Can technology reduce the cost of managing construction project’s information?

Regardless of the level of governance and control an organization wants to enforce on their construction projects, technology can drastically reduce the cost of managing the everyday information generated from the different events, actions and communications. This article will only address the savings that could result from improving the efficiency of generating, capturing, administering, reporting and sharing this everyday information.

Those potential savings will be limited for performing the following tasks which are common to any construction project regardless of its size, type, location or value. Those tasks are:

1.      Project Filing System

2.      Creating Project Communication Records

3.      Distributing and Sharing Project Communication Records

4.      Tracking Project Communication Records

5.      Reporting Project Communications Performance

Project Filing System

Regardless what project you are involved with, there will be always a filing room where folders that have the project documents and records. Those include the contract drawings, workshop drawings, as-built drawings, incoming and outgoing correspondence, daily reports, transmittals, inspection forms, authorities’ approvals, proposed change orders, change orders, safety incidents, permits, request for information, weekly progress reports among many others.

Using a Project Management Information System (PMIS) like PMWeb, the organization can duplicate the filing system structure and upload a soft copy of those documents. Those could be scanned documents, PDF files and other type of electronic files. For those uploaded documents, attributes that can provide better information like the location, bid package, category of work, specification section and others. Information that will of great value when there is a need to report or locate those documents. PMWeb also allows sending notifications when new documents are uploaded into a folder as well as keeping the versions of all electronic files that were updated.

In addition, the project team can add remarks and comments on those uploaded documents where the comments made by each team member will be stored in different layer that can be reported on. The redline option allows adding text notes, shapes and stamps to the selected project document.

Having those documents uploaded on PMWeb document management repository, the project team members can search and locate those documents by giving the key words to be searched for. Something that project team members will spent hours if not days in trying to locate records or documents that are related to some event.

The savings in the team effort that an organization can attain from being able to locate needed documents when needed could be of great value specially when there is a need to locate those documents in a very short time. Having the documents in a document management system will also be of great value when those are archived and handed over at the end of a project.

Creating Project Communication Records

Almost every construction project has some kind of pre-defined templates for daily reports, RFI, non-conformance report, permits, inspection among others. Those forms are usually created in MS Excel, MS Work or PDF where the user has the option to print the form and fill it manually or fill it on the electronic template, save it and print it. Some of those electronic templates might have dropdown values to ensure that the project team member use the predefined values. The user also needs to attach the supportive documents that are referenced in the project communication. Depending on the project’s requirements the project team members might need to have 3 or 4 sets of those documents when the communication record is submitted.

Using PMWeb PMIS, most of the input forms needed in project communication comes ready out of the box. Those include RFI, Meeting Minutes, Safety Incidents, Daily Reports, Transmittals, Submittal, Potential Change Order, Change Order, Progress Invoice among many others. Those forms have fields that are designed to pick data form predefined lists including WBS, Activity ID, Phase, Specification Category among others that can be made common to all other forms used in PMWeb across all projects managed using PMWeb.

Of course, input forms are not limited to what comes ready out of the box, but they could include any other forms in any other language to capture the additional information needed on the project. For example, organizations can develop extensive site inspection forms that are specific for each building system like structural, mechanical, fire protection, electrical among others. The PMWeb form builder provides a unique What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG) capability to create the form that is identical to what the organization is used to have.

The output communication form that will be formally submitted to the communication recipient can be designed in form and format to be aligned with the organization’ color branding, logo as well as the specific project requirements. In other words, although there will be a single input form, but the output form could vary to meet the specific project’s communication requirements.

As stated earlier, some if not most of the project communications require supportive documents to be attached to that communication. For example, the transmittal form would require the drawings, manuals, schedules and other type of documents to be attached to the communication. Using PMWeb, those documents are usually uploaded into the document management repository to ensure that no project related documented is not accounted for.

Distributing and Sharing Project Communication Records

After creating the project communication, the next step is to send this communication to the intended recipient as per the project responsibility assignment matrix (RAM) which will detail for each project communication who will issue, who review will review, who could be consulted, who needs to be kept informed and who is authorized to approve. The authorization to approve could be linked to specific attribute of the communication such as if the communication could result in additional cost or extension of time among many others.

The RAM is usually detailed into a workflow to capture the sequence for submitting, reviewing and approving the communication where multiple reviewers and approvers could be involved. The workflow also help to detail the workflow branches that are linked to reviewer and approval authorities’ levels. Those workflows can prove to be of great challenge if the project team member wants to manually decide on who should be next on workflow step and ensure that branch conditions are fully respected.

 Using PMWeb PMIS, workflows can be created for each communication form taking into consideration the sequence for the submit, review and approval steps. The workflows can include all the conditions that could affect the workflow branches. In addition, PMWeb allows to delegate and replace users already assigned to a workflow if there are not available.

For each step in the workflow, we can assign the time allotted for the step, what actions the step owner can perform, what will happen if the document was approved or rejected along with details on the objective of the step. PMWeb also allows to use to identify if multiple reviewers assigned to a step need all to approved the document or anyone can approve the document.

The savings of the effort needed to submit and share project communication that PMWeb would bring would bring by automating the workflow steps is massive even if we exclude the savings of rectifying the mistakes of sending project communications into the wrong the channels.

Tracking Project Communication Records

Many organizations continue to use MS Excel as the method to track the different project communications. The effort needed to maintain those records in a near-real time status can prove of great challenge as unless the communication record is available then those logs cannot be updated. In addition, with the wide variety and volume of project communications, the effort needed to extract the content and update those records not only needs a lot of effort to add the data but also to review and verify that the data is complete and correct. RFI, Meeting Minutes, Submittals, Correspondence, Safety, Daily Reports and Inspection are examples of the many forms that each organization must maintain a log of.

When PMWeb PMIS Forms are used to capture the information associated with those communication forms and workflows are used to circulate the form and attachments among those who are involved in submitting, reviewing and approving those forms, having real-time logs of all those transactions is a default option. The organization can design the output form in any desired format. The report could define the way the data will be sorted and grouped, what data fields to display and if there is need to add filters to limit the data to be displayed. It is possible for the same type of project communication, say RFIs, to different tabular and graphical reports to display the information.

Reporting Project Communication Performance

One of the requirements of managing any construction project is for the project team to have clarity on the performance and status of project communications. Again, the trend is that those organizations will extract this data from the MS Excel log files and apply formulas to measure and report on their selected Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). The issue is that the log file created in MS Excel is usually designed to display the current data and therefore creating trend charts is not possible due to the absence of historical data. The other challenge is that usually there are different files for each log that could be managed by different project team member. Consolidating those tables and KPIs in a single table can prove to be of high risk due to file size and the ensuring that all logs are received at the same time to produce the near-time dashboard.

For PMWeb users, this is not an issue as the project communication dashboard will provide real-time status of the selected project communication. The measures, metrics and KPIs are defined once and they will be calculated automatically when the project communication records get created or progressed. Historical and past periods data are automatically stored in the database to enable creating trend and growth charts. The dashboard can be designed in a format that will be aligned with the organization branding and reporting requirement.

The dashboard is usually designed to be a drilldown dashboard which means that a user can drilldown from this dashboard to the log of a specific communication record, say Meeting Minutes Log. For the Meeting Minutes log, the user can drill to the Meeting Minute output form for a specific Meeting Minutes record. The user can then drilldown to Meeting Minute form itself and review the documents attached to that form as well as other PMWeb records that had been linked to the same meeting minute. This traceability is impossible of MS Excel was the application used to manage the project communication.

Using PMWeb PMIS, the same approach will be followed for other project processes like those that relate to cost, schedule, quality, risk, procurement among others. Following the same drilldown approach, Senior Management who have access to projects portfolio dashboard can drilldown to a specific project. Then they can drilldown to desired management aspect whether it is project communication, cost, schedule, risk, procurement, quality among others.

Now even if an organization ignores the benefits of enforcing the best practices of governance, transparency and accountability when it comes to implementing professional project management processes, the benefits from improving the efficiency in capturing, communicating, tracking and real-time reporting the status and performance of those processes could be something worth looking at. It is estimated that almost 60% of the effort of senior project management team is wasted on capturing, reviewing, analyzing and sharing information that is crucial for them to have the insight to make informed decisions. Using an integrated project management information system (PMIS) like PMWeb could drastically reduce this wasted effort and create massive benefits by reviewing, analyzing and learning from this massive BIG DATA that an organization can capture across their portfolio of projects.