Recently I met with a federal agency where I learned that in the next five years, 60% of the senior staff will retire. That startling fact has been nagging at me ever since.
Can you imagine losing 60% of your senior staff? Many would proclaim the sky is falling, bury their heads in the sand, and hope things magically improve. This is not the case with this agency. Forgive me for being secretive about who the agency is, but I am not sure if this is public information or not.
They are very wisely seeing this event as an opportunity to evolve. By abandoning antiquated technology and processes, and in turn, integrating new technology, standards, and processes, this very forward-looking agency is planning to make a long overdue leap forward.
I have been encouraging them along this course of action. Do you think we're nuts?
Look at it this way. With the senior staff retiring in great numbers, a great deal of the resistance-to-change-fear retires too. With such a profound reduction in staff, it makes perfect sense to tune up, if not completely rebuild, the "engine" that cranks out your deliverables. By improving your output, it will be possible to maintain, and even exceed, existing production levels.
One leap they will inevitably make is from 2D, static-based design to 3D, dynamic-based design. This alone will greatly improve their production as well as the quality of their work. One irrefutable fact about 3D is that it allows us to catch errors before we get to the construction phase.
Another leap will be to adopt standards. I talk a lot about the power of standards, because I helped many firms, public and private, migrate from a non-standardized environment to a standardized one, and witnessed profound results: 50% to 700% increases in productivity.
The many contractors that work for the agency will be required to adhere to the standards and to submit electronic deliverables. This means all the data coming in from the outside will follow the same standards as work generated from within. The result is seamless interoperability.
There will, of course, be a training component, and a well thought out and executed implementation plan.
By following similar plans, I believe that any organization that is suffering from the effects of the engineer, designer, surveyor, and technician manpower shortages can optimize their company to actually do more, higher quality work than they are currently doing.
The agency agrees and has ambitious plans. You'll hear more about this project as it moves forward.
