TonicDM founder Reg Prentice explains why continuity gets harder at scale.
One thing I’ve seen over and over in AEC firms is that as they grow, they start to lose context.
A project moves offices.
A team member leaves.
Someone asks a question like:
“What exactly did we send to the GC before that change order went out?”
And no one is quite sure.
Not because someone made a mistake but because the way most firms manage project communication doesn’t scale well. It relies on people remembering, forwarding, or digging things up from inboxes. That works fine until it doesn’t.
The budget is in your ERP.
The drawings are in your system.
But the decision, the one that changed the design, or clarified the scope, or got approved late one night, is probably in someone’s inbox.
If that person is gone, or if they didn’t file the email just right, the context goes missing.
And without context, even good data loses its meaning.
This isn’t really an IT problem. It’s not about folders or better tagging systems.
It’s about whether your firm can hold onto what it already knows, without needing someone to reassemble the story.
Because that’s what often happens. A team spends hours—or days—trying to piece together what was decided, when, and why. People remember things differently. Files get renamed. Threads go missing.
The moment you need clarity the most is usually the moment it’s hardest to get.
When a firm is small, these things feel manageable. But as firms add more projects, more offices, and more complexity, the gaps start to show.
If your systems rely on individuals to hold everything together, that creates risk. Not just legal risk, though that’s part of it, but continuity risk.
Risk that the next team, or the next generation, can’t see what the last one did.
We didn’t build TonicDM to be a better filing cabinet.
We built it to retain the decisions that shape your work, automatically, with context, and without requiring people to change how they work.
Because good people forget things.
And even well-managed projects need a better way to remember.
We work with firms of all sizes—including those managing thousands of projects across distributed teams—who want to protect their knowledge as they scale.
- Reg
