July 1, 2021

Finishing Strong | Integrator Insights

Finishing Strong “A ferocious concentration and fanatical execution is what you need to finish strong.” Gary Ryan Blair For an in-house integrator, the topic of “Summer Projects” is near and dear to our hearts. Summer is our busy season and an excellent opportunity to show our continued value to our organizations. Back in January, we looked... Read More

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Finishing Strong

“A ferocious concentration and fanatical execution is what you need to finish
strong.”

Gary Ryan Blair

For an in-house integrator, the topic of “Summer Projects” is near and dear to our hearts. Summer is our busy season and an excellent opportunity to show our continued value to our organizations. Back in January, we looked at the planning aspects of summer projects, and at this moment we are right in the thick of making those plans a reality. However, making a plan and starting the execution is, in some ways, the easier part of what we do. In many ways, the hard part of what we do is finishing strong. Let’s look at some important aspects of closing out our summer project load.

I assume most of you have heard the term “punch list” before, but if you have not, a punch list is essentially a detailed list of tasks that need completed or issues that need resolved before a project can be considered “complete.” In the parlance around our shop, the punch list could be considered the list of items that fall between a project being considered “done” and a project being considered “walk-away done.” One important aspect of finishing strong is to make sure that all the little things that need completed at the end of a project are well documented and then checked off. It is a basic part of quality control and project close-out. Ideally, the punch list is a collaborative effort between the installation team and an experienced person who had not been involved in the installation. The punch list should be a written document that is visible to all the relevant people on the project team. One great way to make sure a punch list is complete is to have a project close-out checklist that you can reference against. In the end, however, having a detailed punch list is useless unless you prioritize that final effort to finish and check off each item.

A punch list is a document prepared during key milestones or near the end of a construction project listing work not conforming to contract specifications that the general contractor must complete prior to final payment.[1] The work may include incomplete or incorrect installations or incidental damage to existing finishes, material, and structures. The list is usually made by the owner, architect or designer, or general contractor while they tour and visually inspect the project.[2]

Wikipedia

When your summer is approaching the end, take an opportunity to communicate your success with your institution. Work with the strategic communications staff in your department and/or at the university-wide level to write up an article that talks about the projects your team and your contractors completed that summer. Be sure to highlight the benefits to the students, faculty, and staff that the projects will provide. If there were some new technologies that your team integrated, take note of them and explain why you decided on that technology and how it improves the audiovisual system. While you may not be comfortable with self-promotion, the reality is that many communication teams are short on things to write about and will be excited to hear from you – you just made their job a little easier. To help with your promotional efforts, take some time throughout the summer to capture a few “action” photos or even some video of your team working their magic. A good promotion can improve the visibility of the value that an in-house audiovisual integration team provides to your institution.

While you are considering communicating about your summer success, it is also a good time to think about training. Even with well-designed and extremely intuitive user interfaces, faculty and staff will always be more comfortable if they have an opportunity to learn about the technology before they need to use it in front of others. Depending on the nature of the project, you may want to consider offering targeted training to a specific audience, a public training that anyone can join, or perhaps both. If you choose to schedule and plan a public training opportunity, it is a great idea to note the dates and time of the training in the promotional articles we discussed above. No matter who your audience is, you should develop at least an outline of the topics you want to cover during the training session. While I think I am great doing impromptu training, too many times I remember that great thing that would have helped the training in the minutes or hours after the training is complete. Do you and your audience a favor by taking the time to plan your training session. You may want to consider a trial run with someone who may be less technically inclined than you are; that person could help you understand areas where you may need to simplify your language or state the concept in a more accessible way. Finally, support your training session with some form of written instructions as well, preferably in some online format that you can point the users to for ongoing reference.Last, but not least, after you are through the first couple weeks of classes and have taken your well-deserved victory lap around the campanile (or quad, or memorial union, or the lake, or whatever you take victory laps around), schedule a post-project review, sometimes called an after action review (AAR). No matter how great or awful things went, there are always things that went well and opportunities for improvement. At a minimum, get with your team and walk through how your summer projects went – go all the way back to the end of the prior summer and systematically walk through the timeline and events surrounding your summer projects. You may also want to invite other key stakeholders like your facilities team, any contractors involved, or project owners. Just for good psychological reasons, I like to start by discussing successes. What went well? What new processes, hardware, or techniques were successful and need to be repeated. Get personal – call out specific individuals with ways they excelled, came up with a great idea, or went above and beyond. Then move to the challenges and lessons learned encountered during the projects. When thinking about areas for improvement, don’t just think about the epic fails, also consider the things that went well that could go even better. Pay special attention to any potential safety issues and opportunities for improvement. At the end of the discussion, develop some specific action items that will be undertaken with attention to who will complete the item and by when. A great post-project review will provide a great foundation for the pre-project planning sessions for the following summer.Every summer my colleague Spencer Braly says something to the effect of “No matter what happens this summer, classes will start.” While said playfully often in the midst of some mid-summer disaster, it is still a factual statement for every higher ed institution; the summer project push will come to end. How it ends is largely in you control, so do the things that will help you finish strong – document and check off your punch lists, communicate your victories with the university, provide end-user training opportunities, and capture your lessons-learned with a post-project review.In the meantime, I know you feel like you are in an epic battle right now, so remember the immortal words of Gold Five: “Stay on target.”

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