Navigating Through a Pandemic: Celebrating Our IT Team
For National Information Technology Professional’s Day, we are recognizing our outstanding IT team members for the support and initiatives they spearheaded prior to and during COVID-19 to allow our staff to remain as productive and connected as possible whether in the office, at home, or through a hybrid working style. We appreciate all you do in helping our firm best serve our clients and industry partners!
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IT professionals all over the world were faced with a new challenge in 2020. With short warning, many offices across the globe were closed and employees began working from home. The pandemic changed our daily routine and IT staff had to make it work by providing solutions and assistance to every employee.
BKV Group employs a small mobile workforce accounting for roughly 20% of staff, with 80% requiring IT solutions. In the two years leading to the work from home shift, BKV Group’s IT department made improvements to each practice site; including:
- Network upgrades
- VPN capacity
- Cloud migration
All these changes allowed BKV to remain strong and nimble in the design industry as we forecasted the next 3 to 5 years. Little did we know, it would be the structure we ended up relying on to provide a remote worker with a reliable and remote working environment.
Six months later since March 2020, BKV Group staff are still working from home, and working productively, through a mixture of company laptops and personal computers providing access to the BKV network. Challenges still exist however, such as home internet speeds, and the need for everyone to become more flexible and tech savvy.
Some of the tools we’ve seen have a huge impact while working remote are programs and tools like:
- Cloud services, such as Microsoft Office 365
- OneDrive backups
- Microsoft Teams
Teams in particular has provided the ability to stay connected with team members, while allowing staff to share files, take phone calls from their desktop or mobile devices, and lead productive and seamless client meetings. More than any other service, Teams has kept our business connected, in sync, and on task.
In addition, the Autodesk BIM 360 service which we invested in two years ago has enabled every discipline to be productive in the design documentation process. The ability to open drawings straight from the cloud rather than our own servers has streamlined usage and freed up VPN throughout our practice site for all other needs.
The upgrades and services that BKV has invested in has allowed the company to stay safe and continue to be productive. Yes, there was definitely a learning curve, but the company is moving forward and continuing to provide high levels of client service and design excellence to our customers.