Shepherd, a Knowledge Management platform built on Airtable
And why an architecture firm needed it
Thoughts on growth (and chaos).
If you have any work experience you probably know this story… A company sets to solve a problem providing extra value to a market and a product or service is born. If things go well this product evolves, better adapting to suit the market needs. As this change happens development partakes within the company and workflows become clearer. Suddenly some tasks appear easier to execute. Everyone knows who will reply to that email a disgruntled client sent. Who will go to that conference and present our newest development? That guy for sure!
All these interactions mature into loose processes. With time, some of them even get further developed and established. When embraced, these once simple hacks become embedded into the company system.
Progress continues and clients keep coming. 10 clients become 20 and 20, 40. Work is not scarce and everyone seems happy. That is until you start to feel it… something is creeping on you.
It’s a silent threat. Nobody addresses it, but it’s there. Your coworker has that face, the 1-more-email-will-do-it face. Your most trusted spreadsheet is crashing with so much data. What is going on?! Everything seemed great a couple of weeks ago… Judging by the momentum of the situation, the answer may seem counter-intuitive: growth.
Now, growth is generally good news. It validates market absorption and great work from the team. But reality is growth can be painful, and this is especially true for companies. Lighthouse has said it best:
When you all fit around a single table (or a single Google Hangout) it’s easy for everyone to feel like they know what’s going on. Most people were probably wearing multiple hats and in constant communication as you focused on a single, core thing your business tries to do well.
But now things have changed. Not only do people wear fewer hats, you probably even have multiple people to do many of the jobs.
Gone are the days when you can have a team wide standup and someone can monitor your wiki and a project management tool to understand what everyone is doing. Now people have to learn to focus on what they need to do, learn when and whom to reach out to, and trust that everyone else will do the same.
Growth in companies translates to a lot of things. The creation of new services, improvement of tools, and hire of new collaborators are all examples of it. Why exactly then is growth a challenge? In my experience, growing can be hard because -amongst other things- it implies an expansion of business operations. This may include upgrades in process, staffing, or technology. Regardless, the last step of any of these expansions is always the same (and a burden if done wrong): communication.
Organizational change always comes with resistance and that’s why developing upgrades is only half the battle. When done right, sharing improvements with the team should empower employees. This empowerment should leave them with tools to keep spreading the word and to propose new innovations. THIS is the other half.
Ask yourself, could you replicate any company system if needed? Imagine something broke and the mastermind behind it is unavailable. For a solution to be completely delegated documentation should exist on it. How does this work? Why was this conceived this way? When is this helpful? These are all questions that help teams better communicate a new solution.
Let’s talk about know-how. Although excellent definitions for this concept exist (see here), for this post, I’d rather address it from a more holistic perspective. From here on I’ll refer to company know-how as everything that conveys information on how to behave, interact, and resolve matters about services -internal or external- provided in a company. Having that in mind, we can say that company know-how helps employees solve everyday questions. These solutions accumulate and help define a business operation. Included here are answers to questions like “how is that new 3d modelling software installed?” or “may I edit the columns on the employee directory spreadsheet?” And this goes on forever!
We’ve established now that companies are in constant evolution. And that for innovation to become part of an operation communicating the right way (and documenting!) it is crucial. Now, if you are reading this in your office look around. Do you see any AI ready to help you design your next website with those graphic standards you just developed? If your answer is no then you are like me. And we both have to assume that humans are going to have to understand, accept, and master every bit of know-how published. Once done, they can own it, take advantage of it, and improve it.
Instructions should be developed for every gear that makes a company go. And that’s not it. These know-how packets need to be clear and organized in a way anyone can get to them when needed.
Companies develop know-how on a daily basis. Developing and sharing intricate rules, processes, and systems that make up your operation forms part of a relatively new field of study, Knowledge Management. Also described as the science that studies how knowledge gets transferred within an organization, Knowledge Management (KM) is the backbone of this post and project.
On BIM and new services.
Let’s take a quick detour to talk about the protagonist of this story: BIMmx. An architect-of-record company in Monterrey, Mexico. Core services provided are BIM integration and development. BIMmx has grown a lot this past year, its first. Remember about the challenges of growth? Well, BIMmx certainly knows about them. All thought out work schemes and paradigms have been rethought and redesigned through this change process. Development is a daily job and communicating new stuff in an efficient manner has become fundamental.
The project I am about to describe was kickstarted by the realization that having templates in folders, onboarding processes in kanban boards, and standards living in several repositories was not working anymore. Even though operation solutions were being developed, know-how dispersion was making impossible threading ideas from point A to point B. The need for a central platform to manage knowledge data was imminent.
A brief and a realization.
Having realized we needed this we set to do a project and the brief was clear: finding a KM platform able to contain all company know-how and setting it so that any member (new or current) could understand the company navigating it.
Also to consider was that maintenance and user feedback could make or break the proposed solution.
In search of the perfect Knowledge Management solution.
We decided to start off by researching available resources. As a rule of thumb, I’d rather find an existing platform that solves 80% of the problem and develop 20% of a support tool than later having to maintain 100% of a custom -and seemingly perfect- system.
We found many apps with features we thought our KM platform could use, and we learned. A user-friendly interface is important, a maintainable structure, a powerful search system, a feedback loop. These were all part of the notes.
Nonetheless, considering feasibility (costs, times, fit), we concluded none of the available alternatives fulfilled our need. Dive deeper into the analysis in this post: 5 apps to champion Knowledge Management and why they didn’t play out for us.
On building our own.
So we decided to hack an app. We love airtable, we do everything here. Airtable can display records as cards in a gallery, is super easy to bulk change, can be upgraded with blocks, AND we already pay it. We should give this a try. So we did. That’s my inner voice thinking, BTW. We set to solve this problem using this ultra flexible database.
We tried to save some of the lessons we learned made successful the reviewed platforms:
- Flexibility: to contain all company know-how more than one file format and communication channel (text, GIF, video) is needed.
- Dynamism: being able to edit published information helps in improving solutions and avoiding redundancies.
- Feasibility: some success cases shared by these apps seemed almost too perfect. We learned team size and culture are important to consider to find out if a tool is a good fit.
And without further ado I’m pleased to share the result.
Meet Shepherd.
Shepherd is an Airtable base containing all BIMmx’s know-how. The name comes from it being the platform intended to guide all team members to information within the company.
Shepherd looks like this:
Lets shift now to a FAQ format to explain all the perks.
How is Shepherd used?
To onboard, we add collaborators to the base and ask them to read all available documentation. After that, using it is very straightforward! Navigate and scroll through documents, search for specific solutions, learn about new updates, and publish your know-how.
How does Shepherd benefit the company?
This platform:
- Integrates company know-how in one place. All solutions, whatever the kind, are contained in this base.
- Allows for information retrieval by many layers. In our case, when looking for a file, we can search for: file format, area responsible for maintenance, content, date of creation, and more.
- Introduces know-how element linking. When a user searches for a process he may find the templates needed, the procedures to follow, and the softwares to download to complete the tasks. All in one search.
Looks interesting! Can this work for me?
This post describes the experience of a small company of 15+ employees. If you are part of a small — medium team, your company needs know-how, and you are willing to give Airtable a try, the answer is yes! Learn more about how to set up Shepherd and general tips in this post.
Where can I get it?
Download the base here.
Find your own Shepherd
Your perfect KM platform may look similar or completely different from Shepherd but the principle remains. Having a platform that encourages your team to build and share know-how can be very beneficial for your company. Give it a go!
Before wrapping up I would like to extend a special acknowledgment to Jessica Rodríguez who was essential for the development of this project. Thanks a lot, Jess!👏.
