Moody Nolan's Approach to Putting Knowledge in the Flow of Work with Synthesis and Guardian

Chris Shafer: All right, let's go and get started with today's webinar. So today's topic is Moody Nolan's Approach to Putting Knowledge in the Flow of Work. So today Moody Nolan will be demonstrating how they connect their users to their knowledge base with both the use of Guardian and Knowledge Architecture. So I'm excited to have both Moody Nolan and Knowledge Architecture joining the Guardian team for today's webinar.

So getting in today's agenda, we're going to go over the typical introductions, but also since we have a lot of guests here who this might be the first time seeing Guardian or seeing Knowledge Architecture, we're going to have a quick introduction on both and then we're going to get into the good stuff. What everyone's really here for is get a better understanding of Moody Nolan’s training strategy and how they connect their users to their knowledge base and then we'll get into a little bit of a discussion about the future of learning and then end things with the Q&A.

All right, today's objectives #1 and #2 is get a better understanding of what is Guardian and Knowledge Architecture's intranet platform Synthesis. And the good stuff again is understanding Moody Nolan's use of Knowledge Architecture in Guardian and how they're helping their users improve their capabilities by connecting them to their knowledge base.

All right, let's get through some housekeeping before we get too far along here. So as always, the mics are live, so we want to hear your questions. Now we just ask that before you unmute yourself, just use the hand raise feature within Teams.

And please don't unmute yourself until you're called upon. And for a lot of people, they prefer using the chat. And we, as always, find our chats very lively in the Guardian webinar. So to help things go smoothly we use emojis for each of our team members, not just the Guardian team members, but the team members of both Moody Nolan and Knowledge Architecture all have their emojis that will claim your question, so they will be answering those specific questions. So just want to make sure everyone is aware when you see that emojis pop up, what that means

And one of the things that we typically find is there are some sometimes some really good questions and we would like to expand upon those a little bit more. So if it's going to take a little bit more time, we may hold those questions until the end of the webinar for the Q&A.

So today's presenters. So I'm excited to have Bryan Payne and Nick Bower, both from Moody Nolan here and presenting how they utilize both Guardian and Knowledge Architecture. We also have Chris Parsons with Knowledge Architecture and myself representing Guardian.

So as promised, sorry to do this to everyone, but just for those who are joining us today may not know what Guardian is. So let's give you a quick rundown of what is Guardian. So fundamentally, Guardian is a Revit add-in to help communicate and automate your firm's best practices and standards. Now we do this by providing real-time training in the moment to help prevent mistakes before they happen.

While we're not going to be covering some of the automations that we have to protect your firm's graphical and Revit standards, we're not going to be going over this today, but I just want to make sure everyone is aware these are some of the capabilities that Guardian has. And lastly, it's an analytics tool providing a 360-degree visibility and management of your firm's web environment.

I would like to take a quick moment to expand upon that a little bit. And since today we're really talking about training and ultimately just think about you put a lot of work into developing your knowledge base and whether it's through webinars or sending out emails, communicating to your users, hey, here's our knowledge base, here's our best practices. But how do you know that that training is effective?

So with Guardian, you're able to see how people are responding to those specific training messages in real time and are they utilizing those commands as you intend them to? So you can see that in the data.

Great. One of the things I want to focus on as well is as we've developed Guardian and specific features, we really set out goals for us and in these features. And while I'm not going to go through each of these one by one, I want to highlight on a few of these.

We really want to make sure that firms are able to communicate their best practices on a command-by-command basis. So everyone knows you cannot just explode CAD files within the model environment. So this gives you an opportunity to train your users saying hey we don't explode CAD files, right? This is how you should go about if you need to get a CAD file into your project, you should either link it or you should. If you need a detail, open up a detail family, do it there, then bring into your Revit environment.

Project level customizations. There is never a tool that is a one-size-fits-all solution, so we really pride ourselves in making sure that users can customize Guardian to meet those specific project needs and protect completed work. So just have a show of hands please just use the reactions in your in your Teams is how many times have you as a Revit user got into the model and only to find a linked model had moved deleted grid or something like that, right?So our goal here is really to make sure that the work that you've done stays completed.

And then moving on to the next one here is improve sync with central. Again, show of hands is how many people I would say enjoy the sync with central command or feature within Revit. So with Guardian we have a feature called Sync Traffic Control that addresses a lot of the limitations within Sync with Central and ultimately making sure we automate consistency.

Now since we're today, we're really talking about training and how training is delivered to users. And while we have a lot of features that we've kind of demonstrated or talked about earlier, we're going to really focus on one called Command Messages.

And a Command Message works when a particular command or an action such as deleting or mirroring happens within the Revit environment in which you choose to provide real-time guidance. So this can be customized on a command-by-command basis and even you know depending on the way your firm is structured, whether it's a project-level specific command or maybe a different discipline or a project type. So the goal here is to be able to communicate your firm's best practices on a command-by-command basis.

This also provides a great opportunity to provide links to your knowledge base. So as Bryan and Nick will be presenting later, is demonstrating how they've embedded these links to their knowledge, excuse me, their Knowledge Architecture resources.

These command messages also provide an opportunity for your teams to provide communications back to you on why they may need to do something. Maybe the best practice may not be a best practice for that specific project or that specific design task within Revit.

So with that being said, I like to switch gears here and hand it over to Chris and so he can give us a brief introduction into Knowledge Architecture.

Christopher Parsons: Sure, great. Yeah, thank you. Thanks for inviting us to be here. So we have been in business since 2009. We build a product called Synthesis, which is our integrated knowledge and learning platform and we work with over 150 AEC firms to do that.

In addition to the technology, something that was my background is in IT in two architecture firms here in San Francisco, and I fell in love with this idea of knowledge management and helping our firm make the best use of its knowledge.

And so a lot of what we've been doing over the course of the history of the company is figuring out not just the technology that firms need to get good at managing their firm's knowledge and learning, but really the people, the process, the culture that support building really modern kind of learning organizations.

And so one of the reasons we're so excited to do this webinar with Moody Nolan and with Guardian is the kind of combination of Synthesis and Guardian together really help put knowledge in the flow of work and can connect people to the right knowledge at the right time given some of the workflows that Chris just described. So we're looking forward to seeing some good examples. Chris, if you can go to the next slide.

So three major kind of moving parts to Synthesis. The 1st is and this is kind of where we started as a company is as an intranet. So it's a central hub for firm-wide knowledge and information. Obviously it can be design technology standards and best practices policies, but you get into HR and marketing firm-wide communications. We integrate with systems like Deltek and Unet and Openasset to give people good access to employees and projects within the firm. So it's a very robust firmwide knowledge platform on the Internet side, we can go to the next one, Chris.

Last year we introduced AI Search. So this is kind of Part 2 of the Synthesis platform. Now we've always had search within the platform that was kind of a keyword search that would return results, but now we're able to tap into the vast majority of knowledge.

All of that vast knowledge we have in the platform, videos, posts, documents and pages to allow people to ask questions and get answers directly through AI search and then obviously provide links off to kind of supporting resources. So it's been a massive improvement. It's been very popular within our community. I think we're going to look a little bit at it today at Moody Nolan's instance of Synthesis, which they call The Mood, which is a great name. And then lastly, we sorry, we go to the next one.

We are in private data with Synthesis LMS. So earlier this year we formally added a learning management system or an LMS into Synthesis. People had been hacking and working around trying to turn Synthesis Intranet into an LMS for years.

There's some things you couldn't do in it around assignments and tracking and continuing education. So we've actually made this a formal part of the product. Now you can build courses, learning paths, assign those. We do continuing education credit, but it's all integrated into the same platform as the Intranet and then AI search lays over the top.

So if you're an end user you don't have to think, is this a course? Was this a lunch and learn? Is this a post? Is this documentation? You just ask your question and we find the best available knowledge and route it to you. So really that's part of our vision of being an integrated end-to-end knowledge and learning platform for AEC firms.

And with that, I'd like to pass it over to Moody Nolan to talk about what y'all are building.

Nick Bower: Thanks, Chris and Chris. My name is Nick Bower, I'm Director of Design Technology here at Moody Nolan. So I'm going to go through just a few quick slides and then we'll turn it over to Bryan Payne here in a in a minute or two to kind of demonstrate some of the things we've been working on tying together the process or the workflow of getting information and knowledge to our users when they need it.

Before we go into that, I just kind of want to give you a little bit of background on who Moody Nolan is and kind of walk through a little bit of the timeline of how we got to where we are with our engagement of KA and Guardian.

So Moody Nolan, we're architecture firm. We have 12 offices mostly throughout the Midwest, East Coast down into Texas. We are the largest African American owned architecture firm in the country and we do pride ourselves on being a very diverse firm in many different ways. We have 310 total staff, so we'll talk about that here in just a few minutes of why that's important. So Chris, could you go to the next slide for me, please?

And so in basically from 2020 until now, we basically doubled in size, right in combination with the pandemic. And with that came certain challenges and along with that came some very awesome awards. So we were the 2021 Architecture Firm Award winner through the AIA

You know, recognized from the architecture record and building design and construction. So go to the next slide because I want to talk through our timeline because I find this interesting.

So there's a lot going on here. So it's kind of busy, but there's a lot going on with this process. So I said that in 2020 during the pandemic, we basically doubled in size. So we went from 100 and some odd people, 150 people to 350 people basically within a year and a half. At the same time, we were also investigating an Intranet and so the timing of this was incredible. Our initial kickoff call with KA was February of 2020.

And in late February, I think it was like February 19th, literally two weeks later, every single person in our firm was home. So the acceleration of needing to get information to people very fast was it was quickly upon us.

So myself, Brian Alting on our team and a slew of other people, we all scurried around gathering content. We did not have a very formal intranet at that point. And then by August of 2020, we launched The Mood. And I note that that was in the Synthesis, the S5 live platform because that kind of made a difference on how we tackled a few things.

So I'll go through this quick. We immediately started the process to their new version, which is Synthesis 6, which is the new version that they have now. And with that came a lot of great things that allowed us to do more and get more information to people at our firm, including guides.

And that's kind of what we'll talk about here in just a few minutes, I put on there the P.I.G program because that was our first introduction to the Iconic and the Guardian team and that kind of set the stage for us to start kicking the tires on what Guardian was, what it meant to do that.

And then you'll see on there in 2023 we implemented this thing called the BIM Process Manual. The BIM Process Manual was a heavy lift. It's something that we've wanted to do forever and ever and ever and we could never find time to do it, nor could we ever find the correct implementation style or the correct place to host it.

But basically we wanted to start gathering all of our thoughts of what, what does it mean to do the process of BIM at Moody Nolan and how do we structure that and in steps Guardian, it was like perfect timing. So right after we launched the BIM process manual was our first meeting with Guardian. We met them at AU.

Bryan Payne fell in love with them immediately. I think he was very love with being able to, I don't know, passively shame people with memes. I think that's kind of what our big overall culture take is on that. I'll let him speak to that in a little bit. And then from there we started monitoring processes so we could really try to find the blind spots of things that we really wanted to focus on.

Fast forward, we started to roll the BIM process manual. Actually this is not this slide is not updated. I forgot to put the update slide, so you'll see a bunch of BIM process manuals. We'll fix it in post. So anyway, we started integrating our BIM process manual topics and pages directly to the forward facing Guardian pop-ups that come up some of those messaging things. So and then we're going to eventually start to tie that with AI search, which is what we're going to see a little bit today, so instead of drawing on, let's go to the next one.

All right. So we'll turn it over to Bryan Payne. He's going to talk a little bit about how we utilize some of this stuff and how it came to be. So go ahead, BP.

Bryan Payne: Yeah, thanks Nick. So again, I'm Bryan Payne, I'm a BIM Manager here at Moody Nolan and kind of the implementer of a lot of the Guardian aspects of what we use. So first and foremost, how do we bring information to the users? And I think Nick kind of already addressed it, it's through The Mood.

It's kind of, I mean it's overused, but it's kind of a single source of truth for us. Obviously we are more design tech, so we're looking really at kind of the BIM process manual and those things, but it is pretty much for everything that is internally facing to Moody Nolan exists on The Mood.

As Nick mentioned, we moved on. Kind of got to give a shout out to Nicole Powers if she's on the line here. She basically went through and curated the entire BIM process manual. A lot of it was pulled from previous iterations of The Mood.

But all kinds of white papers, any presentation videos we have were all kind of gathered and organized into different chapters and that though that information is now searchable on The Mood. So in kind of the case we're showing here, you know if someone's about to use the purge unused command.

Maybe they're not 100% familiar with it. They can search purge unused on The Mood will take you to the BIM process manual. Currently we have kind of a model maintenance area there, and in that particular page there's information about purge unused and things that we want to specifically call out.

Now the great thing that I think about with both Guardian and Synthesis is the ability to kind of customize it to the culture of your firm. And our firm is what we like to say is diverse by design. And I think diversity kind of gets overly politicized nowadays, but.

Essentially what it means is we want people with different backgrounds, different experiences, different ideas, and then we all bring that information together to create unique ideas and solutions.

So where that fits in here is that if we're going out of our way to find unique people, different people, why are we trying to present a learning system that is homogenized? People learn different ways.

Right. So we want to be able to provide them different opportunities to obtain that information. So some people can go to The Mood and search and get a PDF, look at that PDF, follow the step-by-step directions, no problem. Other people may appreciate the PDF, but they want to print it out.

Because it's something about the tactile aspect of it. They want to be able to touch it. They want to highlight it, make little notes that works better for them. Others want videos. Sometimes those videos can be 20 minutes, but others say, no, I need about 5 minutes short burst videos. So then, you know, maybe we can snip.

Those videos make them a little bit shorter for those groups. So what Synthesis allows us to do is basically create a page that has all those options there, and essentially that covers our bases to capture all those different learning groups.

If we can move on.

So on the flip side of that, you also have people who maybe don't do as well with searching and curating information. They are more into learning in the moment. So that is where I see Guardian coming into play.

I have equated Guardian before to DoorDash. You know, people who don't necessarily want to go out and search for information, they want it brought to them. So with that analogy, I think Guardian becomes the vehicle for that connection between our external kind of Mood interface.

And the internal aspects of Revit. So continuing with the Purge unused theme, if you were to use the Purge unused command in Revit, you'll get this pop-up. And really what this is doing is potentially dealing with multiple user types. You know, a lot of times we give presentations that might even cover the specific aspects of that pop-up.

Some users will go and then it maybe it's been a few months and maybe they forget. So this pop-up just reminds them. So yeah, we did talk about that. I need to make sure I do these things.

At the same time, you might have a few users that just didn't make it to that particular presentation, so this might actually be completely new for them. So what we're doing, if you can see in that snip, there is there are several instances of blue text and those are links.

That take you out to The Mood and it goes to that specific location that we just showed in the previous slide. So talks about purge unused and the nice thing about it is it not just to that specific page, we can also anchor it to that specific point on the page.

So you know on that model health check page. It might have six or seven topics, one of those being purged on use. If that happens further down on the page, we can anchor to that point. So when they do the link, it takes them to the page and it automatically scrolls down to the portion where a purge on use gets talked about.

All right. Next page please.

Nick Bower: Oh, the idea. I'll jump back in here. The idea that we currently have is that you know that part of Guardian is going to pop up is going to create the pop-up messaging.

And it is on them and they will click on it and they will go to The Mood. What we're going to eventually try to do is start to train around the idea of just because there is this little section on The Mood that covers this, that we've anchored you to, does not mean that there's not significantly more information that may.

They live in all of the other places and so this is where AI search comes into play with this. We currently are in beta testing phase for AI search. We have not flipped this on for our entire company yet. We're still populating content. We found that sometimes we have to kind of pre bake a little bit of content manipulate.

The wording to get things to show the exact way we want. But what we did in this one and Bryan, we can show this too. We do the live demonstration on a different subject is we were just like, OK, So what would it mean if someone clicked on that? They clicked on the link, it took them to the page section of the page for purging.

But what happens if they get curious and like, well, what else can I do with purging? And so, you know, how do I actually purge the model? And so that's where AI search comes in because it is excellent at scouring the internal intranet. So you know, you'll see the search summary. It gives them advice on how to do that, which phase it, you know, should be doing that sort of thing.

It will list the relevant people and it also pulls some of the all the other relevant documentation and where it found all that. Oh, and it footnotes all of it. So you can go to every bit of that. So there's nine, what, 9 references on there. So yeah, that's just a little bit on a search and we'll maybe we'll live demonstrate that here in a few minutes, I think.

Should be fine O next slide.

Bryan Payne: Yeah, so a little bit on just the Guardian side, how users are reacting to it since we've implemented it. And honestly, they love it. It's very common for us to receive emails or little notes saying how much they appreciate it.

Several of them are just appreciative of the memes. You know, we like to have fun with them. We try to make them funny and those are great. But the ones that I'm showing here, I think hit a little closer to the home. So we have an internal help desk system.

And generally, when we receive an e-mail from that system, it's about help, like something's going wrong, something's not working right. Can you help me set something up? Only since Guardian has been in play have we received messages like the one on the left there just saying hey.

You guys rock. This thing is great. We really appreciate it. And that is kind of reinforcing or affirming the value that we saw with Guardian when we first saw it at AU and now.

All of our users are also seeing it, so that's really great. The one on the right is the Teams message that we received. There was an issue that came up on a particular project and it ended up requiring us to create a command prompt to cover that specific issue.

So once that was implemented, you know, maybe a day later I received a message directly that said thank you, this is great, that made my day. So again, those are the type of things that we really appreciated because that lets them know that they appreciate the time that we put in to put this together, so.

That being said, I think we'll kind of do just like a quick demonstration of one of our tools so.

Chris Shafer: That's right, Bryan, if you want to go ahead and share your screen and show how all this happens in reality.

Bryan Payne: So I'm assuming we're all good. Everyone can see my screen.

All right. So I'll just make it quick and simple. So we'll do a situation where we're trying to import CAD. So for us, importing CAD is not the best. It's something we would prefer for you to link. So again, the first thing that happens if we get the pop up again, we are very meme heavy.

We like comedy in our design tech group and overall as a firm there is an acceptance of the humor. So we try to get funny memes when they pop up. The other side of that is also to hopefully kind of disarm any aggressiveness that people might feel like we don't want individuals to think that it's an us versus them or that we're trying to be Big Brother.

We want to keep it light and understand that it's just all of us working together to make sure the models are good and clean and we can do good work, so.

Once that pops up again, we have, you know, a little blurb talking about what we would like you to be aware of when utilizing that particular command. But then, yeah.

Nick Bower: BP This one only comes up if it's done in a work-shared file, correct? Is that that's the way we have that one set up, right? So there's a little bit of nuance to that one, is that right?

Bryan Payne: I believe that is correct.

Nick Bower: Yeah, so you can import CAD files or no, yeah, you can import and explode CAD files in a locally shared file, but not a Workshare file. So that goes into the nuance of it, right? Like that's what one of the things we really love about Guardian is getting into the nuance of it. It's like it's not a blanket statement of authoritarianism. It's like, no, we just want you to guide. We don't want to guide you.

Little bit into the right direction on how you want to do this. So sorry to interrupt, go ahead.

Nick Bower: There we go.

Bryan Payne: Standalone, it would be accepted. So from here again, if you need additional information or you're not 100% sure what we're referencing here, if you click on The Mood hyperlink, it will take you right to The Mood specifically.

To our section involving linking versus importing. It talks about the pros and cons of linking, importing, and then we also have a video of a presentation that I did probably a year and a half ago now.

Specifically on this topic. And then we also took that video and we created chapters so that again, if you have the users who don't want to listen to the whole thing, they're just interested in a specific subject, they can quickly get to that area and maybe it's only 5 minutes of their time.

So again, multiple options here depending on what you need. Can you just read the text and understand what we're talking about? Do you need to see the video? How much of the video are you interested in? So we're trying to again capture as many different learning typologies as we can.

And just as another example, we can try to look at the beta of the AI search and let's say want Best practices or linking versus importing?

See what it shows.

Nick Bower: Everyone, hold their breath. Chris, hold your breath.

Bryan Payne: All right, so again, essentially it's doing a lot of the same things that the original page that it's referencing comes from, but it's just organizing all of it in kind of easily readable summaries.

Right.

Or talks about things to pay attention to with linking, things to pay attention to with importing.

Kind of our best practices for things.

I think it even talks about it.

Chris Shafer: And out of curious, sorry, Bryan, out of curiosity, all this information that's being displayed now has been generated from your own work, correct? This isn't sourcing anything.

Bryan Payne: Right. This is all internal, yeah. So these are the references that it's pulling from. Different again, whether it's a page somewhere on The Mood or if it's a PDF that's on The Mood, it can actually go through and search the PDF.

Chris Shafer: Nice.

Bryan Payne: Sometimes it'll also go through the video because the videos are being automatically receiving transcripts.

Nick Bower: Transcribed here.

Bryan Payne: And then again, it still references who in our firm you could contact, which is again, these are all members of the design tech team if they have further questions. So again, that's it's just fantastic. I think it's great.

And then what we've started doing on pretty much all of our command prompts is adding the option to contact help desk. So at any point in time, if you know going to The Mood and seeing this pop-up still does not get you the answers that you're looking for, or maybe you just have additional questions if you click on that particular pop-up.

It'll open up an Outlook interface and you can just ask your question and it comes directly to our help desk system. So pretty slick.

Chris Shafer: So you had a user, a couple of users here who use that help desk link just to send you an e-mail saying I like this. That's I'm it's amazing.

Bryan Payne: Correct.

All right. So again, it's kind of a short presentation, but that is the nuts and bolts.

Nick Bower: Did you initialize? Did you already do the? Did you already do the purge unused?

Bryan Payne: I have not.

Nick Bower: During the session, because that one's a different one. Yeah, I don't know if anyone paid attention, but on our purge unused, that's only one per session, right? So it doesn't pop up every time you hit purge unused. It's only once. So like you could theoretically close this and then open purge unused and then go right into it. But.

If you go to The Mood page for this one, this is a good example of the anchor point I believe because this is a very long page. You can see on the right where the scroll bar is and so we were able to anchor it directly to this purge unused section which has got just you know a little bit of information that we've decided that is.

For this and you know, eventually maybe we'll put a video attached to it as well, or just the chapter of that or something like that.

Chris Shafer: Out of curiosity is now that you've had both Synthesis and Guardian operational for a while now, it sounds like your employees are really enjoying and respect the work that you guys have done and in helping them educated, how about your firm leadership? How have they responded to all of this?

Bryan Payne: Let Nick answer that. He's the director of technology.

Nick Bower: Well, I think, yeah. So I think the, you know, from the intranet side of it is, is it's, it's a lot more of a broad scope, right. So that you're covering everything of what it means to be an employee at Moody Nolan. So from that standpoint, yes, leadership has really embraced you know what KA is offering as far as you know The Mood.

The Guardian part is a little more niche in that it is very much you know Revit production focused but we do get a lot of really great feedback when we go and talk to them, explain why it is we're doing what we're doing and how we're doing it and making sure it's not making sure that it aligns with our culture that that we've built at Moody Nolan and that sort of thing. So yeah, it's been positive across the board on both aspects.

Chris Shafer: Thanks. Have you? And one of the reasons why we developed Guardian was to really prevent some of these misuse of a lot of these Revit commands like explode cad. There's a proper use of using it and there's an improper use of purge on use, right?

When we see things being used improperly, that's when things go off the rails and you have setbacks in your project. Have you seen improvements on those fronts of those people utilizing Revit more effectively?

Nick Bower: Definitely with sync traffic controller for sure. Yeah, sync traffic controller, game changer. Go ahead BP.

Bryan Payne: That would say all, yeah.

Yeah. And I would also say, I mean obviously on the exploding of CAD because we have not, we went through different phases with that particular command. So again, first we started out in kind of the monitor phase and it was in that phase that we discovered that we were exploding at a higher clip than we thought possible.

So because of that, we then said, OK, well, we need to say something about this. And that's when we moved to guide and kind of said, hey, let's, let's not do this. Let's make sure we're doing these things for the right reasons.

And again, another nice tool with Guardian is that you can have it send you an e-mail anytime someone uses that command. And then we were getting inundated with emails, so we were noticing that people still weren't really coming off that explode wagon. So then we just moved it to prevent. So now it just doesn't happen anymore, which is great. So on that side it's.

Christopher Parsons: Do you still see attempted explodes even though it's on prevent?

Bryan Payne:

I have to double check. I think it might show up as they activated the commands, but it just doesn't go through.

Christopher Parsons: OK. Yeah.

How do you guys, if somebody new joins Moody Nolan, when did they find out that Guardian exists? Like do you onboard them? Do you tell them this is coming, you're going to get these messages or the first time they try and purge unused content that they get this warning and now?

Nick Bower: Yeah.

Christopher Parsons: Like, oh, what's this?

Bryan Payne: You take that Nick or you want me to take it?

Nick Bower: It's that is not currently a part of our onboarding process. So there is probably a bit of a jarring experience the first time they go to hit purge unused. So which maybe isn't a bad thing. I'm not entirely, I'm not. I'm 5050 on where I stand on that.

Christopher Parsons: Right.

Nick Bower: But.

Bryan Payne: Well, I think on the other side of it is, you know, outside of the command prompts, which kind of you know this prompt pop up when you're utilizing something specific. We do have other aspects of Guardian that happen just when you open a file, it asks you to choose what workset you're going to start with.

So they should be initially introduced to it in something that's not as jarring maybe as the command prompts and maybe that starts providing questions. We do have an entire page on The Mood that goes over all the different aspects of Guardian that we currently have active at Moody Nolan.

Chris Shafer: Bryan, you sort of hinted on this earlier, but what is your process of elevating Revit commands to a level of protection in which users will get a command message?

Bryan Payne: So usually we start out with, we probably go to guide, you know, if it's something that we're really kind of interested in and making sure people can see that you want to be careful when accessing this particular tool.

After guide, if we are having serious concerns about it, we will also add that e-mail notification because that lets us know close to real time that those particular items are being used and we actually probably have one tool.

It's kind of right in that bull's eye right now. We're getting a lot of emails on the utilization of it. So it's pretty much at that point where we're starting to think, OK, we might want to go from guide to prevent because it's still happening at a higher clip than we would we would like.

Chris Shafer: Nice. Nice. Go ahead, Chris.

Christopher Parsons: I was just gonna say you're escalating kind of slowly. I'm curious, like just as a order of magnitude, like how many guide things do you think you have? How many prevent things do you think you have? Do you have more idea? Like do you ever have to like do you have ideas for like memes you already have found but you really probably shouldn't create a guide because it's not necessary, but you kind of want to because you kind of want to get the meme out. Like just talk about your like your workflow.

Bryan Payne: Yeah, so with regards to command, obviously there are there's a lot of commands that you could potentially provide guidance and prevention to. We try to work on the less is more approach. So like dealing with purge unused, it only happens once per session and part of that is due to just the nature of the command itself, once you hit purge on use, a lot of times you have to do it like three or four more times before it actually purges everything that you want. So we don't want it every single time you have to do that, that you're getting that pop up fresh.

Christopher Parsons: Mm.

Bryan Payne: Other items we want to inform you every single time. So importing CAD every single time you try to do that, we want to let you know. And I think the fact that when you touch maybe all the other 30 commands that it may be monitored or guided on, that there isn't a pop-up that lets you know that the times, the rare times that we do apply a pop-up, that there's a level of importance there.

I think if every time you selected something there was a pop-up, you're losing the attention, I think of the user. They're just going to start closing it and not even looking at it. So we're very intentional about keeping those commands to a limited scope at this point, and then if we decide to add an additional one, we kind of want to go in a slower process.

Christopher Parsons: So you're monitoring first, you know, and then to make sure there's actually a problem. Then you go to guide with an e-mail maybe, and then you go to prevent.

Nick Bower: Yep, I think we only have one prevent, right? I think it's only one.

Bryan Payne: Right. And then we right now only explode CAD is our only prevent. And then I guess just as a kind of a peek behind the curtain like I've gone through and I've like identified certain commands that we might have an interest in providing some type of support to and it's just a couple things like one, you know what the command is and then obviously one of the most important things, what's the meme going to be? And then after that it's the content.

So that's the other side like we want to make sure that on the move there is some content there that we can push this information to and if we don't have it yet, then that becomes an action item for us that we need to go through, create this and then we can start potentially rolling that out and again it would start as a guided command.

Nick Bower: Right. We won't create a guided messaging pop up for Guardian unless we have backing documentation kind of firmed up for it.

Chris Shafer: That's really nice to hear. Yeah, you want to make sure that you have the resources to actually help people and not just tell them no, right? The whole goal here is to improve their capabilities, not just to slap them on the wrist.

As an extension of that, when you're creating the memes, do you have internal meme contests or is it just Bryan and Nick?

Bryan Payne: I mean, I'm a little bit authoritarian on that, I think.

Nick Bower: We're not authoritarian in our command or monitoring, but we are with the meme usage, so you got to pick and choose your battles a little bit.

Chris Shafer: Yeah. I was just going to make a joke is you know you retain the creative process to yourselves here.

Nick Bower: That's right. That's right.

Christopher Parsons: One of the things we talked about kind of in preparing for this session is trying to align a new tech, any new technology, but specifically Guardian and the combination of that with Synthesis to your firm's culture. And I'm curious like what kind of what is Moody Nolan's culture and like how have you made design choices for the way you've implemented these two products to have it map up with your culture?

Nick Bower: Gosh, you ask such difficult questions. You're so good at asking questions that make me think. I think Bryan touched on it a little bit previously that you know that we kind of, you know, our culture is to bring in diverse backgrounds and to allow people to be themselves and we do so many different diversity of projects too, that there's not one-size-fits-all for every process.

So we can't create, we can't create any process that can't be, you know, expandable for whatever project type it is or scalable. So we try to do that for most of this as well. That's why we don't do it a bunch of guided commands.

That's why we kind of tailor some of some of that and The Mood is a reflection of that as well. So the things I'm interested in seeing, you know as this evolves, you know based on how we kind of built this and maybe where it's going is to see what kind of other things we can add to it out-of-the-box things like how do we, how do we really start to enable like AI? How do we really start to bring AI search more forward-facing into, you know, some of these guided messages?

How do we, how do we just, yeah, just how do we bring that more, you know, ad hoc on demand type of things that people need and how do we, how can we try to facilitate that? That's what I'm very interested in is kind of marrying all of this even more.

Christopher Parsons: I'm glad you went there. I mean, one of the things I've been thinking about is, I mean a lot because we're building an LMS and you guys are well aware we're building one is kind of when do you kind of proactively invest in learning and development with somebody?

Let them know like this is a thing you might encounter. You need to have this context versus when are you trying to catch somebody for the first time in the flow of work, like the first time they use this command. Like how are you thinking about that kind of proactive versus kind of reactive knowledge and learning work?

Nick Bower: Yeah, you know, that's something that, you know, we've talked about internally a little bit is how do you? It's like threading a needle. How do you? How do you get?

And not knowing exactly how this is a good difficult question and not knowing how LMS is exactly going to shake out both with how you guys are implementing and how we're going to implement it makes it a little bit of a different. It's kind of a hypothetical, but I can see a scenario where we're utilizing Guardian to track and to.

Christopher Parsons: Sure.

Nick Bower: Kind of informs some decisions that get made on what type of specific types of mentoring or training are needed, right? So like you know if we start monitoring, I know one of the ones is the one Bryan was saying earlier, like right click and hiding.

Christopher Parsons: Yeah, yeah.

Nick Bower: A link, right? There's a bunch of different ways to hide a link in Revit. That's not one of the good ones for many reasons. We can monitor that and we can see who is doing that and how often they're doing it. It doesn't necessarily mean we're gonna come down and shake our finger at them and say you stop doing that, but what it could tell us is that we have a, there's a specific demographic whether it's like a young professional that's doing that and we can then say, well we have a EP summit, emerging professionals summit or we have an emerging professionals meeting, maybe that's a topic that we can do for that. So it's a little more organic right now.

Christopher Parsons: Mhm.

Nick Bower: Does that inform a course that's in the LMS? Maybe. I don't know yet.

Christopher Parsons: Yeah, that's fascinating. Using the actual usage to help determine a learning and development agenda. I love that.

Chris Shafer: And it'd be great if all this could be connected seamlessly, right? It sees the users, what level they are, knows the training that's required and pushes that directly to them in a little more proactive way.

Christopher Parsons: Yeah. I mean, I think that's one of the things that I, you know, at our conference I said a line that I deeply believe that in the next five years, more will change for AEC knowledge and learning that has changed in the last 25. And I think that's partly AI, that's partly generational. That's kind of a lot of technology like this starting to work more closely together.

And I think, Chris, your vision is right. It's like we know a lot about a user. We know their usage. We know how we want things done. Like can we close that loop and just make this more automated and get delivery to people when they need it and not have people have to go through 20 hours of video if they only need you know, 45 minutes, you know, there's like so many ways that we can get better, I think at L&D.

Chris Shafer: That's exactly right.

Well, with that being said, is I can see there's quite a lively chat.

But I just want to make sure that we open it up. If there are any questions that people want to ask, Nick, Bryan or myself or Chris, you know, feel free to go ahead and raise your hand.

Nick Bower: I saw that Susan might have some that I don't know if she's answered them behind the scenes, but I saw there was a couple that she had kind of emoji that are more tailored towards KA being able to speak to some of those things. I don't know. Let's go back through and look.

Chris Shafer: And Susan, if any of these, you may have answered it in the chat. If any of these may be relevant to the broader audience, feel free to bring the question to the table.

Susan Strom: Yeah, I'll throw one out there that was a little earlier on, just about how getting people to a specific spot in a video is like you record a 30 minute how to or something or you have a 30-minute CAD meeting or bIM meeting or something where you go over lots of details like how do people find Minute 15:15, where you talk specifically about the why behind, you know, one of your rules.

Nick Bower: Yeah, I can talk a little bit about there's a couple different ways to tackle it and we've done a few different ways of doing it. One that's kind of newer and I know Brian Alting is on if he's still on here, he does this a lot.

Is when we have a pre-recorded session through Teams, it actually kind of automatically throws it up to stream now and so you can then use some of the editing tools in there and allow it to generate some of the chapters before you then bring it back down. So you can do that a little bit, but then natively inside of Synthesis, it's actually really nice how it works.

The caveat for a lot of that though is that it has to be. I think it has to be. Correct me if I'm wrong, Chris, has to be in a library. No, if you do it natively, we've only done it in. We've only.

Christopher Parsons: No.

Um, Yep.

Nick Bower: I've only done it so.

Christopher Parsons: So if it's not a library, that means you can put it directly in a post or a page or a lesson in the LMS, yeah.

Nick Bower: Yeah. So you know here's the you know we did this one thing on this thing on ceiling in Bluebeam and some LOD stuff but it's very easy to add chapters like it's you guys have made it so intuitive. I just love the way that you guys have done this and I think it's incredibly simple, you know, just being able to go to the exact point of that time stamp, right. So you know 8:11, right, you create your you know time stamp and if you get it wrong you just keep going through and it'll find that you add your title, add your chapter and away you go. So I think that part is really nice. So yeah.

Christopher Parsons: Yeah. And then, you know, Susan put something in the chat. Obviously we can search to a specific point in the AI search and that'll only get cited. And then you can copy those chapter links and just message them or put them in a link to a post. So yeah, that we put, we believe very heavily in the video being a huge part of the future of knowledge management. It's a lot faster to create content in many cases and as is a good, you know, people can watch the clicks versus read about the clicks and curious to see what that means for our kind of integration with Guardian over time. You know, as right now it's pretty simple, like a link you can link to a chapter, but what else could we do? I don't know.

Nick Bower: Oh, maybe we might have to kick the tires on creating a link directly to that chapter of the video so it pulls directly up to it so they don't even be taken to the page. I think that's one of the things we might test to see, but one of the things they've added and anyone that's on Synthesis 6 would know this is that they have, you know.

Christopher Parsons: Yeah, yeah, that'd be great.

Nick Bower: Kind of anchor links that you can do and these are literally just copy the link to that section and that would be your URL. So it's very, very user-friendly. So it's one of the things we love about it.

Christopher Parsons: How do you maintain the content in that BIM manual? I mean, you talked about the massive process to build the BIM process manual and how do you keep that up to date and fresh and not just have that kind of get out of date?

Nick Bower: That's a great question. It's a lot. It's a lot with any content, right? Like it's, it's, you know, it's a lot so it's just it's. I don't know. You just you find sometimes you don't even find things that are that are old or outdated. Some things get brought up in a help desk ticket and you say, oh, we have this thing on this and you go look at it. It's like, that's not right. That's been that's changed or whatever. You know the other thing too is Guides back when Synthesis 6 when we live with that guides were extremely powerful and they are extremely powerful as AI search goes on. I'm curious to see if like more I don't know community less searching happens where it's less about a structure of finding things and more about the searching of finding things that might be generational.

But to answer your question, it's a little bit of everything, right? Like you know, we'll get an update from Avail from our buddies at Avail or you know, Guardian or Ideate or any of our partners that are like that and you know new feature gets added, we have to go track it down.

Sometimes it lives in multiple locations like it doesn't just live in the BIM process manual. Sometimes we have to go update very menial stuff like LOD or we make a small subtle change to our BIM execution plan and then that has to get you know, it's just a lot. It just it is what it is, but it is beneficial at the end. So we just try to stay on top of it.

Bryan Payne: Yeah, I mean, I think I would add on to that is that's kind of why being able to link information from Guardian directly to The Mood becomes so powerful because the BIM process manual is constantly growing and evolving. So as it continues to get bigger, it makes it even more difficult for people to potentially find some of the information that they want. So being able to tie it directly to a command or a tool through Guardian, it's just great.

Christopher Parsons: It's harder to browse to the information, so they're either using Guardian or you kind of said search as like kind of maybe two ways to get them to what they need in the moment they need it, yeah.

Chris Shafer: Yeah, that's great.

Christopher Parsons: How do you think, can I ask one more question, Chris, or are we out? I kind of asked about future of L&D, I want to maybe ask just like from a different direction that's not LMS centric, but as you think about new emerging professionals coming into Moody Nolan and kind of how you trained the last generation of new folks versus how you're thinking about training these folks, like how are you thinking about learning and development for you know that next generation of folks that are entering the firm?

Nick Bower:  think it, I don't even know if it's generational at this point. I think there has been a shift in how you in consumption of information regardless of generation in the profession. So I, you know it used to be you would do you know four-day intensive fundamentals training and you would go into a room and you would do this and then it became a little bit more, you know, online instructor led kind of thing.

And you know, you could get into some custom stuff and you know you're taking people out of work for multiple days like you're, you know, 34 hours, 36 hours, 40 hours, whatever it is.

I think my take or my gut tells me that the future of this is bite-sized, consumable, ad hoc, on-demand stuff. Like you search for how to do a wall and there's, I don't know, a three-minute video of how to do a wall.

And if they continue to keep asking questions, then the information builds upon that. And maybe that's part of, you know, I know you didn't say specifically LMS, but maybe that is part of an LMS kind of thing where it's capturing that at a user level. I don't know.

Christopher Parsons: Yeah, but I think the philosophy technology aside, right. And I see Steve made a comment about four day training. It's like I feel like so much of the philosophy used to be just in case knowledge. We're going to tell everybody, somebody they may run into one day just in case it comes up versus more like just in time knowledge. Now it's like they're not going to remember it anyway three weeks from now or three months from now. So let's deliver to point of need and I think that's what you guys are.

Nick Bower: What is? What's your take on it, Chris?

Christopher Parsons: In one minute, yeah, I mean I think I agree with every, I agree with everything that you said. I think that it's more shorter, bite size and maybe for a reason you didn't say which I think if you take it to the content management side, you know for you and Bryan and your team these long huge videos that people have to go through or long, those are harder to maintain too because technology is moving so fast.

So I think modular and bite-sized is easier to consume, but it's also easier to create and maintain. So I think for all those reasons, that's the trajectory that we'll keep going on and easier to deliver through Guardian and the flow of work.

Chris Shafer: Yeah. Thank you, Chris.

Nick Bower: I know some of the things that were talked about it at KA Connect, you know some of the things I know I thought I saw Jim Martin on here. I know some of the things they're doing is very fascinating where they're allowing AI to start to do some of some of the legwork where you know you have limited resources internally that you can do these sorts of things. You might as well let AI do it. I would love to find some time to be able to take, you know, an expert interview, just something they talked about which I found fascinating expert interview, but like then take the transcript and feed it through like copilot and allow it to create a curated video that then we could rechapterize that's based on that sort of expert knowledge base, I don't know. It's there's a lot of fun stuff that’s coming with AI I think.

Christopher Parsons: And using data to get people the stuff, like being intelligent about knowing what the point of need is versus the reason you're getting this is because you've changed jobs or you're working on a new project type or new project phase. It's like, no, like we know from the data available to us, you've never done this before, you know, and now you're doing this thing. Maybe you need a different level of reinforcement than someone that's done it before, so lots of opportunity.

Chris Shafer: Exactly. Just in time training. Perfect snippets based on what you're doing, based off of your history and limited interruptions as well, right? Just finding the perfect balance.

Christopher Parsons: It's a lot like a traffic control, I think, Chris, you know, it's like you've got all this knowledge, you've got all these people, you're trying to land the plane right every single time versus just forcing everyone, you know, down the same path because that's the most efficient thing.

Chris Shafer: On that note, we're going to end with that little bit of wisdom there. So thank you, Chris. Big thanks to both Nick and Bryan for, you know, sharing how they've utilized both Guardian and Knowledge Architecture and appreciate everyone who's attended today's webinar.

Christopher Parsons: Yeah, thank you Moody Nolan. Thank you Guardian. Thanks everyone.

Chris Shafer: Thanks everyone. Bye.

Bryan Payne: Thanks for inviting us. Appreciate it.

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