How levels of work have impacted our business - with Grant Beck of Graham Group

Speaker A Levels have been just a common word we use almost every discussion we have. We talk about the level of the individual, the level of project, the level of demand within the company, and it's a common day language for us. Now, when I look back, I don't know how we operated without it. We wasted so much time trying to describe what it was that both the individual or the demand of the job or the requirements of the position or whatever, and now we just say it's level three, or we need a level three person, or we'd have a level four job. Once we've established the levels of projects and the demands and the levels of people's level capability, then it became really simple just to match those things up. And inevitably, when we run into an issue that would rise with an owner or a project's not going well, we'd look at it and say, well, wait a minute, that's a level three project and we got a level two individual doing it, or we've got something like that. And then because, well, DA, of course that's the problem. We didn't match up the requirements properly to the capability of the individual or the demands of the job. Almost everything we do now is focused around that. That was an undertaking that our previous CEO, tom Baxter undertook, and that was to shift our whole company from what we call level three project to level four. So we had to define what is a level three project and what is a level four project and get the entire company, first of all, to understand even what it was to define what a level three and four was, so they understood what it was we were trying to move toward. And then once we established that, we had to start to understand what kind of an organization we actually need to do to run a level four project. And that was probably a bit of a surprise, because the demand and the capability we had within our company, we realized we didn't have enough capable people at working at that level. They had lots of potential, but then it started making us, forcing us to start developing our people to get them to the proper level so that we could actually go do this work. And that takes time, of course, as well. But we soon found out where the successes were, where we didn't have the right people matched with the right kind of projects at the right level, and where we did projects were successful and where we didn't. We had issues. So I'd say that probably it was a big learning curve for us to go through that's.