Contents
Firm profile
Krueck Sexton Partners (KSP) is a Chicago-based Architecture firm that has designed iconic and environmentally conscious public and private projects in their hometown and around the world. Since being founded in 1981 by Ron Krueck and Mark Sexton, KSP has built a unique culture of openness and possibility. KSP is also an early adopter of the 2030 Commitment, which requires participants in the building industry to track climate-friendly design practices and pushes them to integrate increasingly efficient, renewable, and innovative energy systems.
Operating with a People-First mentality
Krueck Sexton Partners believes deeply in the quality of their team. They take pride in the team they’ve been able to build over the years and have made it a priority to empower them.
By extension, this has led to a better client experience. By empowering team members to lead, clients feel reassured that their projects are well managed no matter who is running the meeting.
“We've actually heard it directly from clients who would tell us you know what we like about working with you is that you actually have a really deep bench. It isn't dependent on this one figurehead or the one thing they said. We really like that when you're in the room, it's great, but if you're not there there's somebody else, and they actually also represent the company on the same level. We take great pride in that and we want to reinforce that.”
- Tom Jacobs, Co-Managing Partner
“KSP is unique because we care a lot about people. I've seen that manifest itself through the studio and investments into the people that are making the work and we also really care about our clients so we spend a lot of time and effort to understand them so that we can design for them.“
- Taylor Franz, Associate Principal
This notion of empowerment carries through the entire organization especially in project operations. Project-level financial data turns project managers into leaders by enabling them to make informed decisions about project schedules and client communications. That ownership is critical to the success of Krueck Sexton Partners.
“It's very easy to read and understand where you are in a project. The challenge of making data easily understandable so that people get excited by seeing it and that they start owning it, I would say this is the biggest single biggest differentiator from our pre-Monograph firm to what we're doing now.”
- Tom Jacobs, Managing Partner
Challenges with resourcing projects
Starting in 2019, Krueck Sexton went into growth mode. They expanded from a team of 17 to 49 in a relatively short amount of time. That expansion broke the systems they had in place.
They struggled with legacy applications and workflows, whether using spreadsheets for resource planning or Deltek that provided visibility to finance teams but not to project managers. This needed to change as they understood the benefits of empowering their teams to make decisions based on real-time financial and operational data.
Before Monograph, resourcing was a pain. As Tom Jacobs notes during his presentation at Section Cut 2021, Monograph’s interface “made a big difference in capturing” their data. With their previous resourcing spreadsheet “you sort of pick the data from some other accounting software, and that takes forever, and at the end of the day when you’re done, you think ‘Oh wow, now we know what we’re doing’, of course two days later––it’s already out of date.”
In using Monograph’s Resource, the KSP team is able to automatically schedule hours across team members using one of the three available ways to distribute time: a budget of required hours.
Alignment with their strategy
The benefits of using Monograph extended beyond resourcing. Krueck Sexton Partners views their company through the lens of 4 components of governance championed by Marjanne Pearson of Talentstar. They are Projects, Practice, Enterprise, and Fiduciary.
Projects: What is the performance of KSP’s service?
Practice: How does KSP produce knowledge internally?
Enterprise: How does KSP create value for the business?
Fiduciary: How is KSP run sustainably?
By providing their team members with a better time tracking solution that provides real-time budget and project schedule feedback they were able to improve the performance of their service. As the majority of the firm works on projects, this improvement impacts every other component. Everyone on the team is talking about data and it shows up in every other meeting they have, from their Partners Operations Meeting to their various committees.
“Once you start using [Monograph] in that project domain, it becomes a flywheel. It becomes the very fundamental gears of the company. And it reinforces itself. The company becomes more accurate, more timely. . .”
- Tom Jacobs, Co-Managing Partner
“The real-time feedback that we get from Monograph is incredibly important for us. At this point we've been utilizing Monograph now for a couple years and it's totally transformed, I think, not only the information that we receive but the timeliness of that information, the engagement we have across the studio.”
- Don Semple, Partner
The Value of Great Design
As an architecture firm made up of designers, it was important for Krueck Sexton Partners to find a tool that was legible and easy to use.
Monograph was designed and built for architects, and therefore it brings together important aspects of practice that traditionally live in disparate pieces of software into one simple view. Innovative visualization tools like the MoneyGantt allow users to intuitively understand the relationship between remaining budget and schedule.
“At previous jobs, I've spent a lot of time calculating hours and our project teams are more efficient with Monograph. I found that we're able to see what people are working on in real time so we can adjust them and be more creative.”
- Taylor Franz, Associate Principal
A beautifully designed timesheet portal also led to considerable time savings and in actual time entry from staff where over 95% of all timesheets are submitted on a weekly basis.
“It's indispensable. I would say, Monograph is a little bit like an IPhone. It's just at some point, wow, it's easy. It actually is. It's attractive. And all of a sudden, that's where in a leadership position it becomes when you can breathe in, because you actually see that the system is starting to work and you can take a step back and then think about the things we ultimately need to be concerned with.”
- Tom Jacobs, Co-Managing Partner
If you would like to try the software that “becomes a fundamental gear” for your firm, get started today.
