Unlocking Data: The Keys to Accelerating Performance

MARY FORBES: Hi, everyone. We're here today to talk about unlocking data, the keys to accelerating performance. Like you, Formula One racers have a long legacy of leveraging the latest in design and technology. And today, they are reaching speeds more than 200 miles per hour. And like you, and why you're here today reviewing this class, they are being driven by data. I'm Mary Forbes, customer success team lead from Eagle Point Software, the creators of Pinnacle Series, the leading e-learning system designed specifically for companies in the ACC and Manufacturing space.

And I'm joined here today with Cindy Wood from HKS, and we are here to help you unlock the power of your data, put you in the driver's seat, and fuel your project team to reach their peak performance, their top potential, and stay ahead of the competition. Cindy, would you please introduce yourself, your role, and what your team does at HKS?

CINDY WOOD: Thanks, Mary. I'm Cindy Wood and I'm the practice technology learning and development leader at HKS architects. Practice technology, my group, is comprised of 20 past architects and interior designers that came to the dark side of BIM, helping projects deliver more efficiently and follow their proper company standards. I lead a small L&D team who draw from our experience as past designers as well as past educators, and we help their teams and what they need for delivering a project to cross the finish line quickly with the least amount of accidents along the way.

MARY FORBES: Wow, that sounds like you have a great pit crew, Cindy. A learning and development focus that's truly balanced with the experience that you need from the technical project side. I have so many questions for you, and I cannot wait to get started. So first, let's talk about Start Your Engine. How did you know what you needed to do, what data you needed to start your engine, so to speak. So what data did you capture, what metrics were important, what questions were you asking?

CINDY WOOD: Hey, you see that easy button? No. I'd like to just say that there is no easy button to deliver in BIM. There's a lot of misconception around that, thinking that there doesn't have to be somebody behind the computer to do this. That's really not true. There are so many variables that still go into making sure we put out a successful project, making sure that we're not only not losing money but making a profit.

So to do this, we get asked a lot of questions. So when somebody comes to us with questions, we need to figure out the answers. So to be able to give the answers in a way that doesn't take us a lot of time, we decided to make it easier for everyone to find. So we get asked everything from how did Jennifer perform on the Revit assessment to why are the models slow that she's working on? How do I know if she took the training that was asked of her, and what training geared towards her needs she take? Her model crashed the other day, and we don't know why. So a few of those questions, that they only take a few seconds to ask, actually take a long time to answer.

So I work at a firm with about 1,500 people. And if I get asked those on a daily basis about every single person, it's actually going to take me a long time to get through with that. So I don't want to spend that time. So I want to spend time building more training, I want to spend time delivering training, I don't want to spend all the time answering these questions if I don't have to, even though they're really important to answer.

So you can see here that we see that we have three paths that get us there, right? So at the beginning, you think about the result that is wanted. So when they come to you asking a question, what is the result that I need to give them? So questions, including but not limited to staff upskilling, so how are the Revit skills primarily? Yes, there's a lot of other programs that we use. But of course, that's how we deliver our projects. And then of course, education compliance that goes along with that. And then model health, a big one.

You know, we've been using these programs for so very long but there's still problems, right? We still have crashes, we still have slow models. So we need to know, are they following standards? Why is there latency with my model and how do I staff this project? So along with that comes resources. So conventionally, somebody, if they come and ask me that question, you get data gathered from many different places-- many different people.

So we could go to the BIM coordinator that's working on the project, ask those questions. We have BIM assessments, we have individual models that you can open up and see. And then we have training classes. So some of this information is stored in different places, so yes, it is able to be found. It doesn't necessarily mean it's hard to find, but getting them together so that we can see everything in an easy way, that's the time-consuming part.

MARY FORBES: OK. So if I get this right, you took all the different questions that were coming at your team, where you had to go and look for those answers. But more importantly, you had the finish line in mind, what matters most to the business. You referenced a lot of different data sources, silos. We know how hard it is to bring large organizations like HKS into one and cross over those different parts of the organization. And anyone that has worked with data can relate to the challenges of managing multiple files, relying on different sources. It's slow, it's tedious, it's a lot of rework. Cindy, can you elaborate, really, on how you went about developing, what I call, your pit stop strategy?

CINDY WOOD: This or that? Which road would you rather cross to the finish line? The first one or the second one? I don't know about you, but I want to get to the finish line in the fastest way, which requires being efficient in our process and delivery. So we'll get to the end, but how long it will take and how much info will be missed? So I said, there's a lot of those different places that you can find that information. But we want to make sure that people get everything that they need in their story of getting to their finish line. So if we're looking on this squiggly road, the first thing we might ask is what's the project number? Well, but then, where is the project hosted? Who's the team?

OK, well, now I'm going to go open the model. We can see the sync times. Oh, what's the other person's Revit build? How are their skills? Those are CAD files? Oh, whoops. I opened the wrong model and I got to start again. So a lot of time can be spent on all these processes, even though we know we might know how to get there. So like I say, I try to help this team, try to figure out what was going on. I opened the wrong model, I have to start that process all over again. And I don't know about you, but I think that's a bit of a waste of time.

MARY FORBES: Great. So it sounds like you've identified all the pit stops for us. How did you make it easy for your managers to see their position in the race, the track, the car conditions, i.e. looking at what was going well, where did they need to adjust. I know some of this data is also sensitive, so how did you handle the data permissions and ensure that they got the access that they needed just to their VIP section, so to speak. Can you show us what this end result looks like?

CINDY WOOD: Sure. Let's get right into it. So this is one of our dashboards that we developed, which is an assessment dashboard. So it is bringing all the information together on someone's Revit assessment and showing what type of training that they need to take based on their data and results. So we can look, and trust me, I've done this manually many times. And trying to figure out which classes somebody might need to take based on the skills that they had and then where to find that class, not to mention try to give it to them where they need to find it, it's a lot of time.

So here on the right, you can see we do have a bunch of different places that just the data comes from in this instance. So up at the top there, we have the Pinnacle data that comes in for progress. We have knowledge smart data for our assessments, and then we have HKS data because we need to have all of that stuff linked together. So not only did someone take the assessment, but I need to know their name, their office, their manager, all of those different things to be able to get the information properly. So when you click on one of these sections in Power BI, it's going to show you where this information and data comes from.

So if I click on this one here that is the recommended training, it shows-- it opens up one of the data parts and it says this is the skill that they had, this is the section of where we put the link, all of that stuff shows up here. So the best part about this is it shows only what we need. It's not going to show us the things that we don't need. So then we go through and then we connect it to the dashboard. So we have, again, the Pinnacle data on the right, and we have a little bit of HKS data there. So we go through and we see the columns assigned, who assigned it, the course, when it's due, how much they have left to do, all of that stuff. A ton of information all in one spot for us.

Then we also have model analytics dashboard. So not just looking in on the person, but looking in on the team and how the models are. So same thing, we have all this data that comes from multiple sources. We have the HKS data there again. We have PAL data, which is project activity logger, and then some more data at the bottom. So all of these things go into making these dashboards. This one is our big picture dashboard and it shows more everything all together.

All of the models in that one project together, all of the people in the office. So right now we have it filtered, so it's showing practically the whole firm. So there's a wide array of how things are doing with just general stats, how long it's taking them to sync, all of that stuff. So a lot of valuable information all in one place.

MARY FORBES: Wow, everything they need to know. This looked great. Any idea on how long it took you to build the cockpit in the dashboard that you can share with us as well as any lessons you learn, any red flags, yellow flags, that slowed you down before we move on here?

CINDY WOOD: Lots of lessons learned. Like you said, too, there's a lot of sensitive information. So we got to make sure that the right people are getting to the right forms and the right dashboards. So it gets a little sensitive on making sure that people don't see someone's Revit score or something like that if they're not supposed to. And then we want to make sure that it's easy to get to. Nothing's worse than not having it easy to get to.

Also, this was a learning curve for us in the sense of learning a new software. We don't just teach things, we learn things too, right? Everybody learns every day. And so a lot of us learned these softwares for the first time as well. So there was that bit of learning curve on our side was getting to know the new softwares and then just getting to know the information that was important. The information that needs to be seen the fastest, seen the most of, who has to see it, a lot of those different things.

And then getting to know our data team, right? How hard is this going to be to put together? We did struggle on making sure that the data syncs and connects and all of that all the time. So we do run into some little hiccups every now and then when stuff doesn't want to sync, but for the most part, it was a really fun learning experience that we just can't wait for everybody to use because it's going to save everybody so much time.

MARY FORBES: Great. I know I can see the benefits there. How did you get your managers to buy in to allow them time for the skills assessments and training? Because I know in reality, there's very little downtime to stop and to go slow, follow the pace car. Can you share more how you empowered them to make those quick decisions, those course corrections?

CINDY WOOD: Yeah. Right here, the first you can see that the easy of-- easy to use, easy to find all of that. It took a while. We've been doing the Revit assessments for years, and it's always been a hard thing of getting people to take tests. It's kind of a sensitive term, that we are testing people on this. That if they don't do well on this, they're going to get fired, all of that stuff like that. That's really sensitive stuff to talk about, and we don't want to scare anyone away. So we really had to develop a roadmap that was going to show the benefit to doing all of this.

So giving them what they need. So hey, your team is going to be stronger. And again, we really try to focus on not judging them by their skills. But if we see where people are struggling, that really helps us guide them in what they need to learn. And that's really what the most important thing is, right? If people are really struggling on how to do project coordinates, we don't know that unless we do an assessment, unless we test people on that. So it's really sitting down and having those honest conversations with the managers, and then making sure that we have stuff to show them and making sure that we have a plan.

When we first were giving out the assessments, it's just like, oh, here's an assessment, there's an assessment, you all get an assessment. And you know, then it's kind of a lull. They don't want that lull. We need to make sure that, hey, so we have this assessment, and then these are the next steps that we are going to take and these are the next things that we are going to show you. So not only, OK, they take the assessment, cool. Then we're going to do this training, yes? You don't want to give them time to do the training. We get that. But who are you going to call when your model project breaks? You're going to call us.

And then we're going to take all this time, your project's going to be down for days, sometimes. Don't think it doesn't happen, because it does. We want to make sure that your models don't break. So the two hours that they give us for training today is going to save you a day in the future. And ultimately, it's going to save us all money. So that's where we really try to focus on it there. But on here, especially, giving them access, providing easy instructions, making nothing hard to find and making sure that they know that the sensitive information is just held to certain people at least makes them feel confident in what we're doing.

So here's one of our dashboards. And again, pops up is instructions. So these are called tooltips. And we want to make sure that they can be found. So instructions are there right for you, and then again, on the left, they're only showing you what you need to see. Then we just get into it. And you're like, whoa, what is all this, right? But once you start reading all the little pieces, it's really easy to see what you're looking at and how it makes a difference. And we don't just fly these at people, right?

We have a team, like I said, of 20 people. We are split into-- we have what's called regional leaders. So there's people that look after a certain region. And what they will do is they will take these forms and they will sit down with leadership and go through it. So even though you don't always need to have to wait for us, which that's the best part. If you can find all this stuff yourself, you don't have to wait for us. But if you do want to have the conversation, we will gladly have one of us sit down and go through it.

So we do have limited but useful public filtering. So in Power BI we have a ridiculous amount of filters, but that's just too much. So we want to make sure that when someone comes in here they can just do the easy filtering. Oh, sorry. And they're in the middle, connection to the skills assessment. So this will also show that this is who staffed on my project, how are they performing? So we have two people on this project that are an expert and somebody that's below average. So how can that team work to help each other as well? And then where do we need to give more so that they can succeed? And then the data, like I said, is just easy to read and easy to absorb.

Then, tailored training. So this is the assessment that I showed you earlier. And what it does is we take out all the information that's not needed. So like I said, we don't actually go on scores. Scores like 80%, 60%, that's really not helpful. If you tell a manager, hey, this person got 60%, they don't really know what that means. So we want to make sure that it's broken down into subject areas and then we have a threshold. And so the threshold is, if somebody is below the threshold of, you can see there's a dashed line there, anything that's in yellow and red, it will pop up in the bars on the left. The matrix will show you just the training that they need to take.

So it's not going to have anything that they don't need to look at, which is great, right? It gets confusing when they have too many things that they don't need to take it. They scored in the green, say, on the design options there at the top. We're not going to require them to take training, therefore we do not have that link off to the side. And it takes them straight into our learning at Pinnacle, so there's no questions for people. They easily get where they need to go.

Then we connect that to that training dashboard. So you can filter it. So if I open up this little filter here, you can just click on the assessments skills gap training. That's going to make it so they're not seeing any of the training that they were given for, say, their onboarding or rendering, any of that stuff. It's just going to see the stuff that they had to do with skills gap.

MARY FORBES: Great.

CINDY WOOD: So when we look at it here, then you just see, just by assessment training, by this one person that I have blurred out, and this is where they are in their status. If they've enrolled, if they finished it, if they've completed it, all of that stuff is right here at their fingertips.

MARY FORBES: Great, Cindy. Can you share a little bit more? I know you talked about the value of the assessments for the person having to not take things that they already know, right? They're just closing out their skills gaps and that stigmatism around taking assessments. Can you share a little bit more on how you got your team to say it's OK to take those assessments, to go in and take that learning, and really what does it look like for them to be able to see that finish line when they go into Pinnacle?

CINDY WOOD: A lot of it, too, is when we get that-- not just the manager buy-in, is we get the buy-in from the very top coming down. So not only when you take these learnings, you have a project number to charge it to. Also means you're getting paid, so you get paid to do this, right? Well, imagine, get paid to learn. I love it. So part of that, and it's really-- it doesn't take that long. And you can go in, you can complete some things, then you can leave, then you can come back. It's really great to be able to see that.

The good part about seeing it on this page here is the manager then can see, oh, you know what? They maybe didn't score that well on annotation or putting together details. And then that's something that the manager themselves can take and say, you know what? Maybe we need to have a sit-down. Maybe I need to talk about this employee about details. So not just the Revit side of it, but how we do like the details in our projects. So there's a lot of value for everyone in that aspect.

Oh, you already said-- the value here. So these are some snippets from Pinnacle. And the one at the top left there is someone's personal page. So if they go, scroll down on their personal page, again, it's all right there. So we deliver their personalized snapshots of everything that they need. So they can see that, oh, well, here's the skills gap training that I have to do and it's right there. So the best part is, if you just miss, miss it is, you close out of it, anything like that, it's going to be right there at your fingertips when you log back in.

So microbursts of training, too. So if you see on the right-hand side here, every learning path is separated into little sections. So you can see that, hey, I finished this next little bit. So it's easy, again, easy to see what's assigned. It tracks where you left off, and then you can go back whenever you want. So-- whoops, oh my gosh. Let's go to the podium in the winner's round to see where we're at with all of this.

MARY FORBES: All right. Well great, you got us to the finish line here Cindy. So if you could just take some time to-- you took us from the starting line to the checkered flag, giving everyone that formula on how to win the race against their competition using data. You made it look easy, honestly. When I first saw some of these dashboards and how you put them together compared to how-- I know some of the data going into it and truly keep it organized and make it very easy for your managers, make it easy for the team. So I'm very excited about that. So maybe just do a quick summary on why this is so important for you, for HKS, and some of the benefits that you're getting from this data-driven strategy and the keys to win.

CINDY WOOD: Sure. So first, start your engines, visualize the data. Be curious about the data that matters. The right fuel mix for your car, right? So like I said, we say we don't want to have stuff that is not valuable to people. You want to put the right oil in your car, you want to put the right gas in your car, we want to put the right knowledge in people. Fuel your dashboard, understand and leverage the pit stops to your advantage. Empower the team to act quickly with the right data, the right team that is driven to improve and perform.

Use the cockpit, automation. Create a so-called cockpit to give your team more time to learn, produce, and have the right conversations. And then finish strong, adjust your mindset. How do we make it easy for employees and managers to be in the driver's seat? Take control and finish strong. All really important stuff. We need to celebrate the wins, the big ones and the small ones. We need to upskill the staff. We need to keep people, we need that retention. Less rework, less downtime. So knowing how your model is going is going to create less downtime in the future. There's so many benefits of an efficient team for the company and the individual. What's next, AI?

So benefits. We need to break down data silos across business units and offices. We all learned recently that working across different offices and working together is really, really important. So personalize the learning. Data-driven learning strategy is key, right? We don't want to have people keep taking a walls course if they are just excellent at drawing walls, right? So we need to use the data to our advantage.

Quick access for managers, said that many times, right? Nobody has time anymore. We need to make sure that we have a quick resource, quick and easy. Powerful insights for leading strategic conversations, focus on priorities and what matters. The data-driven learning strategy identifies and balances the goals, needs, and realities of the organization. Drive a high value impact for your initiatives.

MARY FORBES: Great, Cindy. That really, I think, summarizes the true benefits and how great the partnership between our two organizations and truly getting where HKS needs to be and where you're going to continue to grow and the great success that you're having. So thank you so much for taking the time to work together on this class.

And we'll go over to the last slide here to talk about next steps and how they can either contact HKS to learn more or Eagle Point Software, our website, as well as my email address and LinkedIn. So excited about sharing this with you and looking forward to continuing success.