[00:00:05] Speaker A: Welcome to the broadcast to post podcast. In this episode, we'll be diving into the latest AV trends shaping conference rooms, classrooms and emergency operations centers. Whether you're in education, government or facility operations, this discussion will help you make smarter future proof decisions for your spaces. And we've got two fantastic guests. First, Jacob from UC Davis, and he'll be sharing how his team, alongside Key Code Media Engineers, standardizes classroom upgrades for better user experiences and IT support with a small staff under extremely tight deadlines. We'll also be speaking with Diana from the city of Moreno Valley and she'll be revealing how AV over IP and SMART presets transformed their emergency operations center into a flexible multipurpose space. Let's start with our first interview with Jacob right after these ads. This episode brought to you by Studio Network Solutions Media teams have enough things to worry about.
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[email protected] Joining us now is Jacob Bernhardt, CTS, an audiovisual engineer with UC Davis AV Engineering. Jacob and his team play a crucial role in designing and upgrading classrooms across the entire campus, ensuring a seamless experience for both students and faculty. UC Davis manages 167 general assignment classrooms and numerous lecture halls with capacities ranging from 15 to over 500 seats. With so many spaces to maintain, standardization is key to keeping things upgraded quickly and running smoothly. Jacob, welcome to the podcast. Thank you so much for joining us today.
[00:02:05] Speaker B: Thanks for having me.
[00:02:06] Speaker A: I think to get things started, perhaps we should get an overview of what UC Davis strategy for the next five or seven years, what the plan is given all the rooms there and all the things you have to take care of at UC Davis.
[00:02:19] Speaker B: Right. So usually our plans change year to year depending on budgetary restraints, especially under the current climate. But our initial goal is to kind of paint the entire campus with a cohesive technology solution so that all the rooms have the same look and feel. And if you're used to going into one room, it's very easy to transition as a professor or faculty to teach in another space. The only thing that might change is some rooms have multiple matrix screen solutions and some are standard. We do have a couple of flex active spaces where there's like a perimeter amount of screens and students can connect independently. We have tried some different kinds of technical solutions as we evolve, but our Main goal is to kind of get the entire campus cohesive and to set.
[00:03:15] Speaker A: Kind of the scope. We're talking over 150 rooms. We're talking small rooms to large auditoriums. So it's not cookie cutter. There's a lot of different rooms with a lot of different variations.
[00:03:26] Speaker B: Yeah. And we try to make the user experience on the interface the same. But yeah, there's a lot of different backend changes. We've got rooms that hold 20 people and we've got rooms that hold 579. I think is our largest space. So quite a wide range in terms of sound systems and projection systems.
[00:03:49] Speaker A: So when we first started talking to you and your team, Jacob, I think one of the things we concentrated on is having a long term strategy. Right. For a deployment this large with this much technology, it's not something you can do every other year. Right. It's something you have to plan for. So how did you kind of tackle that from a logistical standpoint in terms of planning for a long term strategy?
[00:04:10] Speaker B: Well, I wish I had all the control in the long term planning. Unfortunately, like I said before, some of our financial decisions are driven by higher factors. So it makes our job a little bit even more difficult because sometimes a solution that we hope to last seven years needs to stretch a little bit further.
But yeah, typically we try to source the most reliable solutions we can because not only do the rooms not get a refresh frequently, they're in constant use, sometimes from 7 in the morning till 10 at night most of the year. So if something did fail, we don't have time to go in and fix it.
[00:04:50] Speaker A: And also, you know, as I'm sure everyone can appreciate, when you get into these rooms, you want education to take over. You don't want technology to be in the way of the actual purpose of the room. So I believe the rooms were designed in a way that professors don't really have to think think about getting it to work. They walk in, plug something in and it just works.
[00:05:11] Speaker B: Yeah, and also, you know, kind of the main concept of simple GUI design is if you have to have a cheat sheet instruction on how to operate it, then it's not as user friendly as it could be. You should be able to go into these spaces without any training and just get your laptop up on the screen and go right into your curriculum.
[00:05:35] Speaker A: What I like about that, and I'd love for you to share this with the listeners out there, is what does a kind of pre configured setup look like at UC Davis? What was kind of standardized on for a majority of the rooms.
[00:05:47] Speaker B: So a lot of this happened before I came to the university in terms of the original design intent. And that has been modified a little bit. But originally we had a wide range of faculty that used everything from overhead acetate projectors, slide projectors, really, really old stuff. And so we tried to introduce document cameras. And we still have one optical media player in our standard, a Blu Ray player, and then standardized on both HDMI and a legacy VGA with a whole wide variety of dongles, because we are a bring your own device campus. So being able to come in, plug your gear in, and then quickly from the touch panel, there's just the inputs right at the bottom. You click on them. There's a preview confidence monitor so you can view your content before throwing it onto the screen in front of people. If you happen to have a lot of desktop icons that you don't want the students to see, then throw your slides up there. But adding a Wolf Vision document camera, the 3V Neo series, has been really great because a lot of those professors that still kind of have their curriculum on classic handwriting, they can still. They can still do that. And then we also have a lot of rooms with chalkboards still. We have some legacy mathematics professors that demand chalk. They. They seem to think that math just doesn't go into the brain unless it's on chalk. And so we still have some chalkboards. So to get those systems into our lecture capture, you know, we have, you can see one behind me in the corner, that white camera back there captures anything that they're going to write on the board, and that goes into our home lecture capture system.
[00:07:34] Speaker A: So all of this obviously looks good on paper and it looks good as a block diagram. But what we like to hear quite often is how it actually is working after it's been deployed. So have you gotten any feedback or any examples of how this design that we help you put together has improved input from the faculty or the student experience?
[00:07:55] Speaker B: Lots of feedback. And we've kind of discovered that you can't actually make everybody happy.
You have some people that, you know, want one thing and others that want another. So we tried to make this, with this design came out of the lots of meetings with our faculty. And we have a technology kind of team that drive what types of things they want to see in the classroom. And then we come up with technological solutions to make sure that those are going to be able to happen. In reality, we've gotten feedback that we tried a digital annotation system in one room, and the Professors didn't really like it, and we tried different types of technology to drive that, and they still didn't quite resonate with them. There's some people that it worked with, but the digital annotation kind of digital blackboard wasn't working for most of the faculty that use that space. And so there's a little bit of a lessons learned. And we're still trying to. Trying to try, you know, new technologies here and there, but for the most part, we have kind of our base standard, and then we. We can add. Remove a little bit for it, depending on the room.
[00:09:06] Speaker A: So you mentioned document cameras, you mentioned smart boards, you mentioned some folks saying we want to stick with chalk. But what are some of the biggest technical changes that you're seeing happen right now that UC Davis is in the middle of in terms of deploying what technology and what's coming next year in the year after?
[00:09:23] Speaker B: So we've started to add a lot of bring your own device video conferencing to the classroom. So right behind the projector, behind me, you can see that black bar. That's a ceiling mic that the audience audio can get into the far end. And then they can drive the cameras. There's a front and a rear camera, and they can select between the two. And that goes directly into the instructor's laptop from. For zoom or any. Any soft codec. On top of that, we have our hard codec lecture capture system. So it gives them the ability to do both if they want to record it themselves or they want to have students drive. We have a team of students that manually operate some of the cameras. So if you have a legacy professor who's just doing, we call it chalk talk, where they just write on the board their math equations or whatever the class is, and then we can get a tight shot so that students following along at home or reviewing the lecture afterward can see very clearly what's on the board.
[00:10:21] Speaker A: That's a great point that we haven't really talked about yet, which is recording of the lecture. Right. Either for viewing live or later on on demand.
So how was that kind of tackled by UC Davis in terms of recording it and making it available to students and faculty?
[00:10:37] Speaker B: Yeah, so there's an entire team that does lecture capture. I support the hardware that then feeds them the content and then they manage it. They have their own processes and servers. A little bit of that technology is out of my realm, but I support all of the hardware that gets that to them. So, yeah, we have codecs and recorders in every room that Take dual content, so the camera feed and then whatever source, if it's the document camera directly or if it's their laptop, and then that can go into their code hera server and they can distribute it.
Usually that is not simulcast, that is uploaded after the class finishes. So it's pretty quickly loaded online. But it's not real time.
[00:11:31] Speaker A: Got it.
[00:11:32] Speaker B: If the professor wants a real time solution, they can use what we're now adopting in a lot of these rooms that bring your own device. And they can use. They can host either teams or zoom. Looks like we have a guest.
[00:11:45] Speaker A: It's quite a. Right.
It's in process, as we say.
So you mentioned that there was a team dedicated to support. Right. So with 167 spaces, give or take to manage, how is your help desk helping faculty when they do walk in and maybe something isn't making complete sense? How are you tackling that when you get those requests?
[00:12:10] Speaker B: So we have a help desk hotline number. That call connects to a kind of a triage desk. And they have a team of students that will come out if it's something like the wireless microphone ran out of batteries or they, you know, didn't get the right adapter or whatever.
Usually if it's here one students can, can tackle that. If it's something a little more complicated, they elevate that to tier two. And if tier two can't figure it out, it's something like seriously wrong, then they elevate it to tier three. And there's two of us on tier three. And then if, usually if we can't figure it out, that's because there's something broken and we need to RMA it or get a replacement swapped out.
[00:12:55] Speaker A: Is there automation set there? So some of the technology that's been deployed that can phone home, so to speak, and say, hey, something's wrong. Do you have any automation tools put in there to alert you? And the rest of the different tiers.
[00:13:08] Speaker B: We'Re currently dabbling with, looking into Crestron Xio Cloud.
The way our network is currently configured, we're pretty sandboxed for security purposes. So we have internal access to our equipment, but we're trying to maintain pretty strict safety and security protocols. So none of the equipment is accessible to the outside world.
[00:13:33] Speaker A: Got. But it's accessible on the land, it's accessible on your local network. Great.
[00:13:37] Speaker B: Absolutely.
[00:13:38] Speaker A: Okay, so when you're combining all of this different technology that has to talk together or talk to each other and be secure, how do you find the. How do you balance between interoperability of all these disparate parts, but also keeping ahead or at least in line with where technology is going.
[00:13:56] Speaker B: So yeah, like I said before, we do have some rooms that we implement new technologies. I think a good example of this would be our teaching learning center in campus. I think we have 23 classrooms and we made two of them what they called Flex Active Learning. So this was a culmination of what we had heard from our faculty that they wanted to try.
And this was a hardware solution that gives a lot of student spaces the ability to share their content with the rest of the class on all of the screens. So there's four main projection screens and then there's TVs in the perimeter of the whole room and the teacher has kind of the control of which station goes where and they can matrix switch everything or say, hey student, I like, they can look at what, you know, student pod 2 for example is doing and then they can make, then share that content with everybody.
So we've definitely tried some of these other technologies. Another one I mentioned before was our annotation displays we were currently using for that job. That was a while ago now. 98 inch planar displays driven by extron annotator 3 hundreds.
And we got mixed reviews. Whether people liked it or not. I think a lot of it comes down to some of the technology is not baked into the curriculum of how a lot of these faculty have been teaching and some are a little more flexible to introducing new technology into their syllabus and some are kind of, they, they've got it in their, their habit of how they, how they do it. And unfortunately we have so many classes that we, our registrar ends up scheduling what class goes into what room more based on seat capacity than on the technology needed. And as we build more classrooms, we'll get a little bit more breathing room to try and get the right, you know, the right faculty who wants to teach this type of thing in this type of room. But we have, we're just so slammed with students. They're just, they're just struggling to make sure everyone has a seat.
[00:16:02] Speaker A: If we switch gears just a little bit. Because there's a question that, that Kiko has to tackle all the time, which is around IP based AV solutions. Right? The, the old world was everything's running over dedicated SDI lines or component lines or even coax at some point. But we're now turning the page and moving towards an IP based deployment. What challenges have you encountered with IP based av? And I mean, does it justify the changeover for the flexibility it gives you.
[00:16:32] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean this is kind of the way the world is going, right? AV over ip, our base standard is still HD based. T We do have a couple of deployments on campus with an AV over IP solution, NVX in this case. And there's some security concerns and some protocols that don't really work well with the way that our network operations team has our campus infrastructure set up, we have deployed it. What we do is we have those systems in their own room, on their own copper and on their own switch and then we're utilizing a control subnet to distance that equipment from the rest of the campus. So it works well in those spaces and it is a cost effective solution. Especially when you start to get into rooms that have a lot of endpoint counts, it starts to really add up. Because if you had to get a real giant 32 by 32 chassis to support a really large deployment, the ADA over IP starts looking a little more cost effective. But yeah, we have done that and we've just had to separate those networks because of our network operations concerns.
[00:17:48] Speaker A: Switching gears again, because there's something I wanted to bring up, I want to make sure not to forget is that when we spoke before, one of the things that I loved is that a lot of your help desk tiers are students. They're folks that you're actively paying so they can live, but they're actually getting the education on, working on this new gear which also sets them up to do this when they graduate and leave.
[00:18:12] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. We have a rotating team of students in our kind of help desk and repair team that go out and service the classrooms and you know, they do routine checks of classrooms, test gear and make and elevate issues that they can't remedy themselves. And this isn't unique to our department at UC Davis. For example, our entire public transportation system in Davis is based off of buses and the buses are driven by students. We have student employees in a lot of the shops, our MU's, we really utilize students in a lot of aspects of the university municipality, which is pretty cool.
[00:18:52] Speaker A: It's really cool. And I wanted to make sure everyone listening was aware of that and to kind of pay it forward, so to speak, and to get the students that you're educating and teaching and enriching to get them actually hands on experience.
Jacob, as we wind down, what things would you recommend to folks who are looking to update their technology at their educational facility? What things did you not know that you know now that you wish you knew back then?
[00:19:23] Speaker B: I think one thing that kind of helped improve our audio quality we inherited, at least I should say I inherited this system when I started at UC Davis and they had kind of done a lot of homegrown stuff and we were standardized on symmetrics DSPs. And we made the change while I was here over to qsc. And that really was a nice improvement because we got the intrinsic correction for all of our speakers. And we're now on mostly a QSC system in terms of amplification, processing and speakers. And I think there's a pretty nice improvement in quality. I wish we had done that a little bit earlier. It was a little bit tricky to make the change for us.
I think that. And also we migrated a little late to the game to some Shure microphones. We were using a 2.4 based system with audio Technica before and 2.4 GHz on campus is pretty crowded, as you could imagine. We have, you have to assume almost every student has three devices, a tablet, a phone and a laptop. And we have pretty robust access points to support that many devices. But it gets pretty crowded. So moving back to standard, you know, 800 MHz range microphones alleviated some of the dropouts and stuff we were getting and then also allowed us to utilize SHURE wireless workbench to coordinate all the frequencies on campus because we do have a lot of wireless microphones.
[00:21:05] Speaker A: So, Jacob, it's really important to get buy in right from people who are using this technology. So are there steps that you or your teams have taken to educate the faculty on the new technology and how it works?
[00:21:18] Speaker B: Yeah, so whenever we finish a deployment, we do kind of a big show and tell and a teach the teacher of all of the if there are any new developments. Sometimes some of the rooms are just a standard affair because we've done the same thing. But sometimes we introduce new technology and so we do a walkthrough with everybody. And then our repair team also has their placard that they put and they also post QR codes on our confidence monitors that goes to their website that does have some instructionals if needed and can post special things that like this room is equipped with, you know, a different kind of microphone in the ceiling than other rooms or how to access the individual specialized parts of certain rooms.
[00:22:02] Speaker A: Jacob, this has been very informative. There's been so much information. Thank you so much for joining us and thanks so much for sharing your expertise today with us and our listeners.
[00:22:11] Speaker B: Absolutely. Thank you so much for calling.
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Our next guest today is Diana Rockett Sykes, who's the emergency manager for the city of Moreno Valley. Diana recently led a major upgrade to the city's Emergency Operations center, or eoc, implementing AV over IP and smart presets to create a flexible multipurpose space. Now, with the push of a button, the EOC can seamlessly transition from coordinating emergency responses like wildfires or extreme weather events, to hosting non emergency meetings and presentations. All in a way that's intuitive for non technical users. Diana, thank you so much for joining us today. I think we should just jump in because we have a lot to cover. I'd love you to briefly explain why EOCs are critical for city operations, but I also want you to actually define what EOC is for folks who are listening.
[00:23:44] Speaker C: Right. Thank you, Michael. Thank you for having me today. So an emergency operations center at the local government level is a physical plant, a physical location where personnel from within the city come together to manage disaster conditions. So you have a conglomerate of subject matter experts performing various functions in order to restore to this the city to pre disaster conditions.
[00:24:11] Speaker A: Fantastic. And you've recently gone through a very large upgrade, Moreno Valley. Can you talk a little bit about just how large that scope was? So everyone listening kind of has an idea of the scope and scale?
[00:24:23] Speaker C: Yeah, absolutely. So the city EOC prior to this upgrade was built in 2012, and as we know, technology has evolved tremendously. So this involved the complete upgrade, the redo, if you will, of the technological systems that run and support the backbone of the Emergency Operations Center. So it was infrastructure, cabling, fiber, things like that, as well as technology such as TVs, monitors, projectors, things like that.
[00:24:55] Speaker A: So that's, if my math is right, that's about 13 years ago when the previous system was put in. So what are kind of some of the specifics? Was it all new cameras, all new projectors, flat monitors, instead of CRTs, was there anything else that can give everyone kind of a scope of how old the technology was?
[00:25:15] Speaker C: Yeah, so we had previously, display wise, we had probably about 10 TVs where people could see data, visualize data, and now we have over 40 of those available for people to consume data. As we know people don't consume data now in verbal form, we consume it in visual form. So that upgrade piece alone was tremendous. We also went from traditional projectors which don't work well in LED lighting settings, and we went to a short throw projector to give us one massive display area which has been a tremendous upgrade in and of itself. And then also just the infrastructure taking the technology where instead of being static, that technology now moves and is flexible to work with the responders. So from TVs and monitors, just the entire system is now super intuitive to the user as opposed to previously the user had to work with the system within the system limitations.
[00:26:23] Speaker A: I kind of like that the kind of switch of the users working for the system or the system working for the users, which also kind of brings up that there's challenges obviously involved in that that are not technical related. So I imagine there was a lot of retraining, a lot of reframing about how technology can work for this purpose as opposed to just putting it out there and saying use it.
[00:26:46] Speaker C: Yeah, absolutely. One of the things that an eoc, an emergency operations center, excuse me, is designed to do is to allow for communication. Emergency operations is 90% about communications and getting the right people having the right conversations in real time. As that incident is that emergency is unfolding. And what that prior system made us do is we had to sit in specific locations based on, based on people's positions. We don't live in that world anymore. We need to be able to get up and move and go to where those conversations are happening, happening. And as most professionals nowadays know, we can't leave, we need our laptops, we need our MacBooks. Right. And so what this, this new system is designed to do is if I'm having a conversation with you over here and oh, now there's another issue I can unplug from where I'm at, go over to in a completely different area within the emergency operations center, plug in, I'm still on the network. I haven't. It's like I'm at my own desk, every position, everywhere I go at all 69 positions in that EOC. And it's just an amazing thing to have that capability.
[00:28:01] Speaker A: So the technology you've mentioned so far is often what we call rip and replace. Right. Where you're just wholesale moving the tech out and modernizing it. And then you've also mentioned kind of the seating restrictions.
What were some other considerations when you went for the new redesign? Were there new technologies that you'd have to have a certain section for or new gear that had to come in which changed how things work? So were there other things that had to be considered and not just the updating of the technology?
[00:28:32] Speaker C: Yeah, absolutely. So the physical, the physical limitations was one. But, but the other piece of that was looking at it from a completely different perspective. We function in 2025 very differently than we did in 2013. And so looking at it from the language that I speak as an emergency manager versus the language that the technology folks meet and trying to find a way to mirror those was challenging, but really the premise was finding a way to make the communications work for us. And that was a challenge because when you have, as you know, when you have an existing space that is much more difficult to do than if you're doing a brand new design from the floor up, you have to work within the walls, you have to work within the capabilities of the infrastructure that's there. So it was definitely a challenge and one that, thank goodness for the professionals that we had not only internally but, but our vendors to make that happen. Because the facility is not all encompassing. Right. It's not as big as you need it to be. You're within the existing four squares of those walls. And you know that that poses a challenge when you're trying to do an upgrade that requires modern day technology and infrastructure.
[00:29:57] Speaker A: And speaking of that, you mentioned the, the ability for faster and more efficient communication and also the adding of new technology. And one of the things that Kiko deployed was AV over ip and that obviously was part of the communication backbone of how the tech works and how everyone communicates with one another. Can you talk a little bit about how that works and how that has kind of made things a little bit more faster and efficient?
[00:30:22] Speaker C: Yeah. So the technology that they were able to put in, I mean when I say the technology moving at the speed of technology, it is amazing. With a single point and click, I can change all 40 displays at once. I can change them individually. The camera systems that we have, both of our two of our main rooms are teams enabled with very high technology, high sensitivity cameras that allow great communication in real time. And that technology alone is just, it's so super fast that you forget that you're on TV or you forget that you know, you're in a space that, that is designed with within such limitations because the speed of everything it's literally controlling and disaster response at the push of a button, as fast as I can click my fingers, things are changing.
[00:31:23] Speaker A: Well, that speaks a lot to automation, right? Because if you click one button and it does 10, 20, 100 different things, that obviously increases or decreases your response time because there's automation put into there. So have you found that you have just hundreds or dozens or hundreds of presets or do you find that you've kind of pared it down to make it easier for someone to understand the system?
[00:31:48] Speaker C: So what we did was in our world, presets are important because what we do is we are an all hazard response, emergency operations center. So we have to be prepared to respond to whatever the hazard type is. And so what we did was we set presets based on hazard type. So you have fire, flood, winds, power, man made, right, terrorism. And so these presets allow us at the push of a button to start an incident, turn everything on and we're ready to go for that specific incident type. So what's displaying around the room are the dashboards and the interactive dashboards and the displays that we need from all of our partners and stakeholders to be effective in that response. If it's a weather based response, one of our main displays might be the National Weather Service, right? So in that preset that's already there, we don't have to think about that or later go, oh shoot, let me put that up. It's there because it's built into that preset. So that is an amazing piece that, you know, we got out of key code that we didn't even know we would have that capability when we started the design. And it's, it's a critical function and a feature that we, we really love. We love that feature.
[00:33:12] Speaker A: Technology giveth and technology taketh away sometimes. And right now there is just a deluge of technical information and opinions from people online regarding technology. So I'm really curious, when you were looking to undertake an upgrade of this size, what was your kind of research process like? Was it understanding the technology and then saying this is too much, we need to find someone who understands this, or was it going to other EOCs and saying, oh, there's some good ideas there, let's see if we can incorporate that into our refresh kind of, kind of what was the process there?
[00:33:45] Speaker C: So, so there's a little bit of all of that. So I spent prior to coming to the city for almost three years. I spent 17 and a half years as the county of Riverside Emergency Operations Center Manager. So obviously I had worked through numerous systems and technologies there, which gave me a really wide breadth of what worked and maybe what didn't. The system that we ended up going with, which is a Crestron based system, we had recently put in the new county of Riverside Primary Operations Center. So I was familiar with the touch and go, point and click kind of Crestron system. And so when we at the city of Marino Valley, when we decided to undertake this, I knew that that was the basis of what I wanted to see in our city. The point and click, the minimal training required for 90% of the users to use. Which is important, right? Because if I fall off the face of the earth or I'm out of the country, my staff and those that I've trained need to be able to do this. I do this every day and they don't. Right. So I needed that. I talked to obviously colleagues and counterparts throughout the county. What works for you, what doesn't? If you had the opportunity, what would you get? What would you want to see? And so through those conversations and then really just understanding at a very innate level through being an emergency manager, what I needed the system to be able to do, all of that came into play. And trying to explain that and convey that to technology based folks who don't speak the EOC language. Like you say, technology cometh and technology going. But on the other hand, sometimes that we had to sit down and go, wait, what does this mean? Right. Diane explained to me what this means and really what you want the functionality and learning to tell them what I wanted it to do, not to try to tell them how to do it.
Right. So that was, that was a big piece.
[00:35:49] Speaker A: I absolutely love you brought that up because a lot of times when we get into larger installs and deployments, often, and rightly so, upper management is the one calling the shots. But I think it's imperative that the users of the system, no matter if it's creative or medical or eoc, are the ones actually using it. And without the input of the actual users, you can design a system that may functionally work, but it's not practical for it to work. So I'm so glad you brought that up.
[00:36:20] Speaker C: That's a great point too, Michael. And I would just like to point out that this project was unlike anything. Being in government for 26 years, this project was unlike anything I had ever seen and project manage. And I'm going to Tell you why, because my city, the city of Moreno Valley leadership recognized the experience and they said, we're going to go hands off with this. We're going to trust that you can move this project forward in knowing what's best interest for the city and working with the right people, bringing the right people to the table to make this project happen. There was no micromanagement. They trusted the process and allowed myself and other professionals to do the work that needed to be done. And because of that, I think the project not only moved forward, forward, timely, efficiently, but we got to the end result that we needed based on these subject matter experts. And that was, that is a nod to the city. And they're, they're true leaders, true leadership.
[00:37:21] Speaker A: That's, that's fantastic. And unfortunately, often that's, that's in the minority that we normally hear that, that it's such a. We're going to let the experts do this and we're just going to make, you know, checks and balances. But, but we know who knows how to do it right. So after all this time, after the product has come and come to completion, I'm sure you've looked back and look at all the milestones and, and, and I'd love to hear what advice you would have that you would give to other municipalities regarding upgrading their EOCs and things they should think about.
[00:37:53] Speaker C: I think in hindsight, I think one thing that if I had to do it again is I would have, I would have probably had maybe one or two more brainstorming sessions before we started the physical rollout of the project. I think, because what happened is when you go through the governmental request for proposal and you go through that process, you know, we all know that that takes time. And then you go through the award process and then you have the initial meet and greet with the vendor and then now the time, the, the time clock starts ticking. We were so anxious, if you will, to get the project moving that I think that we started the project and had to kind of sort through some of that initial getting on the same page with regard to emergency management technology and how we wanted to bring those together. And I think had we stepped back like flowcharted, right here are the key, key, the key points. Because one of the things when you go, when you have an rfp, you're bound by that RFP and you don't know what you don't know when you don't know it. Right? And you know, and so I think, I think that would probably be one of the things that I would change is just slowing the project down on day one to really flowchart and you know, and sketch that out a little bit more. Because as we got into the project, we learned that there were some other technologies available, because with emerging technologies, it may not be there today, but tomorrow it may be. And our project didn't really allow for any of that flexibility. And in hindsight, I think in the RFP process, we could have maybe done some things differently to allow for that if it benefited the city within a certain price range, if that makes sense. So. But other than that, I mean, I think that's probably the main takeaway.
[00:39:58] Speaker A: I'm glad you brought up the part about rfp. And for the folks who aren't familiar, RFP is request for proposal. And that can involve multiple companies doing their own kind of investigation and putting together a summary of what needs to be accomplished. And then usually the municipality signs off on it and then you have it goes to bid and there are integrators and resellers who will then bid on that. But to your point, the time between crafting that proposal, the time between getting that out and that being engineered, and then the response, that can be months or even longer. And to your point, technology changes. And so the things that were suggested prior may no longer be as feasible or cost effective. So there can be some hiccups there. That's why you really want to work with folks who understand that process. It can kind of propose and then design knowing that there's going to be a lag. So there's ways to kind of update things without having to go back to the drawing board.
[00:41:00] Speaker C: Yeah, absolutely. And allowing for that in the budget. Right, exactly. Most, most projects have a traditional 10% overage or, you know, something like that. But when you're talking about 10 technology that may or may not be sufficient and you know, and terminology matters, because if I'm speaking to you as a layperson, right, Saying I want the camera to do this and I want the camera to do this or I want the camera to do that, you're like, okay, yeah, but did not understanding that that camera actually has 10 other things it can also do. But if you just hear and receive that from the requester and you're like, well, I gave you what you wanted. Yeah, well, but you didn't tell me about the other seven things. So. And those were things you have to work through. But I mean, that's typical project management. But definitely allowing for that would have been, would have been great next time.
[00:41:52] Speaker A: In another 13 years yeah, maybe.
Diana, again, thanks so much for your insight. Thank you so much for being on the call today. And thank you for being a client of Key Code Media.
[00:42:04] Speaker C: Thank you. I appreciate it. It was a pleasure working with the team for sure.
[00:42:08] Speaker A: Thanks for watching Broadcast to post Please.
[00:42:09] Speaker C: Make sure to subscribe to the podcast to receive future episodes, follow keycode media.
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[00:42:19] Speaker C: Post production technology content. See you next time folks.
