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Leadership Edge

The Why Walks Out the Door

đź“° Joe is one year from retirement, and what he knows about every hospital your firm has built isn't written down anywhere. Thirteen voices in Arc 3 on what a project archive is worth, and the experiment I'd run on your last five projects.

The Why Walks Out the Door

If your most experienced architect retired on Friday, what could your firm still find on Monday?

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Who this newsletter is for: Especially relevant if you lead a firm, run BIM, or manage design technology, and you know the project archive is worth something but can't say how to get at it.

Summary

This was the first episode of Arc 3 in The Next AEC Tech Stack (TRXL 246). The first two arcs were about tools. This one is about what the tools leave behind: every model, drawing set, spec and email thread your firm has produced, still sitting on a server years after the project closed out. Every company in this arc says it can turn that into an asset, so I asked them all the same thing. What is it worth, and why does so little of it get used again?

The answers worth your time were the ones that named what is hard: a pile of files isn't knowledge, the reasoning behind a decision is the part nobody records, and the people who hold it are the ones closest to retirement.

This series brought to you by
Graitec Graitec provides AEC software, training, and expert support to help architects, engineers, and construction teams design, build, and manage projects more effectively.
With support from
AVAIL AVAIL's content management system (CMS) helps architecture and engineering teams find, manage, and reuse their Revit, AutoCAD, Civil 3D, and other technical content in one place.
Arc 3 presenting sponsor
Speckle Speckle makes design data actually usable across projects, so your team can trust it, own it, act on it, and make better decisions faster.

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Free and paid subscribers are getting the same full newsletter for this series. Normally the full edition of Leadership Edge is a paying-member benefit. For The Next AEC Tech Stack it isn't: every edition goes out complete to everyone on the list, free accounts included. Graitec and AVAIL funded the series, and Speckle presents Arc 3, so the industry could actually use it.

If someone forwarded this to you, sign up free and the rest of the series lands in your inbox as it publishes. TRXL+ members also get the ad-free feed, the full back catalog, and all the content that goes back behind the paywall when we return to our regular schedule following this series.
Catch the full episode

What's Inside

  • What a firm's history is worth. Marty Rozmanith said a lawyer's old cases keep their value for a whole career. Why haven't an architect's?
  • Pile versus asset. Aaron Vorwerk called most firm archives a pile of stuff that's not well understood. What turns a pile into something a person can use?
  • The why. Randall Stevens said firms keep a record of what got done and lose why it was decided. Can that get captured while people work?
  • Clean data first? Theodoros Galanos said getting your data right is a war you can't win. What does he tell firms to do instead?
  • Small firms. Roderick Bates asked what a firm with six bathroom renovations is supposed to train on.
  • Who pays for it. Chris Razzell split his own answer between an angel and a devil. Where did he land?

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