Leadership-Industry

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Parent Category: Leadership
Category: Leadership-Industry

While my "transforming the Civil Engineering Industry" has, for the most part, been a team effort, I have had my influence.

The primary reason I joined Bentley Systems was to extend the reach of my previous efforts.  OpenRoads Technology first true revolution I saw, supplanting three decades of continuous evolution. 

At Bentley I extended our InRoads offerings, including the first Advanced InRoads multi-day course.

I wrote the initial OpenRoads Technology training courses, consulted on-site its early days, and helped drive its rollout and the rollout of the Hydraulics and Utilties tools (SUDA, then SU, now "Drainage and Utilities" in OpenRoads). 

Individually, I started Civil XLr8 because I recognized that InRoads training wasn't very effective.  It wasn't very fun.  I knew it could be and should be both. I made it so.

 

Role-Aware Training Design is a tenet of good training design.  

Some training designers write for one role.  That's common: "one size fits all."  We know how that works. The mortal sin here is not identifying all the roles, and not accomodating - in the training design - easily accomodated secondary roles.

 

The typical training "design" was based on the premise that "we take what a Highway Design Guru does on a typical day on a road project, and we'll teach it that way over a four day period."

 

There are a number of bad Role Assumptions:

The four-day class block is written for a Highway Designer - a Creator.  Even though there are far more consumers of the software design than creators of the design.

The most egregious example is that Reports - which is something that EVERYONE needs to learn how to do - was Chapter 13.  On Day Three.

This forces everyone - Manager, Drafter, Guru, QC Reviewer - to work through Vertical Geometry Design and Calculating Superelevation to learn how to generate Reports.

Optimizing for a Highway Designer complicates learning for other disciplines such as Site and Drainage Design.

While Highway is the majority role for InRoads, it's not the only role.  Better Design can lead to serving the different Audiences far better.

There are a number of bad assumptions there:

It assumes that daily duties of the niche role of Guru, while a great long term aspiration, is the best template by which to teach fundamentals. It's not.

There are things a Guru does that has no place in a Fundamentals course.

One memory, teaching from the vendor's book.  Forty minutes into the Profiles chapter, there weren't any Profiles on screens.  Why?  The students were setting up Tick Marks!  10% of the users may have CAD Administrator responsibilities, why subject EVERYONE to that much of the drudgery in a Fundamentals class?  

 

In 2000, my InRoads training started with a short book, Exploring InRoads, that was appropriate for all users who might have any need to "read" or use InRoads data. It was simple and universally applicable to all roles in all disciplines.  You learn to generate Reports and Display Contours in the first two hours.   Even gurus use the evaluation tools - very quickly, almost unconsciously, to confirm their work.  Book Two was Building InRoads for those who would actually design Horizontal and Vertical Geometry and Corridors.   Drainage Engineers would take Exploring InRoads as their launching point for Mastering Storm&Sanitary.  

Twenty years later, Bentley finally offers easy onboarding into the Civil Engineering software world with the "Collaboration Core" of short topical courses.  Navigating the Interface, Evaluating Horizontal Geometry, Evaluating Profiles, QuickStart for Terrain Display, Viewing Cross Sections, and Evaluating Subsurface Utilities all provide an easy way to consume Bentley Civil Data, without being burdened with having to learn how to create geometry or superelevation to get reports or other information FROM the software.

During my hiring process, I asked if I could make my Exploring InRoads  available for free, "It's valuable to everyone and it doesn't take away any of your paying customers."  Nixed.  Ten years later, you essentially get all of our training free with your service agreement.

I joined Bentley knowing that changes I made there would change the industry (the Bentley side of it, anyway).

The two biggest Transformations: Course Length and Delivery Methods.

Course length: who has four-day blocks of time to get trained?  The default block now is two hours.  Now you can learn a topic when you need it (Just in Time) without having to spend days doing prep work (prior chapters).  Two hours is still too long.  There is inertia to write training to fit a once-a-year conference workshop block.  I'm currently trying to influence colleagues to "write what it takes", even if that comes down to a twenty-minute exercise.  Short of that, create Ready-to-Learn exercises - with data ready to go with no pre-requisites.  "I'll teach you that, but you need to give me two hours" isn't good enough.

Delivery Methods have changed.   

We have Live Remote Training and OnDemand self-study.  Bentley Colleague Peter Huftalen led this effort back in 2013.  I spent a lot of time challenging his premises and pushing back on the parts I didn't fully buy into.  My belief framework has a lot of multiply-reinforcing structures.  Once he persuaded me from my few lingering reservations, I was - and am - an evangelical on smarter training content design: for multiple roles and multiple delivery methods.

In one online meeting I was told "that isn't how we want to teach."  I responded "it's not about how you want to teach, it's about how the user wants to learn."  That's the transformation in a sentence.

The old way of Designing Training was (and often still is): I'm going to be teaching a captive audience in person a particular workflow over a period of six to ten hours.  What materials do I need to take with me so that I can do my thing?

We'd confirm the brilliance of our design by teaching the class at a Big Annual Conference.  It the class goes well, then all is good.  

Not so.  Folks at conferences tend to be the cream of the crop.  In-Person training with Instructors (and helpers at conferences) is the most likely to succeed training option.  Few weaknesses are exposed in this setting.  The hardest way to learn - the target audience to design for - is the OnDemand Self-study learner sitting alone in their cubical.  THAT must be who you design your training for.  You have to make sure it works for them.  If you can write a good course for them, that will also go over well in person.  The corollary is NOT true.

Remote Training and OnDemand Self-study also have a much more difficult engagement threshold than in-person training.  Generally, in-person the audience is CAPTIVE!  In Remote or self-study, if you stray from their interest or aren't clear, the learners STOP.  The Unwanted Content Burden (UCB) must be VERY low.  This means you can't force them to spend 90 minutes to work through preliminaries so that they can work through the twenty minutes relative to them.  This doesn't mean you have to write twenty minute courses, you just need to be able to provide frequent and clear "on ramps" to engage where needed.

Supercharging Intergraph Hydraulics

In 1992, Intergraph's Hydraulic Design Tools did NOT support surcharged gravity flow.  My response when I learned this was "Well, we can't use InFlow in Florida.  There we design the parking lot inlets to pond up to six inches to provide enough head.  This is a show stopper."  (I was new to Intergraph's solutions.  I had been using the engineer's swiss army math knife: excel).

HEC-22, the (now) Bible on Urban Drainage, was not published at this point.  We had a copy of the City of Austin's Drainage Manual, but basically we had our college Hydraulics Manuals and a whiteboard.  We also had to figure out how to implement pumps in a steady-state InSewer (sanitary) program.

I think it was about a six weeks process of working on the whiteboard with the Water Resources Engineering Manager, waiting for the code, testing it and returning to the whiteboard.  We got a good solution that made us market-viable for several years and versions (including Storm&Sanitary) until HEC-22 became the de facto standard, at which time it was incorporated into the code.

OpenRoads includes StormCAD, CivilStorm, SewerGEMS

This is a huge transformation to two full disciplines: Civil (the Dry) and Hydraulics (the Wet).  They are now combined in a single environment.

The OpenRoads platform provides the full capabilities of Haestad's (now OpenFlows) StormCAD, CivilStorm, and SewerGEMS products.  

The transformation here is that previous hydraulic solutions in the Roadway/Site products (InRoads Storm&Sanitary and GEOPAK Drainage) were straightforward "minimal" implementations (HEC-22, Modified Rational and SCS) that could pretty easily be mastered (or at least faked) by "dry" engineers.  

OpenRoads Drainage and Hydraulics is full-on fully-optioned sophisticated hydraulics and hydrology.  It is NOT simple.  It's easy to go astray if your designer is faking it.  Review and Quality Tools are critical if you're reviewing other people's work.

I've led the creation of the training framework and material from very early in the process.  I've worked with Product Management in implementing new tools and methodologies to match the needs of the OpenRoads user - the immersive 3D, BIM-ready environment has completely different needs from the previous standalone or MicroStation-based platform.

I've traveled to agencies and corporations' Hydraulic Leads helping them implement Bentley Civil Hydraulics Software.  Most recent DOTs include VDOT, ALDOT, TxDoT, OrDOT and WashDOT.

InRoads Global Transformation - Ini Manager

Our aspirations are often limited by the tools we have to achieve them.

InRoads Administration was a very complicated process.  As a consultant, I was making recommendations that I realized we couldn't easily achieve.  Without some custom tools, my recommendations were dead in the water.  So I wrote and freely distributed Ini Manager - the tool that really streamlined some complicated administrative processes.  Now it was easy for users to make changes to the settings and get it to the administrator for distribution (it's impossible for the administrator to do it by himself).