Serving Up a 5-Star Learning and Development Strategy That Brings Design Technology to the Table

MARY FORBES: Hello, everyone. We are excited to share with you a strategy that you can use whether you are a small firm, a large organization. One that if you don't have a learning and development department to collaborate with, that's OK. But if you are in learning and development in the architecture, engineering, construction, and manufacturing industry, this is going to offer so many ways for you to get started, for both you and your design technology teams. All to come to the same table.

You might have noticed that we have a food theme going on from the picture here on this opening slide to the title of the session, it's all about food. Why? We're going to get into that in just a moment as we do our introductions and review the agenda. So who are we? I'm Mary Forbes. Customer Success Team Lead for Eagle Point Software. I've been with Eagle Point for over six years. And now leading a team of expert CSMs, responsible for strategizing with our customers to help them solve their continuous learning, knowledge sharing, and capturing, and productivity challenges, leveraging our Pinnacle series and knowledge-smart solution.

Joining me today is one of those CSMs, Kyle Klapatauskas. And our customer, Tammy Rico from DLR Group. As part of our introductions, we thought it'd be fun and interesting to share with you the most interesting foods we've eaten. And for me, it was for when I was traveling in the Nordics, and I got to try some of the various authentic Norwegian cuisine. And food is all about connection. And it really helped me connect with my heritage and ancestors that migrated to the United States back in the late 1800s. Kyle, I'm going to turn it over to you to take a moment for your introduction. We'll have Tammy give a brief one. And then we'll dive into, why food and the agenda?

KYLE KLAPATAUSKAS: Great. Thanks, Mary. So my name is Kyle Klapatauskas. And I'm a Customer Success Manager at Eagle Point Software. So I'm colleagues with Mary. And I work very closely with Tammy and DLR Group. She's one of my clients. As she likes to say, strategic partner. And that really has been our relationship with each other.

My most interesting food is a wampa arm dessert. I don't know if any of you are Star Wars fans. My wife is a really big Star Wars fan, and so a couple of years ago on May the 4th, she made a wampa arm based off of Empire Strikes Back. And it was coconut and it looked like the wampa arm that was sliced off. So that's probably the most interesting food I've ever had.

TAMMY RICO: Hello, I'm Tammy Rico. CBT, CIT. My role at DLR Group is Senior Technical Training Designer. I have been with the firm for over six years, and been in the AEC industry for over 17 years. With DLR Group, I started out really as a regional BIM manager. And then moved into the national BIM manager role, specializing in training. And then now I am part of the learning and development team. And my background has been in implementation, design technologies, processes and workflow improvements, training, strategic planning. A variety of things on that level.

With my role, I've actually had the opportunity to travel all over the United States. And one of the things I look forward to doing is testing out local cuisine and finding those chefs that really highlight their cuisine. And some of my most recent adventures, I was able to try something called skate wing ceviche. So highly recommended. It was absolutely delicious, at least in my book. So I would definitely go test it out. Mary.

MARY FORBES: Great. All right, so you're probably thinking by now, what does learning and development have to do with food? Kyle, I'm going to turn it over to you to share some of the background on this reference, and how this all relates and kind of puts people in the mindset to think about as you're building out your learning and development strategy.

KYLE KLAPATAUSKAS: Thanks, Mary. So there are a couple of different reasons why we chose food as the topic for today's presentation. One is it's personal. So for some context, Tammy and I meet bi-weekly to strategize, to talk about value initiatives, and what we can do for Tammy's various learning initiatives. And during those calls, we always talk about food. I mean, it's just what we do. Whether it's a new recipe, or maybe we traveled someplace, maybe favorites for certain seasons.

And so anyways, with this presentation, a lot of it is about personalized learning. And so how do you personalize that learning? Well, for us, we personalize our meetings by talking about food. So we're like, let's add that element, let's personalize this presentation. But as we discussed it more, we're like, there's this universal theme with food. For one thing, everybody eats food. So there's that. But we also wanted today's presentation to be like-- as if we're coming to the table and having this conversation. Where we're sitting down and we're talking about different learning initiatives, and needs, and strategies.

And it's that coming together, the breaking of bread, that way that we can all build that community and sit down and have a good conversation with each other. So that's why we chose food. And we thought-- we shared a little bit about the most interesting food we've had. We want you to take a moment to think about the most interesting food you've had. I know we're doing this online virtually. But take the moment, think about what is that most interesting food you've had.

Maybe it's a texture. Maybe it's something you haven't had before. Maybe it's looks. Something that the food has been presented in a way that you've never seen it put together, or plated in a way that you've never seen before. So take a moment and think about the most interesting food you've ever had.

MARY FORBES: Great. Thank you, Kyle. Now that everybody's reflecting on that and we're getting you in that mindset, let's go through the agenda. And keeping with the food theme, the menu for today.

KYLE KLAPATAUSKAS: Yes. So our menu that we put together, again, we thought that could be a great way to structure the presentation. So the menu, the first item that we're going to talk about is the concept. So the why and what. And what really drove DLR our group to look into some of these different initiatives and adopt them. The second, then we'll transition to recipe testing. So how did that start off? And then what was some of that initial feedback?

Number three, the limited menu. So the DLR Group did a pilot before they expanded to other business units. Then we'll shift to the buffet is open. So strategic partners, software, leadership. Really expanding and bringing-- getting more people involved. Number five, more offerings. So the disciplines and inventories, the reviews were in. The reviews were great. And so then DLR Group expanded to other disciplines, and added inventories along with the assessments. And then we're going to finish by talking about the secret menu. So what's next?

This has been an ongoing process. DLR Group is not finished. And Tammy is really excited to share really what's as we look ahead to taking all of their work and all their results, and then how do they carry that forward to expand even further with their initiatives?

MARY FORBES: Everything looks great. Looks interesting. We've got a lot to cover to get to that secret menu. So let's get started. My first question is for you, Tammy. The why and the what? I'm curious. Why did the DLR group start doing this? Want to do this? And what were teams coming to you for? I guess to keep with our food theme, what were the cravings? What did they have?

TAMMY RICO: Thanks, Mary. How it all started out was with our global engineering leader, in their business plan, they had a goal of becoming 10% more efficient on working in projects. And so as the design technology team partnering with them, how we could help is looking at Revit, being where they spent the primary amount of their design time in. How do we make them more efficient? How do we make them more consistent? So we looked at that and said, all right, so that's where we can step in as the design technology team and be able to help them.

Another part of this that started driving this was the entire firm was actually asking for, how do you use Revit better? How do we be able to use it? We need training. We want more. Teach us more. So again, the design technology team had to figure out, all right, well, what training do we offer? So this is where our path started and really trying to figure out, what do we offer the firm to make them more efficient? To make things scalable? To make things optimized? You see all these words on here, and it was part of all of it.

MARY FORBES: Got it. And as I think about it-- and you too, Kyle-- almost every customer that we work with has shared similar goals and teams coming to them to set up some type of training program-- some type of learning and development strategy. And as I look at your slide, this is why we're here. Every word on that page. The cravings are real, people. OK, so let's dive into what you did with them. How did you start out? Where do you begin with taking all these requests that came in to you and making it a reality?

TAMMY RICO: For us, the fun part was trying to figure out exactly that. It's, what do we offer? How do we know where to begin? What do we even have on the shelves? So what ingredients do we even have to be able to do any of this? So at the time, we had access to a software package called Knowledge Smart. So if you don't know what Knowledge Smart is, it's a software package that was built for the AEC industry. They have a lot of out-of-the-box skills assessments for multiple software programs and processes. As you can see here, they have over 170 out of the box tests that you can use.

So since we had it sitting there, why not use it? Why not see what we could get? So we mapped out a plan on how to roll out the testing, who we were going to do this with, what we were going to end up doing. So we focused on engineering. And with the multiple disciplines that we have, we narrowed it down to three. Mechanical, electrical, and structural. They were going to be our proof of concept and testing. So to do this, we also decided to use the out-of-the-box assessments to see what kind of data we were getting back. What did we look like? So we had to start somewhere. So we started with the out-of-the-box recipe.

MARY FORBES: Great. So you started with that basic recipe using the out-of-the-box assessments to get your base points. Then the reviews started coming in from the test group. What happened once all the testing was completed?

TAMMY RICO: When the testing came in, it was really fun and exciting to see. So the data nerds and all of us decided to show up. We were looking at it. We were trying to figure out, how do we harness all of this information? So here, you can see just some of the data. So I'll show you a couple slides of just the data itself to show you what we could get out of it. So our design technology team looked at the scores, and then started working on sessions for training.

So at this particular point in the journey, we did all training in house. We tested on fundamental stuff. So all of our training was based on the fundamentals to get the firm up to a base point. So this is where we could actually see, what did we have? What were we working with? Where do we go from here? During this same time, because of this, we also launched a series called, Did You know. The Did You Know series is a 15 to 20 minute session once a week, highlighting processes, and tools, and workflows, new things. Sparking innovation type things.

So it's morphed over the time. I'm happy to say that is still going on every week since we started this. And then we also started looking at what really-- what offices, what things were going on with the actual firm. So here, we're looking at results from our testing. The dashboard that we used is the out-of-the-box PowerPoint template that Knowledge Smart provides. So if you don't Power BI, that is OK. They give you the template. They give you instructions on how to use it. What we did is we tweaked it a little bit.

And we did add-- because we do reporting based on our regions and our locations, we did add that in here. So here, we can see some of the scores that we started with. And here, we narrowed it down to an example of structure. So can look at the different offices. So being able to see this, is we could see which offices do we want to provide extra attention to. Which ones do we really want to go in and go, OK, we're going to do some of these national ones.

How do we bring in? Let's go look at some of these different ones. Where do we look at? Where do we look from a national standpoint? Where do we look from an office standpoint? And where do we really focus our time and energy on it? And with that, we're also able to see-- what this dashboard that's provided is an actual example of the training tag. So each of the assessments, all of the questions that are provided have training tags that go with them. So then we can see whether questions are skipped, what was missed across the board.

So here, we can see that we needed to focus on revisions and sheets, views, schedule quantity sheet lists, brace symbols. And we didn't have to spend as much time focusing on structural wall, spot elevation, sloping roofs. So this was a great way for us to narrow down the plethora of things that we could possibly train on. At the same time, people that were attending the sessions, we were finding that the ones attending were the ones that scored really, really high and didn't really need the training.

And I'm sure that's the same way in a lot of firms, whether you're a 10-person firm or a 2,000-person firm. The ones that are attending the training voluntarily are the ones that don't necessarily need it. So we started looking at some of that kind of stuff. During the start of this version one of the training-- of these assessments and in-house training DLR Group was in the process of launching several automation tools. Our design technology team was growing with the new design technology leader and bringing in all of these automation tools, some advanced processes. Clarity, things like that.

And then overall, our firm started asking with our culture surveys and indexes that were coming back is there was an even bigger push to ramp up the training that we had started. So in doing this, it was now time-- it was now time to push the firm forward and see what more-- what other learning opportunities we can do next.

MARY FORBES: So results were in. All good reviews, right? Well, we all know everyone has feedback for the chef, right? Everybody tends to know, I want something else. I want something different, something better. Now let's talk about, buffet was open. Share with us. How did you handle that feedback? And what did you need to do differently? And want to expand on?

TAMMY RICO: So as I started to sneak peek and give a little bit of preview with-- is there was a lot going on in the firm. And one of our firm's strategic goals that we do every five years was investing in our people. And how do we invest in our people was one was bringing in a special learning platform to house all of the training, to be able to find all of the things. And looking at strategic partners. So that's where we got to have some of the fun. So we ended up bringing in two strategic partners.

One of them is Learn Amp. They are our LXP. We branded that as campus, as you can see here. And an LXP, for those that don't know, is a learning experience platform. This is what houses the bulk of our training. This is our technology-- our digital library of all the things going on from a learning standpoint. The other strategic partner that we got to bring in and start working with is Pinnacle Productivity Now. So we brought them in because they have all of the AEC software that we needed.

And so we could utilize their training that they've already got, whether it was the fundamentals or the advanced pieces of it, and really use that to leverage the training that we needed, the assessments that we needed. While it allowed our internal team to focus on the DLR Group way, and being able to focus their time on that. So this is where we were able to do that. Engineering had been requesting more advanced training. And so specifically, training on the DLR Group way.

They wanted more training on how do they do things using our title blocks, our sheets, our processes, our schedules? Things like that. Just like we all need to be able to do. And so because of this and adding all the automation tools that were coming into play, this launched the phasing approach of how we roll out the skills assessments, and being able to take that advanced approach. So it actually kicked off phases two and three of the assessment testing. And we'll dive into all of this and what it all means, and I'll show you how we did it.

And because of this-- and we met the 10% goal of efficiency with engineering, leadership saw this, and then we had global buy in from our leadership. So all of our global discipline leaders were all on board. We were able to show this to our executive leadership team. They were on board. Our regional leadership was on board. Because we were able to prove it with engineering and they were happy, we could then expand this.

And then it was a floodgate of, now we all want to do it. How do we get it? How do we execute it? Again, that's where our strategic partners came in of being able to map some of this out of frames, testing, phasing, things like that. Another piece of this was launching something we called the training matrix. And so being able to build that out, we were able to do that with interior design as our pilot group first. And I'll show you what all that looks like and how that comes into play with this as well.

And then we were able to create with the training matrix and the skills assessments, our pillars of learning and being able to do all of that. Just so you know, this doesn't happen overnight. It did not happen in a week. It didn't happen in a month. It didn't even happen in a year. This took a lot of time to go through and do this. So here's an example of the timeline that we did specifically for engineering. So you can see, we kicked off skills assessments, the out-of-the-box off-the-shelf version in November of 2020.

Then we launched being able to get that done, set up, roll it out with mechanical plumbing, electrical in April of 2021. So there are some time, and some planning, and some conversations. We did in-house training-- that's where that pink bar is-- through this entire time. Because we had success in early 2021, we brought in all of our specialty services, like our lighting design, theatrical, things like that. And then this is where we started talking about that phase two that I had mentioned and bringing in, how do we ramp it up? How do we make it better? So we started talking about what do we do next, that Mary had alluded to. That was in August of 22.

And then in November of 22, bringing in our strategic partners. What did that look like? Then we started working on our phase three piece of it. So we were able to do things in tandem, and being able to bring this through all the way forward to today in a maintenance piece and longevity with the engineering group as a whole. And we do annual testing with this in December of every year. So this is an overall look at how engineering has been rolled out. We have, of course, timelines for interior design and architecture and other ones.

MARY FORBES: Thanks, Tammy. I remember that first meeting. My clients introduced us. He's our business development manager. And we got on a call and we started working on your Pinnacle Series Pilot, and integrated all of your Knowledge Smart data right into the Pinnacle Series Productivity Now platform. And look where we're at today. So now let's pause for a moment. And you have those phases listed there. The three phases. You talked about maintenance. Can we dive a little bit more into what is in each of those phases?

TAMMY RICO: Absolutely. Being able to go through this-- a phased approach is one that I strongly recommend. You're able to do checks and balances at each piece. And if you need to shift and pivot, you've got the opportunity to do that. So what did our phases look like? So our phase one is the initial testing. So in that phase, we needed to figure out what the timelines were going to be, scale of the testing. We're not going to do all the disciplines. Whether you're a single discipline or multi-discipline firm, you're not going to do everybody all at once.

So you're going to find that group of people. You're going to find your experts to help guide the process. Because I am not an expert in all of the disciplines, we need to find the people that were the experts. We took the out-of-the-box assessments only from the experts version to see, hey, what do they think? How are we going to do it? And then we decided, do we need custom ones or not. And then this initial phase is not meant to be your company standards, your company processes, your company way of things.

Phase one is really getting what's in your pantry. What do you have? Where's everybody at? You need to start somewhere, but we need to know what. And then we tested it with a small group. You decide on your training. And then most importantly is the communications plan. We worked with our communications team to talk to the firm, working with the leaders. How was the messaging being delivered from leadership? From discipline leads? From office leads? From a learning and development standpoint? Career managers? How is this being presented to our actual employee owners?

Phase two is retesting. So phase two is the easiest of the phases because you're literally retesting at a certain time point of what you tested on before. So you don't change any of the testing. You don't change any of the assessments, unless you've upgraded software. Other than that, you keep the questions the same. Because this is your validity, this is your ROI. Did the training you provided work? Are the people retaining what they're learning? Do we need to find other things?

You've got also new people coming in. So this is, again, where you're going to grab that information from them as well to be able to see. And again communicating. Communicating, what were the results? Where are things coming at? Communicating with the firm from leadership down. Same groups of people, how are we communicating it to the firm?

Phase three is company-specific stuff. This is where you're going to start bringing in, what is your secret sauce? How does DLR Group do things? How do we do our schedules? How do we do our title blocks? Whether it's discipline-specific or firm-specific, this is where you're going to bring all those things in. You're going to decide which topics to include. We want to immediately think, we can include everything. And then you're going to end up with a four-hour test and that's not going to work. So you narrow things down, you look at different things.

And this is where you also include advanced features of the software. Because remember, we were testing on fundamentals to get a basis. Now, we're going to test, have you been training, and moving things forward, and looking at more advanced ways of using those tools? And then creating specific company processes, workflows, things like that. You create the questions for the test from the training that you create. Once again, a communications plan on, what does this mean to the firm? Let them know what's coming. Timeframes how is the information being used. Things like that.

And then the final piece of that, it's not really a phase. It's just that long-term, how do we do this? How do we keep this going? What do we do? So from a maintenance long-term standpoint, it's reviewing the fundamental test to make sure. Yep, we're still good with that one. Is there anything that we need to take out because we don't use some of those features? To making sure the company one, so that phase three piece, is current on our processes. So are there new automation tools that your firm released? Are there new processes updated? Because of new technologies in the base software, you've modified workflows.

So update testing on that. Updating your training. And then you set a regular time of year for this to be able to go through and do this every year to see what training comes up for the firm, what training comes up for an individual. And being able to see where do we need to ramp things up. So this is the phased approach that we've taken to do all of our assessments and rollouts. And some of these things can create in tandem. You don't have to start phase three as soon as you're done with phase two. And implementations, now we actually start planning phase three while we're planning phase one, but we just don't implement it until we've got other things in place.

MARY FORBES: Thank you. So those are all the details around the phases for your testing and your training approach. Now, you could have stopped there, and that would have been OK. And we have many customers that have similar successful approaches and strategies where they're doing the testing and retesting, and ongoing maintenance there. But you and DLR Group craved more, right? So let's go back to a conversation you and Kyle had in December of '23. So not too long ago. It was one of your regular biweekly meetings.

It was a few weeks before the holidays. So I'm sure you were talking about what foods you were going to serve at the holiday meals and celebrations coming up. And you were reviewing the status of some of the assessments. And mentioned that you were working on this larger skills repository initiative. And told Kyle, I need to build a skills database for the firm. Kyle asked a few more questions. Kind of like a good food staff person asking more questions to understand really what you were craving. Did you want to try something new? Do you want to offer a new suggestion to think about in the next meeting, such as the Knowledge Smart skills audits?

How do you want to talk about how that next conversation went. And didn't take long. And here's where we're at today.

KYLE KLAPATAUSKAS: Yeah, you're right. We were talking about food. I still remember some of the items that Tammy was talking about back in the December meeting. So up until that point-- at that point in December of 2023, this last December, we had been meeting for about a year, really focused on these phases that you're seeing and getting those implemented. And I think that's a really good example that bring up, Mary, because sometimes you can get so focused on-- it is a big initiative, and you're focused on that.

But by continuing to have those conversations when Tammy mentioned this interest in an inventory, that's where I was like, did you know that we also have Knowledge Smart-- we call them audits, but DLR Group labeled them as inventories. And I think that's what's exciting about strategizing with partners. It isn't just, how do you do these picks and clicks to get it set up? That's an element of it. But a lot of it is that strategizing, how could this be used? You have these needs. Let's talk about that.

And so the fact that there was already buy in from the company, that helped. That helped set the table then to incorporate inventories as well. But then we had that conversation in December. And then in January, we jumped right into inventories while we were also finalizing some of these other phases.

MARY FORBES: Great. Thanks. So let's talk about that training matrix, Tammy.

TAMMY RICO: And Kyle, I do remember some of those things. Because we were talking about homemade cranberry sauce is absolutely yummy. So to do the skills inventory, and when we were talking with Kyle is, OK, to do a skills inventory-- what skills do you do? How does it tie to training? All of this kind of stuff. Well, we had to figure out what that really meant. So do you start with competencies? Do you start with skills inventories? Do you start with-- what does it start with?

So we took a step back-- and if you recall, I had mentioned something called our pillars of learning and our training matrix. So here's version one of the training matrix that we started with interior design in figuring out, what does it mean to be an interior designer? What things do you have to learn? What competencies do you need to be able to function? So this was the very early piece. And in working with our global design leader for interior design, she wanted to know where can she focus some initiatives on for her group to really advance in making some top priorities of things.

So when we look at this, we've got these different columns. And we zoom in and we look at, for example, general. So what does that really look like? For general, it's things like jobsite safety, understanding QA, and understanding design process, research best practices, understanding budgets. So there's different things to being able to talk about. And what does that really mean? How does that work with a particular group? IN having these conversations, we then developed our pillars of learning, which fed into some of our skills inventory. So our pillars of learning, there are six of them.

So the first one is human skills. A lot of people call them soft skills or power skills. It's all of the other kinds of things that we need to work on, like time management, presentation skills, things like that. Then our next one is practice. So practice is the actual specific pieces of how do you do that discipline, that job, that role. What does that really mean? So from an interior design aspect, how do you be an interior designer?

Next, we have the general, which you saw a little bit-- a glimpse of. That's the things that everyone in the firm should know that crosses disciplines. So for example, work plans, even being able to read a set of plans. Because we're talking about our new hires coming in right out of school to our senior leadership. What does that all mean? Job site safety, things like that. The next was the technical piece, and that one's pretty self-explanatory. That's all of the tools that we use to complete the person's role. So Bluebeam, Microsoft, Clarity, Revit, Newforma, things like that.

The next two of our pillars were very near and dear to our heart with our firm is design equity is the first one. So how do you bring design equity into every single project? So because this was so important for our firm, we gave it its own pillar because we want to make sure that we really, truly highlight that in all aspects of it. So it's part of all of it. Same with client and environment. This is important to us. It's important to a lot of firms, our planet, things like that. So making sure that we truly focused on, do we have things that cover this, and everything that we're doing?

And so as these get incorporated, eventually, these two will morph into part of being the other four. But in this first initial phases of things, we wanted to make sure that we really took stock in, are these even included in that? So that's how we ended up with the six pillars of learning. And so everything-- all the training that we're doing is, does it fit into these six buckets? And being able to do that, and being able to start driving the skills inventory before we even built it was being able to figure out this piece of it.

MARY FORBES: Got it. So, you're really taking this to that next level. We hear that all the time. I have to have that holistic approach of my employees. You have to add to your menu. It's more than just those technical things. It's getting into those non-technical aspects that are important in what people do day in and day out in their job. What was important to DLR Group and to your employees. And you're building out a skills inventory that can really be used in so many different ways.

So now you've got that framework in place. Tell us more about how everything developed since that call with Kyle, when he gave you that overview on the audit feature. And since then, you've been able to grow out your menu.

TAMMY RICO: Yeah, this has been, I have to say, really, really exciting and a whole lot of fun in being able to bring a lot of this in. So we keep saying skills inventory, but we haven't shown you it yet because all of these pieces built up to that piece that we're going to show you now. So here's some of the custom learning that we created because of the training matrix that was done, because of the testing that was done. So here's an actual person, I've blurred out their name so we don't so we don't see what their name is.

But here's some of the information that we're getting because we've done phase one, phase two, phase three of our skills assessments and bringing in some of that training matrix to see where things are at. So we can see this particular person, overall looking at how have they scored, how have they progressed, how do they compare with the DLR Group average versus this. What are things that this particular person needs being able to create that custom training? And this is the stuff that we're getting from the training stuff that Knowledge Smart was able to do.

So with Knowledge Smart and then the Pinnacle team of being able to say, hey, can I get this information? And working with that partner to be able to go, absolutely. How do we do it? How do we present it? So here's another look at another piece of that, and being able to see what does it look like. So from a fundamental standpoint, this particular test had 16 modules in it. They tested out of 12. So they had four trainings to complete. When we rolled the electrical piece out of this DLR Group specific ones. There were 15 modules in it. They tested out of five.

That person needed training on 10 of them because we tweaked things. And we expected this. So the scores are obviously going to be different in what we're looking at. And so being able to see where they're at in their training, what they were enrolled in, what they were tested out of. And being able to then amplify the training matrix version to being able to add even more things inside of the training matrix with the different things.

You'll see oranges in here now bringing in some additional skills that we've identified. There's all little bricks on all of this kind of stuff. Being able to identify skills. What does that really mean? And then this is where we really start to develop the actual skills inventory. And to do that, Knowledge Smart has these skills inventories, they call them Audits right out of the box. So I was able to take all of these audits, download them all, put them all in a master spreadsheet. Look at them all, and start identifying which ones we were using for interior design.

Our global interior design leaders said they wanted to be first. And so I worked with her and one of her top team members. And we sat down and we figured out, what skills do we want to look at first? So when identifying all of this and going through the over 1,200 and some odd skills that Knowledge Smart already provided for us, we added even more. And we narrowed it all down for interior design. We looked at over 500 skills for that particular discipline to look at. But launching 500 skills right out of the gate was very, very intimidating.

So we chose 97. We narrowed it all down. We asked a lot on-- we can see here, we added the pillars. So technical, general, some process application, things like that. Some of our sectors, things like that. And we left out all of the human skills at this point in time, and be able to look at some of this. And even then, 97 seems like a whole lot. But it took the average person only 20 minutes to answer the skills inventory survey for us to be able to get that information back. So what does it look like?

Well, Knowledge Smart has-- and I can't stress this enough, they have an amazing Power BI template for you that you can dump all of this information in and be able to see it. The only tweaking that we did to the template was to be able to sort, again, by region. So here's some of the information that we came back. And there's many different ways to do it. I just showed you one where the skills are down the left hand side, and the names of the people are across the top. So we can look at, where are our people from different aspects?

So we look at augmented reality. That one screams at everybody because there's red across the board. That was a great time to have that conversation with our leader in saying, is this a skill that we really need to push? Is this something that we need to push today? Or is it something we have higher priorities on and pushing and advancing later on? Or is this something do we need at all? The next piece is being able to go, OK, she was able to make those decisions and be able to look at it. This also provided us an opportunity to find some of our subject matter experts.

So we look at InDesign, and we have several fives in there. We have several fours in there. So that we can then pair our level fours and fives with our level ones and twos to help give them over-the-shoulder training, being able to look at it. And then we were actually able to see, what were some of our highest ranking things? What were some of our lowest ranking things? So we could see very high, there are things that from the design standpoint that were right up there. So collaboration, mood boards, Zoom, mural. Things that you would expect to be really high.

But then we were also able to look at, overall, what were our lowest ratings? So when we look at some of our sectors and some of our software like Twinmotion. Are we going with Twinmotion? Are we going Lumion? Which way are we going? Do we need to ramp that up with some of our other processes? So we were able to see, OK, now we're going to push some more Twinmotion training and be able to look at some of that kind of stuff. And have those conversations and being able to do that. So that's where we were able to use some of that skills inventory. And that's where you're seeing these actual skills on the left of what are they called. So this is version one of it.

MARY FORBES: Great. That is amazing. And did that help with the cost, savings as well? As you're talking about all the different softwares that people need to have, tell me a little bit about that. I think we talked about that earlier, too, the different understanding what people have and need.

TAMMY RICO: It's made a huge difference in working with our CIO and our design technology leader, and the technology strategy that they're working on in being able to decide, which software are we pushing is a firm? Every firm is going to choose what's best for them, or their secret sauce. So then we can work on ramping up licensing versus one, changing licensing versus another. Or do we even use some of these? No, we don't. Then we can get rid of some of that software because we don't need it.

Do we need to ramp up on some of this other stuff? Do we need to change others? So again, that was not only just from a workflow standpoint, but from a cost standpoint of which software are we going to use and help narrow down. Because I'm sure just like every other firm, we all have hundreds and hundreds of pieces of software that we probably don't realize that we're paying for.

MARY FORBES: Wow. That's amazing. With the heat map that you showed, that's always my favorite chart when we're working with customers. It's so powerful. We nickname it the people finder. So I need to find somebody that has this skill level with this type of software, and get them on a project, or mentor them up with somebody else who has a higher level. So it's great to see that actually in progress and working. To see how that has evolved since that first time you guys met earlier back in January. It's been less than a year, and you've been able to add that full menu in. And you're starting to see the outcomes and the value for DLR group.