Story:
"Ever Forward" Extreme Makeover – DPR Construction Rebuilds their Continuous Improvement Process from the Foundation Up

Challenge: We had no idea what we were doing at first.

Solution: When the full-time Innovation Team assembled, this role had never existed in the company before and the task at hand seemed pretty daunting. How do 4 people get a company of 2,700 to innovate every day, and maybe even bring forth an industry changing idea every now and again?

The first step was coming to grips that this was a long-term project. We knew that year one would be planting a lot of seeds. And by year five perhaps we would have a blooming garden (with a lot of tending and weeding in-between).

The second step was breaking it down into bite-size pieces and holding ourselves accountable to milestones as we went. We traveled on mini tour-legs over a 6-month period until we reached 80% of our company’s professional staff with our Culture of Innovation message. We rolled out Spigit a few regions at a time to ensure enough resources to help with adoption and training.

The last, and the most crucial step, was understanding how our people learn new concepts and seek answers. Recently I asked a group of people, “Where do you go when you need to learn about a topic you know nothing about?” As we went around the room, the two answers we received were “Google” or “I ask someone I know and trust.” The last response was, “I ask someone I trust, or Google it if I’m too embarrassed to ask the question!” Understanding how our people accept new information was key in creating an infrastructure our employees were comfortable engaging in. Let’s admit it… not everyone at our company loves to Tweet for instance! 

Challenge: “Information is not Knowledge” – Albert Einstein                          

Solution: For DPR, actually elevating our corporate IQ was the real end goal, not just increasing overall awareness of ideas. We found early on that it didn’t matter how many Gigabytes of good information we stored on our cloud servers. The honest truth is information alone will not allow an organization to improve, even if all the stored ‘data’ contains great idea after great idea.  We’ve found the real challenge is translating our findings into knowledge able to be shared and applied by others.

At DPR, we find the ideas that are successfully adopted each have their own legacy, evolving through a dynamic path of personal networks and communication that ultimately leads to knowledge transfer. To find these ideas, we apply a filter to examine which ones are most appropriate for the company. And as an idea emerges, we carefully look at the PEOPLE, PROCESS and TOOLS required to successfully implement that idea, and to whom would truly benefit.

The idea must resonate with those that will be involved; the tools must be useful, training must be offered, discussions about trying something new need to excite those involved, or the knowledge will never develop beyond just an idea.  This understanding has led to our innovation pipeline collecting many ideas but being filtered to only a few great ideas in order to strategically improve the way we do business. 

Challenge: Silos are NOT just in the Midwest 

Solution: Ideas are happening all the time, but people are busy and ideas suffer without the ability to be shared easily.  Often the limits are just those within earshot, or perhaps whoever is cc’d on the most recent email chain. Internally we refer to this as information silos, where information has trouble permeating through the company and gets contained locally.  Even with all the technology tools, software, and platforms designed to unite the masses online, recognizing how ideas become part of the company fabric is an exploration in how information travels among colleagues.  More specifically for DPR, we’re interested in how information travels across the country to the variety of offices and jobsites currently active at any time. 

To approach this challenge, DPR employs dedicated Innovation champs whose job it is to engage employees personally, in a time and fashion that is tailored for them.  For example, a group of experienced executives may steer a conversation in a different direction from a group of twenty construction workers out on a jobsite.  For DPR, both groups can have valuable insight to the business and the role of innovation is to help foster the dialogue and environment to let the information exchange happen. We found this personal connection is key to engaging with a diverse workforce, and ideally allows for future conversations to take place that are unscheduled, unstructured, and more organic. 

Similarly, we also recognize the value and speed of social media.  As an additional tool, DPR provides an online collaboration engine to facilitate conversations among peers, who have oftentimes never met in person but share a common interest in a particular idea or topic.  The approach of using both personalize outreach, coupled with technology backed collaboration, work as complementary efforts to help focus both ideas and people toward connections beyond their immediate social circles, and allow ideas to break free from their silos.    

Challenge: Energy, Engagement & Trust 

Collecting and promoting ideas is great, BUT how does simply starting a full-time Innovation team lead to generating companywide energy, engagement and trust?

Solutions:

How did we harvest ENERGY:

Innovation energy and engagement varied per person depending on their initial mindset and their level of belief in the DPR Culture. Some people were super excited by the new movement within DPR; they echoed that the Innovation movement was what attracted them to DPR in the first place, a company that was determined to push the industry forward. This group was quick to jump in and help. Then there was the crowd that viewed the innovation with a “wait and see” attitude, they were going to hang back and watch from the sidelines. And, of course, there were the cultural veterans who were glad to see the energy boost created by the “Full Time” Innovation Team. Overall, the Innovation workshops helped to spread the word about the new focus and helped people gain “awareness” about the program. After that we needed make things happen to help the “wait and see” people become convinced to join in.

To harvest the energy from the workshops, the Innovation team began to act as internal venture capitalists (investors) and idea promoters.  Spigit helped us share, refine and vote on ideas, however there were other great ones that came from conversations, emails and all kinds of forms of communication.    

In order to effectively manage this flow, the team now focuses on filtering ideas through our Pipeline where “hot” or “potentially hot” ideas are captured, discussed and implemented. Just as venture capitalists must decide which companies to pursue, the innovation team must decide which ideas to invest time, money and energy in.  There are many factors that decide how “hot” an idea is, our main filters are below:

• Frequency? How much are we hearing about this idea (Inside and Outside DPR)?
• Ease of Implementation? Is this an easy change to make, or is it extremely disruptive? Both are good.
• Does it add value to DPR?  Is it going to make us smarter, better and faster?
• Does it add value to our clients?
• What is the cost?  Does it require additional funding from innovation or projects?
• Does it align with our Culture (DPR’s Point of View)?
• Does it make sense (gut check)?

Many ideas live on through us promoting them in conversations, company meetings or even Spigit. The ones that bubble up through the pipeline get our most focused attention. Although there may just be a few great ideas, we know that implementing even just a small number will make DPR measurably better.

How we foster ENGAGEMENT:

"What’s in it for me?" Most internal DPR customers needed to see some effect(s) from the Innovation effort to become real for them before buying-in. Without giving them first-hand experience, we had trouble getting people to engage and build up trust that Innovation was worth their time. There were a variety of methods we used to convey the benefits of participating in Innovation to our internal customers: newsletters, emails, quarterly regional meetings, peer group discussions or project level workshops. Sometimes, it was unpredictable what exactly would make an impact.

For example, Gary Scholten (San Diego Innovation Team member) created a rolling video slideshow about all the craft ideas he's seen in his travels. This is being shown in the San Diego office kitchen’s wall monitor without volume. People can watch as they make their lunch, have a snack, sit down to eat or whatever attracts them to the kitchen / lounge area. Scott Strom said he watched this for +/- 20 minutes (as he was eating lunch) and he was really surprised on the impact that the Innovation process was making on “self-perform work” (you can hear his own words via the video).

I was surprised: really that is how we reached you? Here was one more internal customer taken from “unaware” to “convinced” that really good things are happening in our efforts in Innovation. 

Another example of us trying to reach our employees, is having an “innovation” kick-off meeting at the beginning of a project. These discussions were about getting the project teams to think differently at the very beginning and challenge them to find a better way to approach their project. It was about taking the time to ask, “What are we going to do on this project that will be Best-in-Class?", "How can this project benefit from all the good things happening within DPR and use it to add value for the external customer?"

In order for the DPR Innovation process to generate energy, engagement and build trust we needed to increase the number of people being directly influenced in a positive way by Innovation each quarter and each year until we have reached everyone, including the craft (over 2,700 employees across 17 offices at DPR). One of the first ways we did this was through craft luncheons that were focused on encouraging ideas from the field staff as well as starting innovation "pods".

Caption: Craft Lunch @ Project Site in Sunnyvale, CA

As a part of our responsibilities on the innovation team, we're constantly working to identify and empower other innovators. We call these groups of people regional "Innovation Pods". With the help of the Innovation Team, the pods are focused on growing and pushing their own ideas and needs for the region. The pods typically range from 5 – 30+ individuals who are passionate about pushing "Ever Forward", faster in their regions. These pods are ways for employees to actively participate in innovation without having to take time away from their full-time jobs. The pods host their own monthly meetings, webinars, and even happy hours with rotating topics centered on regional needs. These include: transitioning to 100% digital-document controls, 3D modeling or best management practices like how to be a better leader or mentor. 

Currently there are 11 operating Innovation Pods throughout the company and each one has a specific business plan that outlines their regional “Ever Forward” goals for 2013.  The innovation team frequently interfaces with these groups to share information and ideas from across the company. We believe in being “servant-leaders” and work to advocate and empower the pods to make their own decisions as well as push forward on their ideas. Our greatest asset is our people and the Innovation team focuses on recognizing our Ever Forward leaders and promoting their ideas so that they can be heard widely.

How we maintain TRUST:

Groundswells and Rainmakers:  A groundswell is when an idea becomes “hot” in the innovation pipeline and requires a focused effort to push it from ideation to implementation.  Once the Innovation team decides that that idea is ready to be implemented, how is that shared throughout the company as a best practice? 

With a focus on implementation, the Innovation Team realized that the grassroots efforts of the innovation pods would not be as effective without the joint effort of senior management, the “rainmakers”. Rainmakers are leaders with broader spheres of influence and those who are able to generate widespread energy and implementation of new ideas. They are trusted advisors and critical pieces to helping implement change within the company. 

The Innovation team works to filter pod-generated ideas in an effort to present the most innovative and influential ones to regional managers. By doing so, we are connecting pod members with rainmakers and ensuring that ideas and innovation initiatives are tied to regional business plans. This is how we create trust: engage the pods, put energy behind their great ideas, promote the ideas to senior leaders and move quickly to implementation.

Challenge: Implement Quickly – remove bottlenecks.

As mentioned above, in order to effectively implement change at DPR, the Innovation Team pushes ideas through our internal filters. We then draw upon our own separate budget to fund, execute and try new or game changing ideas.

In some corporations, in order to go from ideation to execution you must pass through several levels of approval and processing first. In contrast, the DPR innovation team is unhampered by these constraints as we have purposefully set aside funds simply to try new or disruptive things and do-away with the red tape all-together. In 2012, our idea budget amounted to $1.2M and were able to invest over $350K in new ideas, technologies and tools. We're shooting to increase that number in 2013 and beyond (see below for recap from "DPR Innovation Newsletter - Year in Review", 2012).

It is critical to note, however, that this is not the only way ideas are pushed forward. In fact, it is just one way. By creating a new reliable and trustworthy structure for ideas to be heard within DPR, one that was adapted specifically to combat the problem of size, we saw that ideas began to take life on their own. In small instances, an idea jumped past the innovation team, the pod and Spigit completely and was implemented directly on projects without any help. A true sign of success for the Innovation Team is seeing more ideas follow this same path (see detailed story below, Benefits & Metric: Case Study #4 – DPR delivery system).