Leadership at Every Level: Workflow & Standards Guru Chris Fitzpatrick

Entuitive’s continual pursuit of being better tomorrow than we were today manifests among our high-caliber, talented team. When faced with challenges and roadblocks, our people put their hand up to offer solutions that make everyone’s work easier and more efficient across our seven offices.
When Chris Fitzpatrick realized our production flow could be more efficient, he let the firm know and took charge of updating various workflows and processes.
We sat down with Chris to talk about his work.
Thanks so much for chatting with us, Chris. Can you tell us how you came to take on the role of Standards Coordinator?
Chris: Thank you for having me. To answer your question, I was already heading up our Eastern Standards Knowledge Centre for about a year and a half prior to taking on the general Standards Coordinator role.
We have Knowledge Centres for each of our regions, responsible for ensuring that tools, resources, and more are available to the entire firm. This enables our One Company culture, because we are constantly working on projects that are not local to us. We make sure that relevant resources are available firmwide so that anyone on our team can work on any project anywhere. Part of that work involves making sure workflows and processes are as efficient as possible.
After some time with the Eastern Standards KC, I realized we could ramp up some of that work and apply it to all the Standards Knowledge Centres.If you take the time to analyze your workflow, and how project delivery happens on a daily basis, you’ll quickly start to see where you can save time, which tasks are repetitive, and where there is the potential to create efficiencies. Our goal is to attack our production flow in a proactive way, updating our systems and technologies to always be better and more streamlined.
Can you give us an example of such an efficiency or workflow process?
Chris: Of course. An efficiency can be something as simple as effective document templates. When a team member opens a ready-made document, we aim to ensure that the template is 100% good to go and that required edits are reduced to the absolute minimum.It may sound small, but this type of streamlining can really add up, costing or saving our team countless hours. One such initiative can effectively eliminate three hours of work for our engineers per project. That’s just one example, but we currently have hundreds of similar initiatives we’re working on to improve our processes and workflow. And when we’ve completed those, we will go deeper still.
Our mindset at Entuitive is that change is the norm. By embracing all the ways we can improve our internal processes, we can keep delivering the highest quality products to our clients.
How do you stay on top of all those initiatives and discover new possible efficiencies?
Chris: A very detailed excel as well as making sure I’m involved with as many different sectors and services as I can be at Entuitive. By ensuring I have a holistic understanding of our service delivery process, I can make sure these changes happen incrementally. And small changes every day lead to big results.
What are your plans for this role moving forward?
Chris: Well, it’s a multi-pronged approach. We’re not trying to improve just one process or workflow; we’re working to improve our entire delivery process. Part of that involves the type of streamlining I mentioned earlier. And part of it includes the continual creation of guides, aids, and resources and making those available firmwide.
We have such a talented group of people with so much knowledge. We aim to ensure that the knowledge of our senior engineers is downloaded and disseminated firmwide in the most efficient ways possible. That way the experience of one aids the advancement of all.
Smart people learn from their own mistakes, but the wise learn from the mistakes of others. Hard-won knowledge must be shared with everyone so that we can always be better, together.
Thank you so much for taking the time to chat with us, Chris. We appreciate all your hard work and attention to the details of our project delivery process.
If you’d like to learn more about workflow efficiencies, reach out to Chris Fitzpatrick.
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