Beyond Last Century’s Tools: Innovation in Firm and Project Management - 1.25 PDH (LA CES/non-HSW)

Recorded On: 10/13/2025

Emerging professionals seek firms that prioritize transparency and opportunities for growth, while firms seek a creative, diverse body of employees that push the boundaries of design. We will explore innovative tools and strategies that foster collaboration, flexibility, and diversity and ensure long-term success.

Learning objectives:

Learn how to use testing tools to assess staff personalities and strengths, fostering better teamwork, communication, and feedback methods in project and people management.
Evaluate alternative workflow management techniques that enhance collaboration and creativity without relying on traditional time-tracking methods.
Explore strategies for co-defining organizational values, engaging employees at all levels in decision-making, and leveraging diverse perspectives to strengthen company culture and operations.
Gain insights into maintaining project and firm profitability through financial transparency, revenue forecasting, and proactive decision-making strategies.

Sara Tie

Partner

Connect One Design

Sara has a passion for to celebrating and preserving the beauty of the West through thoughtful solutions that balance the needs of our delicate and nuanced landscapes with social, aesthetic, functional, and economic considerations. Sara founded Connect One Design in 2009 with Gyles Thornely, and has worked tirelessly to create and implement the practices that have made Connect One Design a successful team. Sara’s volunteer experience includes local alternative transportation commissions and volunteering with local adult ESL programs.

Susannah Ross, ASLA

Director

Agency Landscape + Planning

Susannah Ross, ASLA, Director at Agency Landscape + Planning, has spent over two decades managing complex urban and waterfront landscape design and construction. She is passionate about the design of public open spaces in urban settings. She enjoys exploring the potential of landscape design to enrich the daily life, health and well-being of both city dwellers and urban ecology, as well as to shape the core identity of a city. She welcomes the challenge of designing to meet the needs of a diverse set of interests in a complex physical context.

Maura Rockcastle, ASLA

Principal and Co-Founder

TEN x TEN

Maura is a landscape architect, co-founder, and principal of TEN x TEN. With a background in printmaking and sculpture, Maura balances a rigorous approach to leadership, project implementation, and design excellence with a conceptual sensibility rooted in process. Recognized as a national leader of design process innovation, adaptive reuse, and culturally significant landscapes, her projects have received national awards for design excellence, sustainability, and preservation. In 2015 she co-founded TEN x TEN to build a practice committed to horizontal co-authorship, radical transparency, and curiosity.