Saudi a silver lining?
There's obviously been a lot in the news recently about the effect the global economic crisis has had on the United Arab Emirates and Dubai in particular, so it's probably a good time to take a look at some of the other opportunities in the Gulf region. I recently mentioned how impressed I was with Bahrain, but this market, and even the UAE pales in comparison to the giant that is Saudi Arabia.
Construction Week Middle East editor, Rob Wagner, pondered in his recent issue whether Saudi could be a silver lining in the current financial crisis. As he puts it, "If there ever was a country that can survive the global crisis without so much as a bruise or paper cut, the Land of the Two Holy Mosques can pull it off."
The basis for this optimism is a new report from Jones Lang LaSalle, the world's leading real estate investment and advisory firm, which believes that Saudi's real estate market is set to grow significantly over the next four years.
In the report, titled "The Gulf's Powerhouse - Saudi Arabia's Real Estate Market," Saudi is highlighted as the primary driver in the region and potentially the best country in the Middle East for investors to plant money in hotels, commercial space and residential projects.
So what are the factors that make a place described by Lonely Planet as "an emblem of everything most inexplicable to the West" so attractive?
Massive economy and construction market
Saudi has the region's largest economy with a GDP of $608 billion - 20% more than the other GCC countries combined. This isn't gradual growth either, the country has seen GDP increase by an average of 15% per annum since 2002. It also has the region's largest construction market. For a quick taster, Arabian Business's 'Top Ten Saudi Construction Projects' is a real eye-opener.
Size and growth of population
At 27 million, Saudi has more than double the population of the rest of the GCC combined; it's also been the world's fastest growing large country over the past 10 years. In addition, its population is young (with around 45 percent of its people aged below 20) and urbanizing, which has helped drive the real estate market...
Largest real estate market in the GCC
Again Saudi is the region leader, with more commercial floor space than all of the other GCC countries combined. And these segments are set to grow. There is a major housing shortage, there is potential for new high-rise developments in CBD locations and the country is uniquely positioned to benefit from the expected growth in religious tourism over the next few years. This equates to more houses, more offices, more retail and more hotels.
Drive towards international-quality assets and facilities
For the first time in its existence, Saudi is committing major financial resources to housing and infrastructure. More than 285 civil construction projects worth in excess of $260 billion are currently underway or in design. The tens of billions of dollars being invested in educational facilities (part of a 25-year strategy) is hugely impressive and shows admirable purpose.
From our own experience, Saudi has been a tough market to operate in (red tape and unreliable internet connection being two of the main challenges). Whether it will become more appealing remains to be seen, there are certainly some exciting, ambitious projects in the pipeline.
Oh, and there's another big reason why Saudi is well cushioned from the global financial crisis: it has 25% of the world's oil reserves! As Rob Wagner concludes in his article, "There is no such thing as a sure thing. But Saudi Arabia may be the closet thing to it."
Labels: Global trends
Document numbering for Clients, Project Managers & Head Contractors
The industry as a whole has become pretty good at following document numbering conventions for drawings and other consultant-produced documentation. But when it comes to clients, PMs and head contractors, some tend to scratch their heads when thinking about how to number the documents they produce.
When you think about it, it shouldn't be a problem at all. Whether building a hospital, sports stadium, office tower or hotel, there will always be the same types of documents: monthly reports, OH&S reports, PCG meeting minutes, weekly design meeting minutes, project plan, master programme, risk register, budget and so on.
A strategy I've found useful to de-mystify numbering to Clients/PMs/HCs is to get them to produce a list of all the documents that they produce on a project. The list can then be categorized into document types (e.g. report, meeting minutes, programme, register, etc.) and numbered sequentially from say 001.
At this point the variables within a document number have been established. The rest is easy! The other typical elements of the number should be relatively constant, such as project code, organization code, zone (usually a 'site-wide' code for management companies), discipline (normally something like PM for project management), then document type, then sequential number.
The final step is to pre-register these documents. If companies can get all (or close to all) of their standard documents onto the collaboration system as early as possible then, when they actually produce that monthly report, they don’t have to face that fear of not knowing what the document number will be. They simply supersede the existing "place holder" and update the revision date and status.
Other benefits to pre-registering place holders for standard documents include:
- Improving organization within the team
- Having a defined set of deliverables
- Ensuring consistency
- Ensuring that the most important documents can be easily retrieved from a secure system
- Ability to marke sensitive documents (such as budgets and contracts) as confidential so that only the people nominated can see them.
These are real benefits, of the time-saving, efficiency-improving, protocol-complying and confusion-eliminating kind!
Labels: Good practice
Perfect time to get smart on infrastructure projects
An article in the business pages of The Age (Melbourne's main broadsheet newspaper) this week amusingly uses Bob the Builder to illustrate how the financial crisis has impacted the construction industry.
It's put that, whereas the previously optimistic Bob's catchphrase was "Yes we can" when asked whether he could dig it, build it or fix it, he may now need to qualify that with, "...but only if we can access the funds and transfer the risk to government." Not as catchy, but even Bob will have to ride this one out.
As mentioned in my recent post about Dubai's market, 'Decline in Dubai?', the silver lining in times like these is that it will give companies and governments a chance to better analyse and prioritise infrastructure projects.
If research by law firm Blake Dawson is anything to go by, this could be a very good thing. Their recent survey of the infrastructure industry found that a quarter of Australia's projects worth $1 billion or more experienced cost blow-outs of $200 million or more. Of smaller projects, one in five had cost overruns of more than 20% of their value. More than half of the respondents said that projects were not adequately defined in the first place leading to problems after contracts were signed. Clearly those with the purse strings need to be smarter about where the dollars are being invested.
The article concludes, 'Sound investment in infrastructure - which has been properly assessed and funded - will create jobs, stimulate the economy and help Australia play catch-up on the backlog of both major and minor pieces of much-needed infrastructure.'
I couldn't agree more and, as this will account for a large chunk of the construction and engineering industry's business over the foreseeable future, can only hope this thinking is echoed in many of the other markets that we're operating in.
Labels: Global trends
(Re)defining documents
In my previous post '(Re)learning to communicate', I wrote about how simplifying correspondence and communication can help determine what mail types to use on a project. For this post, I thought I'd turn my attention to documents.
Documents form an important part of any collaborative environment be it offline or, more importantly in our situation, online. Most collaboration tools allow a team to create a series of document 'types' that are used when documents are added to the system. These are fields in the database that allow a user to 'tag' each document with the appropriate type. The document can then be searched for using this tagged information. For example, commonly used doc types include: drawing, report, schedule, specification and so on.
As with mail types, the difficulty comes in getting a project team to agree on the set of document types. It's very easy for the list to become long and confusing, which can result in documents being incorrectly tagged, making searching a problem. To help avoid this, here are a few pointers to get the list of documents right...
Think high-level
It's important not to make the document types too detailed. The type should only broadly describe what the document actually is. We often see things like Report - Weekly or Specification - Electrical. This is too specific. The exception would be when large volumes of the document are expected, such as drawings. Here we would often want to separate regular drawings from say, shop drawings. But for most other types of document, unless the numbers are going to be high, life is a lot easier when the type is as general as possible.
Don't include information in the document type that should be somewhere else
Okay, so that recommendation is a a bit of a mouthful! The point here is that, with a collaboration tool, we can break the data relating to the document into smaller chunks (e.g. type, status, revision, title etc.). These chunks can then afford us very powerful cross-referenced searching and reporting abilities.
For example, imagine you were searching for a house for sale online. If all the information had been included in just a couple of database fields, it would make locating a property next to impossible. Instead each property has a whole host of data associated with it (location, number of bedrooms, price, car park spaces, etc.) in separate chunks. All of this can be searched on in any combination. It's the same idea with collaboration tools.
Avoid ambiguity
When creating the list of document types, the names should be obvious to everyone in the team. I find a good rule of thumb is that if a user spends more than 10 seconds looking at the list of deciding which one to pick, the list is either too long or too confusing (or both). If users are confused, there's a high chance they'll end up selecting the wrong type and this will result in searching and reporting capabilities being compromised.
So, the document type is one distinct field in the database. Keeping the various pieces of information that describe a document in separate fields is the secret to an efficient and well used system. On top of this, keeping the information in each field high level allows for more powerful and flexible searching and reporting.
Labels: Good practice
Open filing systems, why?
It's always confused me why some electronic document management systems have an 'open filing' approach where all project files are available at point of upload. A better model is one that requires the user to create a 'transmittal/transmission' of the documentation.
Whereas the open filing model is straightforward to use, it doesn't include the audit trail that a transmittal provides, where key transmission metadata can aid reporting and tracking (not to mention reduce the likelihood of disputes).
The second model also more closely simulates the paper-world view. Although having an open filing system provides an effective 'dumping ground' for documentation, this isn't what really happens on a project. There still needs to be an environment where each organization can store and manage its own data prior to release to the required project team. Because of this, there needs to be a location for all project documentation with the ability to selectively distribute them as and when required.
This is my view, but I'd be interested to hear examples of where open filing systems work.
Labels: Good practice
Going global the Woods Bagot way
A global architecture firm without a headquarters? That's the unusual business model that one our clients, Woods Bagot, has adopted.
This article in Australian e-newsletter SmartCompany outlines how this 139-year-old building design practice, has managed to build a business with 1,000 staff across 14 offices worldwide without a central head office. Could this be a new template as to how AEC firms go global? It's certainly working for them - turnover tripled last year.
Labels: Global trends
Decline in Dubai?
The article 'Brakes on for Dubai Market' in Australia's Architecture & Design magazine is the latest to flag a "bumpy ride" for Dubai's property market. Written from the perspective of how a dip would affect international companies operating in Dubai, it quotes a director of design firm Woodhead as saying that the drop off in work would lead to significant lay offs. Of course the big question facing firms operating in the region is whether this is an inevitable and short-term cooling, or whether it's the start of a more dramatic decline.
Morgan Stanley didn't make themselves overly popular with developers in August with their prediction that Dubai property prices would likely fall by 10% after years of unrelenting growth. This was largely based on the consultancy's view that developers are relying too heavily on "high end" projects at the expense of more affordable housing (which, as anyone who's tried to find accommodation in Dubai will tell you, is hard to argue).
I was in Dubai a couple of weeks back and, based on how things are looking for Aconex and what our clients are saying, it's looking more likely that this will be an inevitable stabilization of a market that was booming at an unsustainable rate. Over the past 6-8 weeks we haven't seen projects being cancelled so much as people holding off making decisions. This is starting to change and, over the past week or two, projects are getting the green light again.
Whereas there may be fewer of the extravagant, showpiece developments that the city has become synonymous with, there is still demand for realistically-priced housing. This will, in turn, drive the infrastructure projects that population growth in Dubai (not to mention the wider region) is crying out for. I think we'll see that these factors, combined with the Dubai's solid economy and banking system, should ensure that Dubai is still a highly attractive market for AEC firms to operate in.
Labels: Global trends
Building a document
We've just been engaged on an unusual project in the UK - for a start, there's not a crane, brick or piece of scaffolding in sight. Our system is going to be used as the collaborative platform for members of the Sustainable Environment Foundation as they put together their 'green paper'.
This Green Paper is an interesting project. It's a private sector charitable initiative that will report on how the construction industry can minimize its impact on climate change. Companies like BioRegional Quintain, Savills, Lend Lease and even Greenpeace and the WWF are putting the paper together and its findings will be handed over to government next year. All in all, it should be a highly significant report.
The Foundation was keen to use a collaboration tool to cut down on paper usage. It's widely agreed that collaboration tools cut the need for paper (in the 2006 NCCTP study 'Proving Collaboration Pays', 79% of the collaboration tool users surveyed said it reduced their need for paper documents and 91% said they spent less money on couriers and postage), although I don't know of any independent, quantitative comparisons of paper reduction between a project that is using a collaboration tool and one that isn't.
That said, it's encouraging that organizations like those in the Foundation see how collaboration tools can support sustainable practices.
Labels: Global trends, Project profiles
(Re)learning to communicate
Hi there, I'm an Implementation Consultant at Aconex and previously worked for another collaboration provider, CTSpace (formerly BuildOnline). My role involves working with the lead organizations on a project to determine how the collaboration tool is set up and configured to best match their project requirements. Project communication and determining which mail types to use is something that comes up on every project (and nearly always causes conflict) so I thought this would be a good topic to cover - I welcome your views!
A core aspect of any collaboration system is how the project team uses it to communicate. Most collaboration tools allow the configuration of various project mail types to suit the requirements of the team and the project - most importantly this may involve certain contractual obligations when it comes to how these communications are named and distributed.
Typically, the correspondence the team uses will include things like: Architect's Advice, Site Instruction, RFI (Request for Information), Client Advice etc. Part of the challenge when implementing a new project is getting the team to agree on the various types they really need. Discussions can often become confused as various team members explain how they think the team should communicate. This can easily result in a very long list of mail types, therefore making it difficult for a user to decide which mail type to use and also difficult to locate the various pieces of correspondence after they have been sent.
One approach that works well, and enables a more productive discussion resulting in a more appropriate list of mail types, is getting the team to think about the basics of communication. Sound simple? Well it is. No matter how we communicate (talking, phone, email, SMS etc.) we really only use three methods:
- Question or Request - Asking for or requesting information from someone
- Information or Advice - Providing information or advice to someone
- Instruction or Direction - Telling someone to do something
You can probably see where this is going. So for example, an RFI is obviously a question. A Payment Claim would be a request. A Bulletin would be information. Thinking in this way can help reduce duplication, confusion and it also helps document the processes that are invariably involved.
A typical process often begins with a question (e.g. an RFI). Obviously, a question requires a response and so this may come in the form of advice (e.g. PM Advice, Contractor Advice) or a more formal instruction (e.g. Contract Instruction, Principal's Direction). Getting back to the basics also forces us to think about 'closing the communication loop'. So for every request or question, there should be a corresponding response to answer (close) the question.
Terminology is also important where certain words like approval or notice may have contractual implications. But, whatever words are used the team should always understand what mail types should be used and when. Closing the loop must be inherent in this understanding otherwise communication routes will fall apart, leading to mistakes, delays and cost overruns. All this must be documented clearly and concisely and this is where agreeing on processes at the start of the project becomes crucial.
We are all exposed to communications from a multitude of sources and it's all too easy to become bogged down and to suffer from the proverbial 'information overload'. Looking at the basics of communication focuses the team on what's really important and it may even help us communicate more effectively in the world outside our projects.
Labels: Good practice
When widgets make the difference
Hi readers, this is my first post on this blog, so let me know what you think and what you'd like to hear more of. I'm the product manager at Aconex so tend to split my time between talking to clients about the needs they have around managing information on their projects, and talking to our tech guys to see if we can make it happen.
Something I came to realise pretty quickly in this role is that in terms of the development of collaboration tools, it's not always about the ground-breaking new modules that revolutionize industry practice; sometimes it's the smaller 'widgets' that can really make a difference and just make life easier for people on their projects.
A good example of this is a new bit of functionality we added onto Aconex today that improves how you view and search for Attributes. Attributes are the meta data fields, usually relating to a works package, area or phase of the project, that can be attached to documents and mails so that they are easier to retrieve. The new functionality rapidly filters the list of attributes available for selection when running a search or creating a new mail or document.
This new feature was added because a client of ours involved in large-scale engineering projects came to us recently looking for a solution to an issue that many of their staff faced many times a day.
Because of the scale of their projects, they have hundreds of options in the Attributes fields - I think the figure was about 280 in total - and trying to find and select one from these long, drop-down lists was very frustrating.
When we did some research into some other projects on our system, we found that this client was by no means alone...
- 122 of our projects had an Attributes list size (in the Mail or Documents module) in excess of 100 long
- 22 projects had an attributes list in excess of 200
- 4 projects had a list in excess of 300 attributes (ouch!)
Having set up a dummy project with 300 attributes to test it for ourselves, it was immediately obvious how frustrating it is to scroll down and scan through a list of 100s of options (which all look pretty similar) to find the one you want and select it.
The solution our guys came up with - an auto complete text box at the top of the Attributes list - should make things much easier. It's a simple, fast and intuitive approach that instantly shortens the list of options based on the filter criteria you enter. So, for example, if you're looking for an attribute containing the word 'Cement' from a list of 150 possible options, you start typing "Cem" and the list will immediately shrink to only display the attributes containing those letters. Sure beats scrolling down a list of 150 trying to find the one you need.
If a simple tool or widget like this has made life easier in an application you use regularly, I'd be interested to hear about it.
Labels: Technology
