I was recently reading an article in the most recent issue of Harvard Business Review titled, “Stop Overengineering People Management.” The article highlighted how a recent focus on labor optimization has instead had the opposite effect – reduced engagement, productivity and innovation. The article is directly applicable to architecture and engineering (A/E) firms and is […]

As the world continues to battle COVID-19, many architecture and engineering (A/E) firms continue to operate with a significant number of their staff working remotely. Many firms have also discovered that their productivity has not suffered despite this shift. I guess this should not be surprising since our industry is filled with smart people who […]

I read an interesting article in the New York Times last week with the ominous title “The Long, Unhappy History of Working From Home.” The article discussed how large, high-profile work at home initiatives at companies like IBM, Best Buy, and Yahoo failed to deliver the expected results and were ultimately canceled. Sufficed to say, […]

How does your firm define a successful project or client relationship? How do you manage projects to deliver on that success? These are a couple of questions that are covered in the CXps 2020 Client Experience Conference video Putting Our Data Into Action: How We Combine CX + RX Data to Improve Profit while Delighting […]

I wrote a previous blog post about how to fight commoditization. A company can fight commoditization by providing unique value to its clients through the way it offers it services. This unique value is the key to good strategy. A good strategy is useless, however, if it is not executed successfully. Peter Drucker has a […]

You have a great idea to expand your business by adding a new service or entering into a new market segment. The first thing that you need to do is to dive into a detailed business plan, preferably starting with the financials, to show that the concept will work, right? This is standard operating procedure […]

In a previous blog post, I outlined some measures to help architecture and engineering (A/E) firms manage productivity. The key measure presented in that post was Revenue Factor. Revenue Factor is a combination of Utilization Rate and Direct Labor Multiplier. I have defined these below for reference. Utilization Rate = Direct Labor / Total Labor […]

  Productivity and efficiency… These are pretty simple concepts, right? Productivity is typically defined as outputs divided by inputs and efficiency as actual output divided by standard output. But there is a little problem here for the type of work we do as Architects and Engineers (A/Es).  What is “input’? What is “output” and how […]