Category: Work

I was listening to an interview of Seth Godin, where he posited that you can have maybe two or three attributes that stand out at the office. If you are consistent with these attributes, it will eventually become your personal brand. So pick carefully and don’t ever break these promises you make to your customers.

Assuming that I only pick out two items to promise to my customers (Seth stated that two is doable, three is difficult, and four is virtually impossible), there are four major questions that need to be answered.

1. Who is my customer?  Is it my immediate supervisor, or his boss, his boss, her boss, or the Governor?  Is it the using Agency?  Is it the consultants that I manage? Is it the silent investors behind the project (all the taxpayers of Nevada)?
2. What will be attribute X
3. What will be attribute Y – and if I put attributes as a simple X-Y matrix, is there anyone else at the office that already fills that niche?
4. Given that I’m unwilling to sacrifice my personal life for the division, what am I willing trade off to make sure I never break the promise of X and Y?

It’s an interesting rubric, but there won’t going to be an answer here. To pick out only two attributes is going to take some hard thinking. As always, choices are more difficult when it means excluding other options.

It is an odd moment when you realize that someone your age is actually better than you at something thought was your particular strength within the profession.

I’m certain it will only be even weirder when I work with someone younger than me who I recognize as superior in this specific role of project architect.

It may take a little bit of time, but if I stay on this detour of being a client side project manager the inevitable will happen.

Architecture is a practice, and I can feel the rust setting in already.

The morning after I made my decision, someone else piped up with new information that might affect it.

I had moved forward based on the comments from someone higher up in the hierarchy, but I hadn’t waited for someone closer to the situation.

It is indeed a balancing act, between keeping up the tempo up but not rushing in without proper deliberation.

I don’t think I got it right this time, but I do have the fallback on being open and honest with my partners, so it won’t be a total surprise if I adjust course.

It’s a balancing act. I needed to make a decision that would most likely make one company quite bit of money over another company.

So it wasn’t one to rush into, but also one where it was basically a 50.5/49.5 winner take all split.

After I gave everyone a chance to provide their input, I realized no one wanted to own the decision, I went ahead and made a call.

Sometimes there are perks to being the owner’s PM.

No need to overthink this.

Hopefully I didn’t rush it.

On an AIA forum a principal in a firm expressed concerns about cell phones in his office and was considering instituting rules about its usage. It caught my attention because distraction addiction is a chronic problem for everyone, including me. This was my response.

I have never been a principal but I will tell you that heavy handed rules will not go over well.  When I left my previous firm (which was already pretty flexible) I was surprised by how empowering it was to have complete trust by my current boss who just says “you’re a professional, get your work done on time, be fair to the division, and keep me posted if you need help.” 

I get it, cell phone addiction is a real problem (I battle it myself) but you need to treat people like adults.

If you enact a formal regulation, your team will nitpick every action you make.  Every time you pull out your phone for a personal call.  Every time you look down at your phone take a text or email.  Every time you ask them to stay overtime, especially if they are on salary.  Every time you call or text them on their cell. Every time you walk into the office five minutes late.  Every time they see a personal web page pulled up on your laptop. The resentment will get ugly.

Or from another angle, how would you like it if someone confiscated your phone for eight hours a day? And do you want employees who just go along with this rule? At the very least, if you create a command and control culture in your office, then don’t complain that your staff isn’t proactive and they don’t take any ownership in their work.

I agree with the other responses on this thread, you need tackle the tangible problem directly.  If errors are your concern, work with your team on that.  One of the solutions is coaching them on properly managing digital distractions, but you need to take the time to install a robust QAQC system.  You also need to protect your team and have those difficult conversations with clients who try to impose unrealistic deadlines.  Set your team up for success.  Develop rapport with your staff, so each of them know the firm standards and they are motivated to excel with each issuance. 

Now maybe I’m wrong and I can envision a scenario where a cell free office will be totally liberating for everybody involved. But I’d bet harsh cell phone rules are just taking the easy way out.

Not surprisingly for government, there is a good amount of paperwork that goes back and forth. It may seem like red tape (indeed it may be red tape), but it seems reasonable that public funds are double and triple checked before they are expended.

In the past, that mean there were a lot of sheets of dead trees physically passed back and forth between various individuals to get anything done.

Digital made it easier to move these sheets of paper back and forth.

And now, with digital signatures via a program like Docusign or Adobe Sign, you don’t even have to print anything out to put your stamp of approval on an expenditure.

Plenty of ink has been spilled on automation and blue collar work, and a decent amount of hand wringing as well about AI swallowing professional work. But digital is definitely a threat for these white collar “factory tasks”.

If you’re moving paper around already, your job is possibly secure, but the next position might never appear, quietly streamlined out of existence.

I just read a post by Bob Borson, FAIA, in his Life of an Architect Blog. He just left the firm where he was a principal – and had his name on the door for six years – to join a much larger firm.

To walk away from your former mentor, the team you’ve groomed, your clients.

That’s intense!

It made me realize how lucky I was in joining the SPWD. It was a total no-brainer decision when the opportunity arrived. A major pay raise with a pension, a reasonable expectation that I would not be doing crazy overtime (my previous firm was good at managing hours I could see a tsunami of work coming), and a status upgrade within my career.

The only downside was that I wouldn’t be wielding the big sketch designer pen, but I never had that role. I have been a DD thru CA architect, so going client side was a pretty natural jump.

In deliberations with my friends and family, it was a question of “dang this looks amazing, what I am missing?”

And it turns out what I missed was the hidden blessing of being handed a no-brainer career opportunity. Usually life consists of tradeoffs, giving up one thing to get another.

In this case, it was just a question of “how long is it gonna take to get a formal offer!?”

Things were a touch slow for a few days so I was tasked with drawing up some potential revisions to our offices as we try to accommodate additional staff.

After a year away from drafting, it was surprisingly hard to get back into the flow. Admittedly AutoCAD looks a bit different from what I remembered, and four years or ArchiCAD certainly didn’t help.

But the hardest part was just a lack of practice. Fundamentals may stick around forever, but the skills and instincts that differentiate between competent and good deteriorate quickly!

Of course I jumped into the easy part first, doodling on floor plans. But the office is small and there aren’t that many options. So once I hit that wall, I realized I had to regroup and start talking with everyone to get a feel for what was actually needed.

Fire-Aim-Ready. Rookie move.

Oh and yeah, like all projects, scope creep definitely happened. Converting a storage room into a couple offices somehow resulted in walking around the Building & Grounds and Inspection groups to measure up their spaces.

Even so, it was a fun couple days, and now we’ll see what the guys upstairs think.

It’s easy for me to slip into busy work to avoid the difficult task of thinking strategically.

Possibly even typing up on this blog right now.

It’s always a nagging concern.

But sometimes, when things are so fuzzy and confused, executing the simplest task is the first step into clarity.

I guess wisdom is know the difference.

I just had a meeting with a consultant who had a high fee on a project.

There are still some details to resolve, but we walked out of the meeting pretty confident we will stick with them.

Why? Because they were able to discuss in detail what work they were going to do in exchange for this money.

They’ve given us top notch design and service in the past, so they’ve earned the benefit of the doubt, and in that light, the high fee is a promise that they will continue to do so.