A Case Study on How Expertise and Skills can be Leveraged Within an Architectural Practice
This webinar is part of the RAIC 2023 Conference on Architecture, now available to stream!
Topics: The Practice and Business of Architecture
Length: 1 hour | What's Included: Video, Quiz, and Certificate of Completion
Do you know what skills you have in your organization, and are you leveraging what you have effectively? Successful firms find the right balance of staff and skillsets and match them with the needs of their projects. But how do you keep track of the firm’s staff members, each with a different skillset, and the firm’s projects, each requiring a variety of expertise? This case study lecture will review Diamond Schmitt Architects’ innovative approach to resource management; an issue all architectural offices struggle to perfect but is rarely discussed openly between firms. This case study presentation will outline how DSA designed a system to collect and analyze the skills and experience of its architectural staff, and how it used the data to improve project staffing and skills training, and to measure professional growth.
DSA recently experienced a period of rapid growth, and at the same time invested heavily in staff training, particularly in Design Technologies. With so many new staff members and newly developed skills, the firm realized it no longer had an accurate account of its staff knowledge base. How could the staffing committee match architects to project needs if they did not know the current skillset of each staff member? How could the firm more effectively focus its training?
This session will begin by identifying the advantages of tracking your staff’s talent and will discuss which aspects of your collective knowledge base are the most vital to understand. The session will further cover how DSA went about collecting the data and how we transformed it into useful information for the staffing committee, management, and the staff members themselves. The second part of the session will explore the multitude of applications for the skills and experience information. DSA developed a series of customized dashboards to allow management to analyze the surveyed information and gain valuable insight about the type of staff available for complex projects and where training was needed to fill knowledge gaps. Perhaps the most important application the session will share is the value to the firm’s staff members. In a market where firms compete to recruit and retain top talent, having a tool for staff to measure their own professional advancement is an advantage.
The most valuable resource in your architectural practice is your staff and their expertise. This session covers how to identify your knowledge base and maximize its leverage.
Learning Objectives:
By the completion of this session, participants will be able to:
- Describe why it is important to capture staff skills and experiences within your firm.
- Develop methods to improve Resource Management based on current staff proficiencies and focus training on staff knowledge gaps.
- Use benchmarking to measure talent acquisition, attrition, and growth.
- Consider the impact improved Resource Management has on your firm's productivity, staff retention and professional growth.
Subject Matter Expert:
Ms. Claudia Cozzitorto
OAA MRAIC LEED AP
Director of Design Technologies, Diamond Schmitt Architects
Claudia is the Design Technologies Director at Diamond Schmitt. She honed her expertise as an architect with over fifteen years practicing in Ontario and British Columbia, working across a range of typologies: large governmental projects, corporate offices, community centres, post-secondary institutions, and multi-unit residential developments. She applied her Honours Bachelor of Architectural Studies from Ryerson University and a Master of Architecture from the University of British Columbia to a concentration on BIM, becoming an expert in the field, leading the BIM implementation in two architectural practices. Collaborative workflows, data analysis, computational BIM and open BIM are areas of great interest as well as her extensive advocacy of BIM in Canada. Serving as the founder and chair of the Toronto BIM Community (tBIMc), is a vice-president and director for buildingSMART Canada, and a former board member of the Institute for BIM in Canada (IBC) Steering Committee as a Royal Architectural Institute of Canada (RAIC) representative. Claudia has been a leading member of the development of the BIM National Survey and was a BIM subject matter expert for the Canadian Handbook of Practice. She is an OAA mentor and has spoken at several conferences, speaking events, guest lecturer and panelist on BIM, openBIM and technology in architectural practice talks.
Ms. Jessica Shifman
OAA
Senior Associate, Diamond Schmitt Architects
Jessica received her Bachelor of Architecture from the University of Toronto in 2001 and joined Diamond Schmitt in 2002. With over 20 years of experience, she has spent her career working on culturally and societally significant projects including the Four Seasons Centre for Performing Arts, Lazaridis Hall at Wilfrid Laurier University, Holy Blossom Temple, Michael Garron Hospital, the Montreal Symphony Orchestra Hall, and the TTC Museum Station Revitalization. Most recently, Jessica was the Project Manager for the Royal Victoria Health Centre’s masterplan for their new South Campus in Innisfil. Jessica is a dedicated project leader who manages technically complex projects with attention to detail and concern for her clients. She is a member of DSA’s Staffing and Recruitment Committees and is committed to ensuring project teams have the right balance of skills and experience. Jessica has become highly regarded for her management capabilities, her work ethic, and her warm and engaging leadership style.