For Dwane Lindsey, 2020 was a whirlwind year.
Of course, the year will undoubtedly go down in the history books as one of the most remarkable on record, as it was when COVID-19 reached pandemic status, disrupting the global economy and putting the foundations for post-pandemic life as we now know it. this
Still, Lindsey’s 2020 will definitely be a year she’ll never forget.
That February, Lindsey started a new job as director of architectural applications for FGM Architects (FGMA), a 140-person architecture firm based in the Chicago area, with additional offices in Austin, Texas; Reston, Virginia; Saint Louis; and Milwaukee.
His job description upon taking on the role was seemingly simple: oversee the company’s architectural applications, building information modeling (BIM) standards, field processes and technologies, all while researching and developing potential new tools that would make the FGMA team of architects more efficient.
The team at the time was using simple PDF editing software to markup and collaborate internally on project documents. From the comfort of their offices, architects marked up PDFs and saved them on internal servers for the next person to come in and mark up. Collaboration was largely in-person, with colleagues visiting each other’s desktops and working on PDFs together.
Going the distance
Even in February 2020, Lindsey was sure there was a better way to facilitate this collaboration.
“One of the issues that users asked me was, how can we better collaborate on our PDFs?” Lindsey said. “Right now, person A, mark the PDF, save it, it’s on our servers. Next, person B makes his marks. Person C makes his marks. And then the person who should collect those red lines, has to wait for everyone to finish. Then they can collect the red lines and the whole process went on and on and on.
Lindsey immediately knew the solution she wanted to implement to improve this process.
Throughout his established career in construction technology, Lindsey had become an avid user and advocate of Bluebeam, utilizing the software’s extensive digital collaboration capabilities on many notable projects, including his recent work on the high-profile renovation of Wrigley Field, the historic home of Major League Baseball’s Chicago Cubs.
Lindsey wasn’t the only one at FGMA hoping to implement Bluebeam, either. He said many of the architects at the firm when he first started would ask him when he planned to implement it. At the time, however, Lindsey said there wasn’t much momentum among company leaders to make a change.
Then March 2020 happened.
It was around the middle of that month that the world seemed to change overnight. The spread of COVID-19 reached a critical mass in the United States that jolted most office-based businesses spanning nearly every industry into sending their employees home to work remotely indefinitely. On a dime, most office workers in the US economy, including those at FGMA, went home without knowing when they would return.
Dwane Lindsey of FGM Architects from his office.
Image provided by FGM Architects
Suddenly, FGMA went from having architects working in six offices to 140, one for every employee. Simple PDF editing and collaboration with company servers in the office was no longer ideal. Any existing collaboration issues with the company’s previous office-based approach were exacerbated.
“How can we now work remotely and still work together?” Lindsey said she wondered at the time. “That’s when I presented our management team with the idea of using Bluebeam.”
FGMA’s management team remained skeptical. “The initial feedback was, what is Bluebeam going to do that we don’t already have?” Lindsey said. “Because based on previous people looking at Bluebeam,” Lindsey said, the management team argued at the time, “the program we have can do 90% of what Bluebeam can do.”
Lindsey’s answer was simple: “The 10% you’re missing by not having Bluebeam is causing 90% of the problems people have not being able to collaborate on their PDFs.” That was especially true, Lindsey said, now that the company was operating remotely because of the pandemic.
The management team of the FGMA was sold. Lindsey would begin a company-wide rollout of Bluebeam beginning in June 2020.
Focusing training
Sitting in his makeshift kitchen table “office,” Lindsey prepared to spearhead a company-wide Bluebeam implementation. It would take months of focused training to get all FGMA architects up and running on Bluebeam, training that would take place via video conferencing and other digital communication tools.
“At first I started a Bluebeam overview session,” said Lindsey. “It was about a 30-minute session that just gave everyone in the company a quick overview of what Bluebeam is, what it can do, and how we would use it moving forward.”
Lindsey ran that initial Bluebeam presentation five or six times, he said, to make sure everyone in the company had ample opportunity to participate. Each session was also recorded so that anyone unable to attend could access the presentation.
Lindsey focused specifically on getting the firm’s architects up and running in Bluebeam Studio Sessions, the software’s real-time digital collaboration capability.
The company needed to transition its face-to-face collaboration needs to a fully digital environment, and Sessions is designed to do just that.
With Sessions, remote workers can continuously work on uploaded PDF documents in a shared environment in real time, viewing each other’s marks and discussing issues to solve. Instead of huddling around a desk in the company office, Sessions allowed newly remote team members to collaborate digitally from their offices.
After the initial overview, Lindsey deliberately designed the rest of the implementation training curriculum. To make the learning curve as easy as possible for the company’s end users, Lindsey split the training program into six sessions, each of which would be administered four times so that everyone in the company could participate :
With Lindsey as a guide, each training session was conducted via video conference, with people following along live on Bluebeam. This allowed the attendees to work with the software during the training, but also start using Bluebeam in their project. The Studio Sessions portion of the training took place in a live studio session broadcast via video conference, so attendees could see in real time exactly what it was like to work in a collaborative environment with the software. These sessions took place from June to August 2020.
While most of the FGMA architects really enjoyed the training—many even had previous Bluebeam experience—Lindsey said it was still a challenge to get people to let go of the old PDF software.
“This [the old PDF software] it was what people knew,” Lindsey said. “And when things were busy during that time, that crutch was still there. So we had to basically take the crutch out after we were done with the training sessions so that people, in some ways, were forced into Bluebeam.”
“That was probably the biggest hurdle,” Lindsey continued. “I think once people got into Bluebeam, they found it pretty easy to use.”
Making a difference
Lindsey said it took about two months, until September/October 2020, after the training period ended before the company was really running efficiently at Bluebeam.
For the rest of the year, Lindsey would serve as the company’s Bluebeam expert, leading all efforts to resolve any bugs or issues people had with the software. In addition to answering requests for help in an informal, ad hoc manner, Lindsey said he would also record and post videos on the company’s intranet, highlighting features of the workflow as the company continue to familiarize yourself with the software.
FGMA’s implementation and use of Bluebeam was so successful among its architects that, in 2021, Lindsey trained the company’s marketing department on how it could be more efficient by using the program.
So far, Bluebeam has streamlined FGMA’s efficiency when it comes to digital collaboration. Lindsey said he played an important role in the company being able to maintain operations during the depths of the pandemic. “The fact that people could actively mark up a PDF within a study session at any given moment was huge,” he said, because it strengthened communication between architects as communication methods changed due to the remote work
“If you see someone flag something in a studio session, you can now call them or chat with them or use whatever communication preferences you have,” Lindsey said. “You can start asking questions about their brands without having to literally wait for that person to finish the document. It’s much more collaborative that way.”
Michael Denz, FGMA Design Director who is among the company’s leaders and a primary end-user following Bluebeam’s implementation, said that using Bluebeam has been particularly helpful with the QA/QC process of the company
“Being able to review progress, print sets and create digital marks at various project milestones/phases allows everyone on the project team to stay abreast of changes in project scope and developing details,” he said . “As someone responsible for overseeing the design process and design development, Bluebeam has given me the peace of mind I need to ensure we deliver a successful project for all our clients.”
Extension of use
Today, most of FGMA’s architects are back working out of one of the firm’s offices, but Lindsey said the use of Bluebeam has continued to improve collaboration, especially since some people still occasionally work from remotely and more projects are being carried out between offices. Time savings from using Sessions have also been notable, Lindsey said, although the company hasn’t been able to quantify precisely how much time it has saved by implementing Bluebeam.
The biggest lesson Lindsey said she took from having to lead a Bluebeam implementation in the middle of a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic with remotely dispersed employees is to simplify training.
Lindsey was intentional early on in only providing training on six high-level topics and features that the firm’s architects would find most useful in the short term, careful not to overwhelm people with everything Bluebeam has to offer. I would recommend the same to anyone else looking to participate in a similar enterprise-wide implementation.
“No one is going to retain all that information in a short amount of time,” Lindsey said.
That said, now that initial training and adoption is complete, FGMA is looking to expand how it uses Bluebeam to fully realize the full scope of the software’s capabilities.
“This [Bluebeam] it started to open people’s eyes,” Lindsey said. “We started looking at facility condition assessments, going into a building and the need to document what’s inside. How can we do it? We don’t want to use paper and pencil anymore. Can we use Bluebeam for this? We’re starting to look at more and more ways to take advantage of the software, because it has so many capabilities.”
By Frank Kalman
