The Emotional Mitigation of Change: Buckle Up and Embrace Cloud Technology Transition Plans!

LEIGH ANN COUCH: Hello, everyone. Welcome to AU 2024. And welcome to our topic today, which is the Emotional Mitigation of Change, Buckle Up and Embrace Autodesk Construction Cloud. My name is Leigh Ann Couch with Google. And my co-presenter is Angie Doyle with CBRE. We just want to acknowledge our safe harbor statement today as we get started.

OK, so jumping in, we're going to do something a little bit differently today. And we're going to set our intention for this session. We're aware that many of you are near and far watching this today, and have had whatever day that you've had. So we just want to invite you to take a moment, and to close your eyes, and take a deep breath, and slow down, and really present yourself. Be intentional here with us today.

We're going to be talking a lot about change and the emotions around change. And that is something that can hit a lot of pain points and boundary issues for folks. So we just really want to center ourselves and be intentional. And open our mind for receiving. And just making sure that we are taking care of our mental health as we get started here today.

So jumping into it today, we will be doing introductions of myself and Angie, going through our learning objectives. We will be talking about the challenges of cloud platform transitions. The importance of building trust and collaboration with your teams. Creating a culture of learning and a safe environment for sharing ideas. Organizing our ACC processes and workflows. And developing a pathway for growth and expansion. So who are we? We, of course, know that everyone did their homework and you read our bios. So we won't go into the full depth of who we are.

But as I said, I'm Leigh Ann and this is Angie. Collectively, we've been in the AEC industry for over 30 years. In that we've actually worked together for about 10 of those years in various different companies. We both come from architectural and technology backgrounds. And have been consulting in the BIM space for the entirety of those 10 years. We now find both of ourselves on the owner's side, which has been really exciting to see a different side and have a different seat at the table.

You can see here in the image here, we are two sides to the same coin in what we do. But also vastly different. So Angie is on a farm in Illinois. And I am in New York City.

ANGIE DOYLE: Hello. So our learning objectives today, we want to just ensure that all of our objectives, our creative endeavors that invoke emotions and throughout the life cycle of a project because that is something that is very important to our industry. So building trust among, literally, everyone that we work with. We want to talk about how we went about that, and how to go about that to ensure that people are heard. We like to create fun, which I'm sure will come across in this particular recording and presentation.

So we want to make sure that we are trying for minimal interruptions, but doing things in such a fun way that it doesn't seem boring or that it's a training for work. We also want to give an example of how we organized our transition process. And how we actually made room to embrace all of the differences the way that we were working prior to how we are going forward. And just note how we are going to proceed with that as Autodesk produces new functionality.

We also are going to talk about how we take that new functionality that Autodesk is going to always develop for us, that's going to better our lives, and we're going to take that into other aspects of our environment, our changed management, our technological advancements. But also in full conjunction, we want to utilize the Construction Cloud as much as we possibly can in this ever changing industry.

LEIGH ANN COUCH: Yes. So to framework that out, our presentation really has two underlying tones that will be at the forefront at any given point in time. And that's both the human capacity and how it receives change, as well as the technology requirements and needs for a large-scale technology transition plan. So when we look at this, the human capacity to receive change, it really is directly impacted by the investment in the task, and how foreign that investment might feel. Usually, when something feels new, there is a bit of a resistance around it.

Changing in innovation, it can be less intimidating if it's done with the end user in mind. So we really want to think about what are the things that have affected us in our lives when it comes to change and innovation? And how we can express empathy in a corporate workspace and in our technology transition plans so that we have the end user in mind, and we're supporting them as much as possible. With that, again, the support and compassion for all of these people. It allows for more openness. It allows for more acceptance in this ever changing industry.

Change is something that evokes a lot of emotions in a lot of people. And we really are just focusing on the human part of that change. And how when we focus on that, we can hit all of our technology and business goals with a lot less resistance. So jumping into the challenges of the cloud platform transition. So change and the resistance around it. As we've mentioned, we are in a ever changing and innovative industry. But no matter how innovative we are and everything that we've done, at its core, changes change. And it's really hard.

How many times have we heard, well, I've always done it this way. Why are we doing it that way? Why do we need to do this? At its base level, change still hits the edges and boundaries of people's comfort levels. Resistance comes up. Things need to be looked at, and things need to be addressed in the journey of implementing technology changes and updates. So we really are trying to show and mirror things here that a lot of the things-- change doesn't just happen in our personal life. It also happens in the corporate world.

And it's really important to discuss the mindset around change, the intention around change. And it's less about specifically, yes, we are talking about a cloud platform transition, but it is more about the importance of the human capacity during change, during evolution, during growing. Especially when that change is constant, which often can lead to a lot of frustrations. It can lead to outbursts. It can lead to a lot of different things that could create a negative environment. So this is really about working on our own individual mindsets so that we're open to that change. We're open to receiving that change. And we're creating a safe environment for everyone to be heard so that we can navigate that with a more conscious mind.

So it's not always about the software and the technology. It's really about the human. And if you think about it, it's really all of the humans that are using these tools. And so we hear the output is only as good as the input. And it's the humans that are doing the input no matter what the platform is, the software, the tool. So it's just really, really important for humans to be at the forefront of this. And to have the focus be on us as the users. So that's just going to be the constant heartbeat of this presentation as we move forward.

So setting the scene to our case study. Angie and I were tasked with-- we decided to be a early adopter of ACC and transition, a global workforce from BIM 360 to Autodesk Construction Cloud. So we had a global team spanning all regions, NASA, EMEA, APAC. We had over 1,500 interacting daily users. We decided to pilot with three pilot projects. Even within those three pilot projects alone, it's hundreds of users. We had to develop a hands-on demo training strategy, and do template development.

So when we look at the case study of what we did here, from very early on, we realized that this was going to affect a lot of people very quickly. Both internal to us on the owner side, as well as our external global partners. And that we were going to have thousands of users on a very large scale portfolio. When we think about that and we think about the scale of that, I believe right now, in our in-person session, we have about 100 people signed up. And so when we look at 1,500 people, that is a vastly large scale.

It's owners. It's architects. It's engineers. It's GCs. It's trades. It's operations. When we look at that, it's 15 times the amount of people. That is a lot of feelings. That's a lot of thoughts. That's a lot of insights. That's a lot of opinions. It's a lot of-- let's be quite frank, eye rolls. It's a lot of, why are we doing this? It's a lot of, this is going to make my life more difficult. It's also cultural differences, depending on where you live. There's different subject matter experts. There's folks who are native users of the software like Revit, and Navis, and CAD, BIM 360, ACC.

And then there's our lovely friends who are not native users, and refer to everything as "the BIM." And don't really know the picks and clicks, and how long things can take. So when you look at implementing and rolling out a large-scale transition plan to that many people, you really have to think about the scale early. So within that, we looked at this and we realized, this was a very diverse landscape that we were going to have to look at. We needed to take a step back.

And when we took a step back, we really decided to lean in and fully embrace the dynamics of the mindset and changing, and what that would look like, and what people need. Also previously expressed, Angie and I have been working together for a very long time. And in that history of working, we have done hundreds, if not thousands, of trainings. We've all been through onboarding at all of our companies and sat through training. And it can be sometimes a bit of a snooze. No disrespect to anyone. But you put it on podcast style and do something else.

So we also wanted to figure out a way to be very engaging, to get people engaged, to get people to want to show up. So really looking, again, at, how can we make this fun? So when we did this, we decided, let's not boil the ocean. There's a lot to be done here in a full project life cycle. We decided that because of the scalability of the number of projects, the regions and the number of people, if we were to say that the entire ACC transition plan had to be perfect from day one to handover, that would be very overwhelming.

So we started with a baseline design phase lift and shift, that would then be treated as a living, breathing document that we would revisit. It would continue to grow as the ACC portfolio grew. In doing this, we also considered, what were our top 10 pain points and obstacles that we were experiencing with BIM 360? And we wanted to test those out and see what was the low hanging fruit that we could fix. And we could do that immediately in the transition so that we could address those issues, get them knocked out, have some quick wins.

Which also meant getting a lot of buy in up front from our end users, because we were fixing little things that annoyed them. And then they were like, oh, my gosh. This is so great. You guys fixed this. Happy to do whatever you need next. So we knew that, eventually, we did need a fully-baked comprehensive transition plan. But we knew if we did that day one, first of all, it would have probably taken triple the time that it did to develop and would have delayed our global launch.

And secondly, quite honestly, everyone would have probably been overwhelmed, which usually leads to the previous mentioned resistance. And people kind of shutting down and saying, this is too much. I don't want to do this. So again, we decided that every single detail didn't need to be figured out. We were going to do the best that we could. And we were going to move on from there.

ANGIE DOYLE: And to add to that very quickly, just very, very quickly. In the time that this plan originated to today, Autodesk has continued to develop the platform and continue to add. So if we had developed this entire comprehensive plan, it would have been outdated the day that we started. So we just went in knowing that, and we made everyone aware of that. So it wasn't a surprise when we're like, oh, we wanted you to do it like this. And Autodesk has fixed it because we are the customer and provide feedback. And now we're going to have to have a different way.

So it is something we just set-- we set it out upfront. We knew that was going to happen, so we wanted to make sure that all of these people that are interacting really did receive all of the information as we were-- as we were developing it.

LEIGH ANN COUCH: Yes. So really, that gets us to, mindset plus technology equals a successful transition from BIM 360 to ACC. And we really want to highlight this. It's very important when we look at the AEC industry. Also the importance of the product changes that Autodesk is doing. And BIM 360 sort of being phased out, ACC coming in. And what that looks like. So we found that in doing this, because we gave so much attention to the human side of this and to the mindset side of this, we have been met with less resistance than some other firms in the industry that we've been hearing about their transition plans.

So moving to the next step, as we move out of setting the scene for the case study, and what we realized we needed to do really early on is building trust and collaboration. So the importance of trust between the owner and the cross-functional teams is paramount in creating a successful transition plan. And looking at the strategies and collaboration among those stakeholders when it comes to open communication, transparency, and a shared vision. And getting folks to be on the same path and the same journey to get to the same goal and understanding how to communicate those differences to different people so that they're receiving it in a way that makes sense for them. But is moving us down the road into what we want to achieve.

So with this and building trust, it's not just about us trusting them and them trusting us. But it's really we greatly value the trust of our external partners. We value their careers. We value their abilities. It's also a lot about, we present our things to them and we ask them to poke holes in it. We ask them to challenge us. We really understand the theory versus reality. Angie and I have spent many years on both the development side and the execution side. And we understand that sometimes what looks really good in theory, in paper, and in your test kitchen on day one, day two being executed on a site, not always the reality when we're in the trenches in our daily work.

So we really rely on them to give us feedback. Again, poke holes and challenge us. I think what's really interesting about this that we've learned is we've gotten a lot of feedback that they quite frankly, they're not used to an owner asking them to challenge them and question them as much as we do. And so what it's done is that it's really created this environment where there's an openness to everyone questioning each other. And it just being a question and you're not questioning someone. It's not a judgment. It's not about the person.

And it's sort of about detaching our worth from what we're achieving in the workplace that we can critique each other, we can challenge each other, we can question each other. And it's not a personal attack. It's about the work. And what that does is it's created an open environment where they are very honest and transparent about their feedback. And because we receive it well, it's created this very open dynamic of everyone being honest. And so we really-- everyone assumes that everyone's intent is good. And we try to not let someone's projection or something that's going wrong affect one another and just create an even safe space.

And so because of this, and we trust each other, there's so many ideas being bounced off of each other. Which is showing the trust and building the trust and just really creating a safe environment. So getting a little bit deeper into building trust through the stages of change, we really looked at three main categories. We looked at awareness, acceptance, and aligned action. In our experience, we see that sometimes people go in the opposite order. And they start with the external thing first. And they say, what is this external goal that we want to achieve? And how do we get there?

We really decided to flip this around and go from the inside out. And we wanted to look at the awareness of, what is our initial roadblocks? What is our internal and external communication? Again, we talked about resistance, fear of change, perfectionism. Things like, I don't have enough time. Why are we doing this? We've always done it this way. And just really giving people a space to voice their opinions. Looking at the internal and external communication plan, looking at early announcements of our intentions, we've had a lot of folks say, we've never been told something this early. So we'll do whatever you want.

Usually, we're told something at the ninth hour. We're often not included in the process. And then folks feel left out. So we, in starting the awareness part of this, months and months and months before actually executing things like, hey, you're a new pilot project, we have a new template, we've gotten a lot of buy in from folks. This then moved on to what we are calling the acceptance phase, which is everyone's now accepted that we are, in fact, moving forward with our transition. And so what are the tangible things that come out of that?

It's really about creating a plan. It's testing the ACC functionality. It's looking at the transition strategy. It's further looking at the communication plan. It's really looking at what are the expectations and what is the full process involvement here. So a lot of this is really getting into the tangible-- the training plan-- it's kind of setting the stage for what needs an action, what is a tangible thing. What needs to come out of conversation and into a document, into a training preso, into a project, and into a template.

So this moves us into our aligned action stage, which is really where we're delivering everything to our teams. And we're looking at the template creation, we're looking at the training plan. We're doing progress announcements, implementation and rollout. Again, that feedback loop. Autodesk feature request. In going through these three stages, and because every single internal and external person listed in the 1,500 plus direct impacted users, everybody had an opportunity to voice their opinions in several of these stages. And so in doing that, there was just a lot of involvement and a lot of buy in early on to the process.

ANGIE DOYLE: No, I don't any more. Yeah, here we go. So yeah, a lot of the things that we heard. Who is deciding this? Why are you telling us this? Why do we have to do this? What is the purpose? This is going to mess up my timelines. I'm going to have to skip critical path things. Why does this even apply to me? I only need to see things. Can you please just give me an exception? We heard so many different excuses. And the upfront messaging, again, was just, this is not new. You knew this was coming. We all knew this was coming. We made you all very aware early on.

So it is not something that is new, but we also provide all of the support. Anything that you need. If you are unsure how to do this, that's fine. We have created training modules. We have direct folks that you can talk to that can help you through this particular task. Even if you are just someone who needs to see only and not actually get in and do anything, there's still a process. And so we want to make sure that everybody is following the same process. Really just standardizing. It also came back tenfold when we got all of these at the very beginning, why do I need this? Why do I have to go through the training?

And we were like, fine, have at it. And so then moments after the "have at it," they came back and they're like, this is different. How do I do this? And we're like, exactly. Here we are to help you. We did let a few slide where we were like, let's give it a shot. And it immediately proved everything that we thought upfront. And so while we did get a lot of these direct questions and concerns, we had a lot of back-end kind of proof that it did work the way that we were trying to get this rolled through. So yes.

LEIGH ANN COUCH: So moving from all of those emotional setbacks, we really leaned into re-framing the conversation and using resources to level set for our path to correction and staying on track. So again, a lot of this was changing our mindset, practice answering questions. Quite frankly, sometimes Autodesk saving us from ourselves, which we are not immune from. And continuing with the mindset of always assuming good intent. So part of the changing the mindset part of this, when people get frustrated, there can sometimes be a lot of negativity that comes from that.

Sort of an interesting fact is that if you look at the English language that has some 200,000 words, 50% of them are negative, 30% are positive and 20% are neutral. So this means that 70% are either negative, or neutral. And so it really does take a conscious effort, a lot of mindset work, and a lot of strength to practice coming at things from a more positive standpoint. And it's not about-- it's not about resisting the emotion, or not letting that emotion of anger or frustration be there, but it's about really allowing it to be there, working through it.

But then also understanding at the end of the day, we're all trying to achieve something here. We're all trying to get to the other side of it. Yeah, the words do matter. And the intention does matter. And creating a safe space for other people's frustrations to be shared does matter. Because it also tends to help them move through those frustrations much faster. We encourage asking questions to the people you work with, to your peers, to your manager, to the people you manage as much as possible. No, go ahead, Angie.

ANGIE DOYLE: I was just going to say, like she said, we encourage all of the questions. And we always have to-- even between us, in our team that is actually actively rolling this out, we always have to remind ourselves that we are just one person. And all of these new people are trying to figure out this new platform and really get into this new mindset. And so all of the questions they are asking us is only theirs. It's only coming from one person, even though we're receiving 15,000 times in a day. So we always have to remind ourselves to, again, just be a little bit mindful with it.

It's not an attack at us. It's not, again, why do I have to do this? We've already level set that. It's just that they're asking it from their single mind, and we're taking it from so many different people. We have to just remember to respond in kindness with that.

LEIGH ANN COUCH: Yes. So really, it was about resetting these emotional pain points. And what is that path to acceptance? So when we looked at a lot of the questions that we were being asked, some of the root issues that we were hearing from that was it was a lack of trust in the process. It was a perceived inconvenience versus an actual inconvenience. I think Angie and I had to accept that changing other people's process, although, it would create a solution that would fix something, we had to accept that it would still be an inconvenience for them. And it's OK for us to accept that and to mitigate around that so that we make that inconvenience the very least as possible.

It was around a, sometimes, lack of skill set. There's a lot of training that goes into this. The user interface is different. How the tool is used is different. We biasedly are much happier with it as a product. And so we fully support everyone getting trained on it and using it. But that does take time, which leads us into a lack of time. I don't have time to do this. I don't have time to do this. Everyone's very busy. Some people feeling like they're blindsided or left out of the conversation. Or fear of not being heard, the push back.

And so we're really trying to do everything that we can on the human side, and really let it lead our plan so that this turns into earned trust through compassion. It turns into clear communication. It turns into hands on demo training. It turns into very early information, even if we don't every single detail. It turns into taking notes, writing it down, showing them that we're listening. Giving them feedback and progress, updates on things that they've told us.

So when they say-- when we say, we don't know the answer, that's a great question. Let us go figure it out and come back, coming back to them and communicating it to them. and also to that point, being honest with them when we don't know the answer so that also builds that trust. Because it really-- they know that we're not going to make something up. We're very honest with them when we don't know the answer, which really helps them to trust us more. And then they become very engaged in helping us understand and helping themselves understand and getting to the root of the problem of things that are going on.

So with this one, again, it just sort of-- we just wanted to highlight, again, because of the scale of how many people we were doing this with, is that trust and collaboration looks very different for everybody. No two humans are exactly the same. And I think sometimes when we do these sort of blanket solutions, that's why we get a lot of resistance and a lot of people not liking something. When we look at how many cross-functional partner teams we have both internal and external, we really reached out to as many people as humanly possible.

We wanted to hear what works for them, what doesn't work for them. What drives them? What's important to them in their cloud platform process? Whether they be the owner side, whether they be our in-the-trenches BIM Managers, our engineers, our project managers, our GCs, our operations team. Everyone is using this platform differently. And they have different needs. And their priorities are in a different order. So we really wanted to reach out to everybody.

We want to understand how do their brains work? Are they visual learners? Do they want to watch a video? Do they want to be able to start and stop it? Do they want more model based? Do they want Angie to come to their team meeting? It'd be a hoot of a time. And we'd go through all sorts of things. Everybody sort of receives information a little bit differently. And in our findings, there were a couple of buckets that most people fell into. So instead of creating one path of training, we have several options of training in order to hit all of those things.

And then the last part of this is something that we really love. And it's also, who are they? Who are they as people? What are their interests? What brings them joy? What do they do in both their work and their life? And it's just been very important for us to understand, and learn, and meet people where they're at, and as the human that they are. And we have found that the more engaging we've been with them and the more warm and compassionate we've been with them, people have met us with also going above and beyond volunteering to do something.

How can we help you all? What can we beta test? What can we document for you? What can we give back to you? And we've just gotten a lot of feedback that a lot of that is stemming from because of how engaged we are with them. So building all of this trust, doing all of this collaboration, getting all of this buy in so that we really start to move forward into, OK, now that we've built all this trust, what's our next step and how can we move forward in our transition plan?

So this gets us to creating a culture of learning, and to our strategy training plan.

ANGIE DOYLE: First key here that we started as this came on board, we knew right away-- Leigh Ann and I have been, again, in this industry a long time. Done a lot of different trainings. Done them from a pre-approved guide versus something we had to come up with on our own. And really just saw how that worked in the way of how humans actually work. So first things first, as we started rolling this out, we documented everything. We screenshotted every change that we made. And a lot of that ended up making its way into our training strategy, knowing that sometimes seeing the development of these things also helps people with their buy in as well.

So we created some training guides. So we have an internal group that helped us create module-based training guides that have a couple of quizzes. Nothing hard. And so this is something that we had kicked off really early on, knowing, again, that this would take a while because we were involving a secondary group. So we had these training modules. So these are for our folks who maybe need to do this at their own pace. Or maybe they're somebody who likes to work at midnight after their kids have gone to bed. That's OK. We understand that.

So this allowed them to take their way through the training in a self-guided training that allowed them to get exactly the same benefits that they were going to get from a hands-on group training. We then launched the group training, and we provided a supplemental deck that goes with that. And that particular deck is actually what developed our training guides. So it went hand in hand with what was in our self-guided training. So this group training.

And we offer these currently once a week. They are an hour long. They don't usually take quite that long. But it depends on conversation, which we tend to get a lot of. So they'd go about an hour. And we don't necessarily always do a specific group of people. So it's not always PMs, it's not always the GC. We get a lot of difference in there, which also helps with conversation.

And then in our early pilots, we also did this role-specific refresher. Because as you'll see later, we really went through and streamlined our roles for how permissions were handled. And so we did break our folks down into these kinds of buckets so that we could say, OK, so for the role that you have-- whether you're a technical lead that's doing drawing reviews, or you're the civil engineer that needs to understand how to upload your masquerading drawings-- we want to make sure that how to do those things based on your specific function.

So we offer a 30-minute training about a week or so before their first big submission so that it's fresh in their mind. They do take the group training at the very beginning. So this refresher is really nice. We offer it for, again, that 65% milestone, which is one of our bigger milestones. And we do that just as needed per project. We kicked this off all late last year. And so we started offering this 95% submission as well. And I am happy to report, no one has ever asked us for that because they're very comfortable with it by that time.

So it has been a really good positive feedback that we didn't get invited to this. Very rarely do they come back with questions from these early pilot projects, because we did give them the access to be able to find the answers on their own. We also host a weekly office hours. We actually recently moved it to biweekly. So we offer a weekly office hours, which we invite anyone and everyone. So over 1,500 at the moment, folks get invited to this, whether they come or not. We have a really great time.

We made some silly updates and changes. We do Fun Shirt Fridays. And we just go through maybe some questions that they have on either how to do something. And I think one of the most beneficial things that folks have found out about this is our direct line to Autodesk. So we do have a meeting with Autodesk monthly. And they have found that out. So we get a lot of quality-of-life requests for the platform itself. It would be so great if-- and then we track that through, and we report it back to our good friends at Autodesk who are probably here with us in our in-person crowd.

So maybe listening online as well. So we did develop this big strategy. Again, this is something we tell everyone right at the beginning. This is in our BIM kickoff decks with new project teams. This is all at your disposal. So please, please use and take advantage of as you go through your project.

LEIGH ANN COUCH: Yes. Also another shout out to Autodesk. I think we've now had three items that actually made it into their ACC update releases and fixed a couple of bugs. So that was very exciting. And there's nothing like buying with your end users than when they actually see something that they-- a bug they found and reported. It got looped back through. It came out. It's been a part of the release and not update. So people were thrilled to see that.

ANGIE DOYLE: One of our people, Paul O. He was very excited to be a part of an AU deck. We have produced some good training documentation. So he says it's the best in the program that he's been involved with for around two years now. So we'll take that.

LEIGH ANN COUCH: Yes.

ANGIE DOYLE: Since we did our-- we really launched in-- a soft launch in November of last year. And since our full hard launch in January 2024, we call it our go live launch date, we are currently at 122 live projects. So every single new project that starts in our program, whether it's our region, EMEA's region, APAC's region, all of them are starting within ACC. We are no longer starting in BIM 360. We are working at, right now, 430 internal partners trained. And that is of this recording date and not the actual presentation date. We will be higher by then.

That's our internal folks. And then all of our external partners need to update this slide right there. So we'll catch that. This is our GCs, as AEs, our subcontractors. Everyone that's involved in the project. We have about 805 people kind of on the books right now. And then since this launch, knowing, again, Autodesk has been making leaps and bounds progress with the platform itself, we've made 15 adjustments. Not necessarily just to our template, which has been big news to be able to update for our teams, but even to our process. So we have taken a look at maybe something-- the way that something worked.

And because of an adjustment that Autodesk made for us, we were able to tweak something and make it a little easier for our users. So we love a good hard launch success.

LEIGH ANN COUCH: We do. So moving into a little bit more of the nitty gritty of how we organized our ACC processes and workflows, and what we really did during this lift and shift. So the lift and shift, again, we decided, what are we currently doing in BIM 360 that we can move directly into ACC with minimal interruptions? We knew that, of course, we were going to be getting a lot of net new functionality with ACC. There was going to be a lot of new offerings that we could capitalize, that we have numerous parallel initiatives going on to do that.

But for this specifically, and with the vastness of the users, and with our go launch, we really wanted to lift and shift starting with our design phase. So we looked at, in BIM 360, our roles were no less than a hot mess express-- the wild, wild west, as it says here. They were all over the place. They've not really been cleaned up or QA/QC'd in so many years. Again, leading back to the human part of this. When we tell our users, hey guys, we know that our roles are a hot mess express and we're able to accept things that we haven't necessarily kept up with, they hear that.

And they're like, oh, my gosh. Thank you for also being self-aware-- gals and owners, thank you-- so that we're not crazy. So that helps. In BIM 360, the permissions were impossible to track. Now we're able to do them in the template and role-based capacity, which has been really great. Our folder structure was severely outdated. It was not globally standardized. So we really worked on updating and standardizing our folder structure. Our issue creation. We actually were pretty happy with our issue creation and what we've been doing. So there was more of a direct translation there.

And we copied over the majority of our issues from BIM 360 to ACC. Except for that we did add a couple of functionality, again, in there when it came to the template and the permissions, and the Assign To, and all of those various things. The drawing reviews, historically, were more live page turn style. And now they are being done in sheets. We have not been anyone who's ever used the design review functionality. We've always done it more of a live or a virtual page turn with all of our issues. So all of our current drawing review items sit and build in sheets.

So what this sort of looked like when we mapped out our project timeline and what is the lift and shift, on the top part, you can see the execution phase. And on the bottom part is the simultaneous parallel workflow that's being developed. So all of the training was developed, it was self-guided, plus hands-on demo, plus Autodesk training. We also very much utilize the Autodesk training videos@autodesk.com. They are wonderful videos that are in lovely, bit-sized pieces. We did tell people what we thought that they needed to view.

We then did the hands-on demo training. Then we did the training feedback. Then everybody went live into doing their submissions. Then us getting feedback loops from them. We did have exit success criteria from each phase in making sure that different functionality worked. Again, the ACC office hours, which have turned out to be one of the most well attended office hours that our program has, again, hit pilot completion and success. And then sort of kicked off into phase two, which was the next phase.

So we did this timeline in parallel with three different pilot projects. Got all of our information back. And then that's what left-- when we decided, OK, this is working great. There's a couple of hiccups. So there's a couple of growing pains. But everyone is like, oh, my gosh. This is the greatest batch upload experience I've ever had. We're not getting midnight BIM 360 manifestos from things crashing, or the template OCR blue box didn't work. And all these different things. So it was very exciting.

And so we actually live launched six months then what we were originally going to do. We were going to let the pilots finish the entirety of their projects. And we said, no, this is going too good too soon. Let's let everybody else be a part of it as well. And I'll let Angie get into more of the role evaluation, because this was one of our big successes in this big success.

ANGIE DOYLE: Yes. And we're still evaluating. And it's still ever progressing. So it is not something that's ever done. We treat it as a kind of a live document here as well. But our role, evolution has just gone beyond. So as Leigh Ann said, our roles in BIM 360, we literally had 87 roles. And they were just random words. It didn't make any sense. Acronyms. Things that you're like, what does this even mean?

So really what we did is we started by creating this report. What do we have? What do we used? And immediately, we're like, these 30 aren't used. Eliminate. Done. We're gone. Trying not to involve too many people, which is not always the easiest. But we just want to say, these aren't being used actively. So they don't need to be here at all. Then from there, we took whatever was left and we reached out to the type of user that it said that it was. Or the type use that we saw it having. And found out, why are you-- how are you using this particular role? And what is its current function?

We proposed a slimmed down version. There were lots we could combine and get brought into to either a similar or the same role. And then we did a soft launch on this with-- we set it up in a sandbox, and we showed everybody, this is what we would like to use. This is how all of that would function. And then this is what permissions would be from that. And so then we, again, have adjusted. We know that there are use cases where we need a little bit more from a little bit more from the roles. And so we have added-- I think we've added five or six since the start.