During planning, KJWW invited U of I facility engineers to Rock Island to more fully familiarize them with the displacement ventilation system the firm had proposed. “If they didn't understand the concept, its operational advantages, it wasn’t a solution they were going to support,” says Parry.
MBA Training
KJWW also spends time on self-education, a pursuit VanDuyne says has fostered a “culture of learning” in Rock Island. Among other activities, entry-level engineers embark on an eight-year odyssey to hone their technical, project-management, business-management and soft skills, with KJWW recruiting university professors to instruct them in economics, finance, strategic management and the like.
“We basically cherry-pick MBA courses, the goal being to take engineers and turn them into consultants,” says VanDuyne. “Owners have to live with the systems we specify, so it’s up to us to demonstrate we have their best interests in mind.”
Although technical training relies on mentorship from senior engineers, it is also a trickle-up proposition involving, among others, summer interns, who investigate nascent technologies and present their findings during company lunches.
“It keeps us looking forward, though we’re careful to avoid bleeding-edge technologies,” says VanDuyne. “Sometimes it’s easy to get caught up in gimmicks.”
By stripping layers of bureaucracy from its organizational structure, the firm has provided employees ample elbow room to evaluate sounder solutions. KJWW is not organized by discipline but rather by client type, some nine in all, including government, health care, industrial, upper educational and mission critical. Groups are headed by client executives whose collective experience averages 19 years.
“We’ve delegated responsibility in order to avoid bottlenecks,” says VanDuyne. “It’s essentially a flat structure that allows us to more easily innovate and integrate across disciplines.”
Based in Chicago, the firm’s regional health-care group, for example, is comprised of 35 employees, including a pair of project executives and an operations manager who assumes responsibility for project staffing, production, scheduling, quality and standards.
“Like a lot of engineers, their ability to combine mechanical, electrical, plumbing and life safety results in more fully integrated designs,” says Harrison. “The difference is they excel at construction administration. They appoint an administrator who has such a diverse understanding of all of the systems involved. He serves as a single source for submittals, RFIs and other construction-related issues. They’re unique in how they staff their projects.”
To further enhance system integration, KJWW is honing its mastery of building information modeling (BIM). “We’ve found that the Revit platform works very nicely for architecture and structural design, but less so for M/E/P,” says VanDuyne. “So we’ve worked for three years to bring that along. Sure, working with BIM requires more time than working with AutoCAD, but it’s also more thorough in detecting problems.”
Its relentless pursuit of the next horizon is why KJWW is so successful in recruiting, developing and maintaining talent. “Five of our client executives have been with us since graduation,” says VanDuyne. “We get graduates who have just left an educational environment, and they don’t want it to stop. We don’t want it to stop either.”
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