Skill up

Skills assessment

David Morley Architects has partnered with KnowledgeSmart and Evolve Consultancy to identify gaps in its team’s CAD and BIM expertise and provide the targeted training needed to raise benchmarks across the firm.

Ask anyone at David Morley “I was very pleased to see that DMA Architects (DMA) about the was already a good MicroStation shop, so firm’s design philosophy and upgrading to Bentley Architecture for it’s likely they will talk pas- our first BIM project was a natural prosionately about introducing new methods, gression,” he says. ideas and products into their designs in order to ensure that each building compo- First steps in BIM nent solves more than one problem. The first project was the building of the

For example, in the firm’s offices on the new Medium Secure Unit at St Bernard’s fringes of London’s Clerkenwell district, Hospital for the West London Mental DMA has incorporated a large ‘living Health Trust. wall’ into the office courtyard. As a multi-building campus project, the

Incorporating a layer of plants grown design called for the demolition of one in super-absorbent rockwool and building to accommodate the construcwatered via a computerised hydroponic tion of an entirely new one, which in turn irrigation system, this green wall softens needed to integrate with a pre-existing the working environment by adding building, with the goal of creating a new, nature to an urban space, while simulta- self-contained campus. neously cooling the computer server Delivered using a P21+ partnering room. That reduces energy consumption agreement, the project team included and increases network uptime. It’s beau- Kier as the main contractor with DMA tiful, functional and efficient. for design and AECOM for all engineering work, including structures, civil, Rethinking process M&E, acoustics and public health. Extending this ‘let’s make every input “We went ‘all-in’ with BIM at a very count’ approach to the wider design pro- early stage of the project,” says Banks. cess, DMA recently introduced BIM work- “Kier has a dedicated BIM group ready to flows with the aim of making design and kick off every new project, so we were analysis better, faster and cheaper. happy to be guided by them.”

In this way, the firm With the whole team on hoped to extend design periods while maintaining project delivery targets. That kind of change isn’t ‘‘ Upgrading software without board and in agreement, there was no ‘testing phase’ for the BIM adoption. The team just dived easy and doesn’t come upgrading the straight in. While this was without challenges, so software users’ quite acceptable to those DMA recruited a seasoned BIM expert to lead the transition. skills is a recipe for rejection building the BIM model, other team members – who were more used to Enter Adrian Banks, who joined DMA in 2010 from the Billard Leece Partnership (BLP) watching drawings develop over time – were left a little nervous at the lack of visible deliver’’ in Australia. There, he had worked exten- ables. sively with Bentley Systems’ “There was nothing – until there was MicroStation Triforma – the forerunner everything,” says Banks, explaining, to Bentley Architecture and Bentley “Until the model was nearing compleAECOsim. tion, there were no drawings for the pro-

On his arrival at DMA, Banks was ject leaders to review.” happy to stick to familiar territory when To help counter their concerns and ease it came to technology. some of the tensions, DMA split its team into groups dedicated to BIM modelling, spec writing and 2D details production.

Measuring success So what did the team learn in the process? According to Banks, a key takeaway was the necessity of investing in training to improve adoption.

“Upgrading the software without upgrading the users’ skills is a recipe for rejection. Before we could ask the design team to believe in the new BIM workflows we planned to implement, we first had to demonstrate our belief in them by investing in training,” he says.

In fact, DMA does a lot of training as standard practice. Working with the team from specialists Evolve Consultancy, DMA’s architects are able to attend oneday training courses on an as-needed basis.

In addition, each month, Evolve Consultancy spends a day in DMA’s offices focusing on key aspects of the CAD and BIM workspaces they maintain. This work is supplemented by DMA’s own inhouse training sessions.

As always with training, return on investment (ROI) is never easy to measure. This is why, after the first few years working with BIM, DMA went in search of a skills analysis service in order to assess progress to date and to ensure that future skills development training was targeted at identified areas of need. Here, the firm picked KnowledgeSmart as its provider.

DMA started with KnowledgeSmart in 2015, at first using only its online skills assessment services to assess new staff. With positive and reliable results, the firm soon decided to assess all staff, apart from those partners who spend little to no time in the CAD and BIM environment. In total, 47 people took the MicroStation Fundamentals test, returning an average score of 70% – a strong benchmark for the practice.

Digging a little deeper, the firm found that scores were spread fairly evenly between 45% at the low end to 100% at the

top end – and, at the same time, unearthed some surprising findings.

For a start, some more confident team members expected to perform better in the test than they actually did, while others who expected to underperform actually exceeded expectations. This indicates that confidence is not a reliable guide to an individual’s real-life aptitude with a technology.

Second, those who responded quickly to the assessment invitation tended to perform better in the test than those that procrastinated, suggesting that hesitation may be a useful indicator of a lack of capability.

Other patterns were identified across the practice hierarchy at DMA: associates typically scored higher than the benchmark, while architects and senior architects were more likely to be in line with it. Those who performed below average were likely to be associate directors at the firm at the top of the hierarchy and Part One students at the bottom. Part Two students, meanwhile, performed better than their Part One counterparts, but still fell a little below the average.

“These broad-brush assessments are interesting to play with, but the real data crunching provides the most value,” says Banks. “We are now using the specific results from each assessment to identify weak spots in individuals and, together with Evolve Consultancy, we have planned a series of two-hour training ‘sprints’ to fill those skills gaps.”

Allowing itself a year to complete its benchmark-raising training plan, DMA intends to invite the whole team to reassessment after 12 months. It anticipates that targeted training based on informed needs will make its budget go further. This, in turn, is forecast to provide significant ROI on the annual KnowledgeSmart subscription fees and release additional funds. These will go towards rolling out a limited assessment plan for 3D and AECOsim users after the MicroStation Fundamentals programme is complete.

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