Reaching the next level

DPM Energy Case Study

Preparing a small business to scale rapidly and engage millennial team members

DPM Energy is a niche engineering firm that specializes in infrastructure renewal, urban development, and beautification projects.

Nick Iozzo, CEO of DPM Energy, built the company to function differently from past employers he’d had. Over the years, he had learned a lot about what works and what doesn’t work to engage and motivate his people.

“A big driving force behind creating DPM was creating a company I was happy to be a part of” Nick says.

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With a younger staff, many of them recent graduates, Nick puts a lot of focus on engaging and motivating his team. One of the biggest challenges Nick faces is quickly training his team and getting them up to speed on the specialized skill sets needed for DPM Energy’s niche work.

As DPM Energy prepared to rapidly scale their operations, Nick was searching for a tool to help keep his team engaged and manage their projects more effectively. He hoped to find a solution that could:

  • Help teams better track their work autonomously and easily collaborate and interact with colleagues to get their work done
  • Help Supervisors and Directors better track what work was being done as the number of projects grew
  • But most importantly for DPM Energy, enhance the social and engagement aspects of their working environment by enabling closer bonds between the team members

After reading a profile of Sensei Labs in The Globe and Mail, what struck Nick about SenseiOS® was how it can be used to create a more dynamic, fluid way of communicating and interacting with staff. This set it apart from the simple task or project-management functionality that he was seeing in other solutions on the market.

DPM Energy prepares for rapid growth

With goals like growing revenue by 100% and staff by 65% in the next 3 years, all while maintaining its culture, it’s no surprise that DPM Energy gets a lot of use out of the Tasks and Connect apps within SenseiOS.

Connecting the next generation

Connect is SenseiOS’ social feed, giving everyone a shared space to share updates, news, ask questions, recognize great work, and like and comment on posts.

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DPM Energy uses Connect to engage their team by:

Teams share their pride of work: Connect gives the team a central place to show off their pride in their work. They post updates about past projects, including invites to events that are held at project locations, like Skating Days at Bentway Park, and highlight how their work contributes to the broader project success. They’ve also uploaded custom cover pictures to highlight some of DPM’s past projects, giving team members another way to show pride in their work.

Nick's profile page with custom cover image
Innovation Break post on Connect

Profile pictures: Team members get to know and recognize each other as the company continues to grow and add more team members. Seeing everyone’s smile in their profile pictures brings personality and life to their digital workspace.

Social celebrations: Posts welcome new hires, celebrate birthdays and promotions, and wish people well before they depart. These posts help team members keep up-to-date on company news, events and culture days.

Spreading innovation: DPM Energy’s Marketing Coordinator, Alicia, posts a special Innovation Break series, sharing news about innovations from across all different industries to inspire an innovative spirit and out-of-the-box thinking across the company.

Giving tasks consistency and transparency

With a high proportion of new hires and recent graduates, getting the team on the same page and standardizing process across every new project was a high priority for DPM Energy as they got set to scale.

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A Kudos for Sunny

SenseiOS helped DPM Energy standardize their processes and get new team members up-to-speed faster by:

Templating Tasks: Typical projects at DPM Energy have a set of recurring tasks that need to occur. By using task templates, the team was able to codify their established best practices. When activated at the launch of a project, these repeatable templates automatically generate a list of tasks and assign them to the right people, ensuring accountability and dependability for every project.

Supporting consistency and learning: DPM Energy wanted to onboard and train their new team members quickly. Task templates gave new team members an easy and consistent way to learn the company’s processes, cultural nuances, and tools and platforms – including learning about SenseiOS itself!

Insights for leadership: SenseiOS gives DPM Energy’s leadership team real-time access to data and information that helps them understand project progress and engage with their direct reports much more effectively

“The bulk of our tasks are now being created automatically, which makes life a lot easier. It helps us develop routine very easily. Especially with new hires – they get to see the same tasks over and over again and build muscle memory on what has to be done for a project.”
Nick IozzoCEO, DPM Energy
Nick's profile picture

Know How is the key to success

Know how is a key differentiator and core value at DPM Energy. Their industry knowledge – including knowledge of the approval authorities, the regulations, and how to efficiently move projects forward in a complex ecosystem – has helped them be successful.

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Know.How, a core value at DPM Energy

DPM Energy nicknamed the SenseiOS Academy app, a lightweight learning management system, as “Know.How.” internally to align with one of their core values. They use Know.How to:

Centrally store learning content: As they scale their business, Know.How. has given new hires and long-time team members on-demand access to a robust knowledge base of digital content – from recorded Lunch & Learns hosted by their own team members, to standard procedures and documents. It’s now faster than ever to onboard a team member and have them add value their customers.

Propagate institutional knowledge: Nick had experienced, in previous organizations, how knowledge silos can cause confusion and lead to missed opportunities. When one person holds institutional knowledge, they become the go-to person for a task, this causes bottlenecks and slow project progress. From lunch and learns to formal training modules – DPM Energy is using Academy to get their knowledge out of the heads of individual team members and into the practices of the entire team, spreading the company’s core tenet of Know How. Having the content accessible, on-demand, and in the best format to convey the given information, means that training content is engaging, relevant, and available the moment it’s needed.

Academy in DPM Energy's The Wire instance

Set up for future growth and success

Looking to the future, Nick sees SenseiOS as playing a key role in helping his team differentiate themselves from the other players in the market. “The happier my staff are, the more productive they will be, the smarter they’re going to get, the better they collaborate – it just makes for a better organization. A happier, engaged staff translates to a higher caliber of engagements for our clients.”

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