a internal resource at VHB, or even a Autodesk resource, we wanted to make sure they all had the support they needed during that personal mentoring time. So then, our final week in person was soft skills. And I will throw the definition of soft skills up there because, again, this was something-- a attributes enabling effective interactions and communications really understanding that this was a the groundwork to really build change at VHB and become a change agent.

So we had our in-person sessions. Again, three days, seven to eight hours per day. And when we broke it down-- technical sessions and general sessions-- our technical sessions were visualizations and troubleshooting. And, really, both of those are our communication tools. And we have a fun picture here of our tech guru, our visualization expert here at VHB. And he's showing everyone how he used the VR goggles to just try to show something to a client. And incredibly valuable tool.

He went through a lot of different methods that he uses to build visualizations for internal, as well as external communications so that everyone has a better from of understanding what the project entails. And troubleshooting, I'm sure if anyone in this room has or anyone listening to this video has any experience with troubleshooting someone's problem, I would say it's more personality than actually figuring out the problem because a lot of times, you're being pulled in. And there's emotions and there's challenges.

And it's really not just solving the problem for the individual, but also helping them to understand how they got to where they are and really understanding why there is such change and understanding and confusion. So that is really, in my opinion, a big component of understanding your soft skills and how you deal with those situations. And then, for our general sessions-- again, we love to talk about our SDI reviews and really have everyone comfortable with those results.

And we also had a session on presentation skills. And I think presentation skills are an incredible component to what we do. Though everything that they do as a coach could be considered a presentation, whether it is actually doing a presentation or whether it's engaging with their team or talking to other departments, other communities. This is an important component of what we're asking them to do.

And the third one here is also meeting with the operations and executive committee. This was, again, in my opinion, a two-edged sword here. We weren't just showing the coaches that they had leadership support. But we were also showing the leadership that they had coaches, that these people had just spent nine weeks with us and they had gained so much knowledge.

And they were really changing the way we do things at VHB. And we wanted them to get that recognition and to see that they were a valuable asset to this company. So bringing them in front of that committee was really valuable and important.

And then we'll flip into our personal mentoring week. And this is the one, we talked, is a little different. It's the same three to four weeks, four to six hours per week. But this was helping each of these individuals integrate back into their communities and back into their offices. We were changing their roles a little bit. We were pulling back some of their billable time.

And we wanted to make sure that they felt that they had the support and they weren't just going back and being told, great, you finished training. But now everything's complete and done, and you can go back to what you were doing before.

So we really wanted to make sure that we were giving ourselves and them that time to understand that. So what's next? And what's next is we started with building our model-based design community. And by started, we have. We've built our model-based design community. Our coaches are guiding that-- our community of practice. And at VHB, we have communities of practice for land development, for highway, for water resources.

And the way we vision our model-based design community practice is they really integrate back into all of those. But we're giving them a space, as coaches, to engage with one another and learn from one another, as well as figure out where we need to advance certain pieces and what we need to do as next steps and what should we be pushing and pulling at with our company. So they started model-based design hour, which is a weekly one-hour open session.

They typically have a short presentation on some really cool aspect, mostly to start the conversation. But it's meant to engage with everyone so that they have a better understanding of model-based design. And that next step with engaging with their offices and other communities of practice, I know all of them are going back into the land development groups or the highway groups and really changing and pushing how we do our design process.

They're all involved in project kickoff meetings, sustainability workshop. And an important one, too, is engaging with our Autodesk product teams. When we say 2025 and we're advancing model-based design at VHB, we understand that some components are not ready for prime time. And we are reaching out to our Autodesk support staff and our enterprise support staff or to the product team specifically so that they can help us to advance what we need from their products.

Another component to what we're going to be doing next is project manager training. We want project managers to have an understanding of not only what the tools do, but how they can engage with our coaches and really understand how their workflows need to be adjusted to align with model-based design. And finally, continue collaborating with the coaches. Technology is constantly changing. We're constantly moving forward, and the tools are adjusting. The tools are changing.

What the clients are asking for are adjusting and changing. And we want to make sure that our coaches are not stagnant and not sitting there and feeling like they don't have that opportunity. We want to push them to keep learning and keep growing and keep understanding these new tools and how we can advance model-based design at VHB. And that is the end of my presentation.

For anybody who would like to send me questions, you can contact me on LinkedIn or-- I'm sure my email will be somewhere on this. I would like to thank everyone for listening to me. And I hope that this has provided some sort of value and that you all learned a little bit of something in how we are advancing model-based design.