Handover: Managing project information when the show's over
We obviously talk a lot on this blog about the benefits of using collaboration systems during projects, but what about at a project's end? The Handover process - where all the documentation relating to the built asset is transferred from the project team to the client/developer ready for operations - is an important process when a project draws to a close.
A comprehensive handover is essential as it provides operators and those responsible for defects liability with the data they require for asset management - from where electrical cables and gas pipes are positioned to the specifications of door frames and lighting fixtures. If there are flaws in this process, clients can end up wasting time and money trying to source or reproduce documentation, and can be exposed to risks relating to health and safety and other compliance standards. Over the years, I've heard numerous horror stories about this data being missing, and new fit-out contractors drilling around live utility cables - not good!
We're working on a large, multi-faceted development in the Persian Gulf at the moment which involves several separate packages as part of one master development. Combined, the project teams have generated several million drawings, documents, tenders and correspondence items, which, under the developer's insistence, have been stored and managed using a collaboration system. Now that contracts are coming to an end, this is looking like a very smart move.
Because all data from across the program has been managed using a collaboration system, the developer is finding the usually fraught handover process a relative breeze. For the first time, they are sure that all the participants are able to contractually complete the formal handover. For them, this means three things: 1) All contractual conditions are met, 2) All documentation, from as-builts to variation requests, is stored in one secure, online archive, and 3) Document retention regulations are followed in a very cost effective manner. And this has all been done at the click of a button, with no need for vast paper archives.
Labels: Good practice
A SaaSy Salesforce.com video
Over the past few years, Salesforce.com have undoubtedly been the leading lights in furthering awareness of the Software as a Service (SaaS) model and, more recently, Cloud Computing (this article explains the subtle difference between the two).
Yesterday, one of their sales reps sent me a link to an excellent video which, in just a few minutes, clearly lays out the benefits of using applications delivered using the cloud computing (and SaaS) model, compared to self-hosted software.
Their arguments are as applicable to our business (web-based collaboration for construction and engineering projects) as to theirs (customer relationship management solutions). We often get asked by companies why they should use a SaaS-delivered project collaboration system when they (or their head contractor) already have a document management system. So, if you want to get a fun and easy-to-digest overview of why SaaS-delivered systems are the best way to go, this video is a good place to start.
Labels: Technology
A good night for Aconex
Pleased to say that our company, Aconex, won three categories at the 2009 iAwards, Australia's main awards for the information & communications technology industry. Having made it through our state round, we won the best Industry Application, Exporter of the Year and the overall 'best of the best' award (which has the nice title of 'Inspiration Award'). Great for our business and a good reflection of the high demand for construction collaboration technology globally.
I was in Dubai at the time so couldn't attend, but company co-founder and Built On Collaboration blogger Rob was there to collect the awards. Our video, which was played when we won, has been posted on YouTube and can be viewed below (in case you're wondering, a definition of "multi-tenanted SaaS" can be found here!).
Labels: Technology
New service for firms looking to enter Libya
As mentioned in this previous post, it has been interesting how much Libya has been popping up in the news lately. There's an article in Building Global (the online version of the UK's Building magazine) which reveals details of a new service, provided by The South East Centre for the Built Environment, aimed at helping small British construction firms to enter the Libyan market.
The service includes introductions to other firms and advice about how to set up business in the country, how to obtain visas and how to repatriate revenues. At £13,000 (around US$20,000) it's not cheap, but apparently they've already had expressions of interest from about 45 companies.
Why the interest? According to the Libyan British Business Council, Libya's GDP is predicted to grow 8% from 2008 to 2011 and it has a massive construction program underway, including a £100bn infrastructure works plan.
In the Related Articles section underneath, there are articles about Italy committing $5 billion to support Libya's construction and infrastructure projects over the next 25 years, and details of Libya's plans to build a $5 billion economic city for oil and gas businesses. The latter is part of Libya's plan to massively increase oil production and begin exporting gas. It aims to nearly double its crude oil production by 2012.
Interesting times in Libya. We're engaged on some massive housing, education and infrastructure programmes there, including some major airport developments in Tripoli, Benghazi and Sebha. Definitely a market we'll be keeping an eye on.
Labels: Global trends
Managing project correspondence: Want to save 25 seconds per mail?
Along the same lines as my recent 'Man vs Machine: The Race to Revise Documents' post, one of our clients has taken out their stopwatch and done some research into the time it takes to perform common information management-related tasks using an online collaboration system compared to using their internal document management tool and email.
The results make interesting reading and (unsurprisingly) reinforce the greater efficiencies of using a collaboration system. When comparing how long it took to file a project mail (e.g. an RFI, advice, notice, instruction, variation, etc.) using each system, here's what they found...
| Internal document management tool & Email | Online collaboration system | |
| Step 1 | Read email in Outlook | Read email |
| Step 2 | Read attachment | Read Attachment |
| Step 3 | (Switch to document management system) | - |
| Step 4 | Navigate to the folder the email should be stored in | - |
| Step 5 | Select to import email | - |
| Step 6 | (Switch back to Outlook) | - |
| Step 7 | Drag email from Inbox into document management system folder | - |
| Step 8 | Delete email from Outlook | - |
| Time Taken | 32 seconds | 7 seconds |
Table: Filing a received mail using an internal document management system and email compared to using an online collaboration system
Because collaboration systems automatically index and archive all incoming mail through one central platform, the process is six steps and 25 seconds lighter. When that is multiplied across dozens of mails a day and an entire project team, it's easy to see where the gains in efficiency lie.
A couple of our clients have done other 'side by side' comparisons on tasks such as drawing review and searching for info, so I'll try to track down the data and add one or two more. Anyone out there heard about or done similar comparisons?
Labels: Technology
Getting New Delhi Airport ready for takeoff
Our marketing guys have just put together a case study about the New Delhi Airport Terminal 3 project's use of our collaboration system. It's an interesting project due to its size (US$2 billion), scale (world's 2nd largest terminal) and dispersed project team (of the 70 firms engaged 45 are based outside India). But what's remarkable about this development is the schedule they're working to so that it's completed in time for the 2010 Commonwealth Games.The construction timetable has been compressed to just 39 months. To give you some comparisons, the new terminal at Changi Airport in Singapore took 76 months and delivery of London Heathrow Airport's T5 and Beijing's Terminal 3 each took 60 months.
With time pressures like that, it's hardly surprising that they didn’t want document and correspondence management to slow them down and so (wisely) selected to use a web-based collaboration system. From what I hear, they've made good use it, already managing around 100,000 documents and mails a month on the system.
As part of the case study, the head contractor, Larsen & Toubro, had some interesting things to say about the challenges they faced - such as distributing documents to over a thousand engineers, limitations of email, trying to manage 500 mail items a day and needing to access files on the move - and how using a collaboration system helped solve these issues.
Maybe I'm being biased but I think it would have been near impossible to complete this project to that timetable without the use of a collaboration system. The Indian government is looking to fast-track a number of infrastructure projects (particularly much-needed road developments), so hopefully they'll look to New Delhi Airport as an example to follow.
Labels: Project profiles
Stimulating reading
Like many companies in the AEC industry, we're looking with interest at the stimulus package announcements and hoping that each one has a sizeable chunk allocated to infrastructure investment.
Nearly all major economies have announced at least one package so I thought that, to get an idea of where the opportunities lie, it would be interesting to compare them and see what they've put on the table for infrastructure spend.
The figures below are all in US dollars and have been converted using current rates. The $265 billion stimulus package put forward by the European Union is additional to these figures.
| Country | Stimulus Announced | % of GDP | Infrastructure Investment | Types of projects |
| United States | Feb 09: $825bn | 6.0% | $120 billion | Transport: $46bn Education: $21bn Energy: $31bn Water: $6bn |
| Canada | Dec 08: $30bn | 2.4% | $12 billion | Public works: $4bn Green Energy: $1bn Schools: $2bn |
| Germany | Jan 09: $63bn Nov 08: $42.2bn | 2.2% 1.3% | $33 billion | Education/Health: $10bn Roads: $1.3bn Rail: $850m |
| France | Dec 08: $35.3bn | 1.4% | $23 billion | Housing: $2.4bn Public works: $5.3bn |
| Spain | Nov 08: $14.7bn | 1.1% | $10.3 billion | Public works: $10.3bn |
| United Kingdom | Nov 08: $29.2bn | 1.1% | $4.5 billion | Public works: $4.5bn |
| Australia | Oct 08: $26bn | 3.4% | $15 billion | Education: $10.5bn Housing: $4.7bn |
| Japan | Dec 08: $687.7bn Aug 08: $125.7bn | 15.7% 2.9% | $53 billion | Green Energy: $16.3bn Public works: $26.4bn Health: $17.3bn |
| China | Nov 08: $585.6bn | 18.0% | $219 billion | Housing: $4.1bn Regional works: $4.6bn Education/Health: $2.5bn Public works: $4bn |
From these numbers, nearly $2.5 trillion will be spent by these countries alone to try and get the global economy back on track. What's interesting to note is that countries joined to the WTO's 'Government Procurement Agreement' can bid on each other's projects. For example, companies from the United States, Canada, the European Union, Hong Kong, Iceland, Israel, Japan, Korea, Liechtenstein, Singapore, and Switzerland are all entitled to bid on infrastructure developments in each others' countries, significantly opening up the opportunities worldwide. Companies from Mexico, Australia, and Chile can also bid on projects, as these countries have free-trade agreements with most of those countries.
Although the jury is still out on the extent and timing of any impact of this stimulus spending on the wider economy, the construction industry has certainly taken note. The past few months have seen a deluge of conferences and seminars in most major markets aimed at helping firms understand where the opportunities lie. Aconex has recently sponsored and attended two of these - in Sydney and Houston - and the mood of participants in both cases was cautiously optimistic about the outlook for the infrastructure sector over the next 12 months.
Labels: Global trends
Information 100 times faster
Following on from my post last month about the impact of internet speed on construction project productivity, I was pleased to hear last week's announcement that Australia's federal Government will lead the build of a national, fibre-to-the-home broadband network. At an estimated cost of up to AU$43 billion (making it Australia's largest ever infrastructure project), the new service will deliver speeds up to 100 times faster than currently available.
On a national level, it's estimated that, when fully operational in 7-8 years, the new service is likely to increase Australia's gross domestic product by 1.4 per cent over a 5-6 year period, adding about AU$15 billion to the economy.
Naturally, my main interest is in the impact it will have on construction collaboration technology and project delivery. The new service will mean that users of online document management and collaboration tools in Australia will potentially be able to access, download and share their files up to 100 faster, leading to significant efficiency and productivity gains. This is an exciting prospect and should help to further drive uptake of these systems.
Labels: Global trends, Technology
Managing mails: Outlook v Collaboration Tools (revisited)
I read an interesting blog post from the folks at 37signals that got me thinking again about the age-old Outlook vs. collaboration tool debate. Fellow Built on Collaboration blogger Leigh Jasper has previously discussed this in three parts (here, here and here), and it seems that we're not alone in the struggle to get users converted into appreciating the value of web collaboration over email.
For those that don't know them, 37signals has a pretty cool (and openly basic) project management/collaboration tool called Basecamp. They built their web application with the view that email doesn't cut it as a collaboration tool for people involved in projects (any type of project not only construction).
In the article they say that one of the common issues their customers face with their application when trying to get other project team members onboard is the fact that they keep using email instead because it's what they understand. Unlike the larger collaboration tool vendors, 37signals don't have the luxury of a large team of Customer Service staff to help projects get over this hump so it's obviously going to be harder for them. Having said that, all collaboration tool vendors will have faced a user (or 500) that can't get past the fact that they have to login to the system to send correspondence rather than just firing off another email from Outlook.
There is no easy solution to this whole issue but I think it starts with a greater awareness and appreciation of the power of how collaboration systems manage mail. The searching/reporting/tracking built into these systems easily beats anything you can do with Outlook. Email also doesn't offer the threading capability to easily track the history of a discussion. And clearly the ability for collaboration tools to transmit an almost unlimited number and size of files between parties far exceeds the standard email capability.
Most of our key clients get the power of our Mail module and mandate the use of the Aconex system for all project-related correspondence. They value the openness and visibility, the concept of filing upon sending (rather than relying on filing/archiving upon receipt) and also the searching & tracking capabilities built in. I'm sure there are many other companies in the construction world with a similar view. Is this correct? I'd be interested to know your experiences with managing mails using a collaboration tool instead of Outlook. Also, what's missing from collaboration tools to help kill the Outlook debate?
Labels: Good practice, Technology
Being disciplined
For any organization with more than one employee, you can safely guarantee that its staff are going to have different approaches and levels of discipline towards filing their communication and documents. More often than not, this places inter-team retrieval of information somewhere between difficult and impossible. This week I was pleasantly surprised to hear that one of the largest developers in the Middle East is tackling this challenge by creating a key performance indicator for their project management staff which measures usage of their online collaboration tool.
The point here is that at a corporate level they realize the only way to ensure they are building and maintaining a complete and accurate project record is to insist that their people use the collaboration system. As far as KPIs go I reckon this one really makes sense for all concerned. For the company, they're ensuring that they have a full audit trail which reduces their risk exposure. For the individual, it's no extra work, and all of their filing is done in "real time" which arguably reduces their workload as well.
Labels: Good practice
