Driving innovation - 4 lessons learned, 3 months in.

The WGE Mechanical team kicked off our 2019 Innovation Training Plan back in February to upskill our team in new digital engineering tools. The intent of this training is to enable our team to continue to deliver great designs for our clients as technology rapidly shifts. Three months in, and having now thoroughly covered Revit fundamentals, here's what we've learned so far...

 1.     Momentum is key: Don't cancel sessions. After the second session, we really started making progress. The content needs to remain fresh in people's minds as you move forward. Cancelling fortnightly sessions can massively delay progress if you don't prioritize it. Senior management support is key.

2.    Stick to the training content: We had a mix of people from Revit novices to advanced users. Often, advanced users would derail training sessions discussing complex features about a certain function. We learned quickly to stop people going down these rabbit holes as it confused and disheartened beginners, scaring them from trying the simpler tasks they were asked to do. I learned to bring back those conversations in terms of the purpose of the training and if it wasn’t relevant to help explain the content, that conversation was parked for another time. Revit is a reasonably complex software with vast functionality so it's important when starting out to break it down into small, manageable components that people can digest without becoming overwhelmed. 

3.     Accountability: Set tutorials, track progress and hold people accountable for not completing assigned tutorials from each session. This is particularly important for senior staff who have the least amount of free time for training. It is important that they are held accountable as more junior staff will look up to them and are more likely to complete their tutorials if their peers are keeping on top of the training material too.

4.    Feedback: After a few sessions I started asking people how they were finding the tutorials, content, etc. I learned a lot from those quick 30-second feedback sessions and it was great for gauging how engaged, encouraged or disheartened the group was feeling. I subsequently tweaked the sessions in terms of pace and detail on the back of that feedback.

 One positive we've noticed already is people are starting to ask better questions than before. Questions like, "Why do we do this task manually when we could do it much more effectively and efficiently using Revit function xx" or "Since X & Y are linked in Revit why can we use it to automatically check Z" The answer to most of these questions is "Yes, we should!" I'm confident as we progress into more complex parts of Revit, including add-ins like Dynamo, ideas will organically grow and improve processes.

 This week we move onto Navisworks and clash detection. Except for 2-3 engineers in our group, this will be completely new content to most of our group so I'm sure we'll have some new lessons learned in another 6-8 weeks time.