When it comes to capital projects, team collaboration is critical to ensuring more predictable project outcomes. This is the essence of integrated project delivery.
But how do you achieve the right level of collaboration you need for a successful integrated delivery process? Today, construction companies and project owners alike are recognizing the answers lie in taking advantage of the right tech to help them build greater transparency and collaboration throughout the duration of their builds.
Let’s look at some of the ways that technology, particularly an integrated platform solution, can support a more collaborative approach and improve your integrated project delivery processes.
Promoting data standardization
With capital projects amassing an enormous amount of rich, actionable data throughout their life cycles, collaborative project teams need clarity around how to make sense of it all, and what demands the most attention. Integrated platforms enable that data to share a common structure, providing a consistency in how the information is presented and therefore interpreted by all team members.
This standardization makes it easier to trust the data so those teams and stakeholders can more confidently manage it and rely on it when having discussions around what the connected data is showing about a project’s status and progress. Looking ahead, it then becomes possible to apply those trusted data-driven insights to delivery of similar future projects.
Streamlining key functions for integrated project delivery
Rather than focusing on piecing together function-specific technologies, an integrated approach focuses on insights teams can gain through an all-encompassing platform that connects, organizes and processes the data those functions produce.
These insights come from easily digestible reports and dashboards that draw on ongoing earned value metrics, such as schedule performance index (SPI) and cost performance index (CPI), that deliver real-time performance progress. They also come from risk-informed and risk-adjusted forecasts that incorporate historical data from the full construction life cycle of past projects — from estimating to commissioning — so teams can leverage them for improved outcomes on projects down the road.
Fostering creation of knowledge libraries
Data is too valuable to be used in isolation, relegated only to the project at hand. Instead, historical data, integrated with up-to-the-minute details generated throughout your capital projects, should be used to form a data-rich repository to become an ongoing source for project predictability that can be used over and over again.
Consider it a living library of institutional and project information that team members can refer to as they apply new learnings for improved risk identification and mitigation, forecasting accuracy, and performance for projects down the road. Being able to refer back to actual data for better outcomes makes more efficient use of their time and effort.
Advancing data transparency for integrated project delivery
Data transparency — right from the beginning of a project — is perhaps the most effective way to foster collaboration. In fact, successful integrated project delivery depends on it. This means having a view into the ongoing status and fluctuations of things like costs, schedules, forecasts, and site crew performance, for example.
Visibility into this kind of data answers questions common among project team members and stakeholders: What’s the status of a particular task — and the overall project? What’s left to be done? Are work scope, cost and schedule on track, ahead or behind goals?
Transparency into all of this integrated data also helps share decision making and problem solving among project teams, stakeholders and craftspeople, where each person contributes their unique expertise and perspective. This can make a difference when data indicates an occurring or developing risk (as indicated in a skewing SPI or CPI, for example), requiring a collaborative approach on creating a backup plan if none already existed or agreeing on a course of action.
Sharing the right data at the right time
Transparency is also about what data is shared, how and with whom. Integrated platforms can consolidate the vast amount of complex data a capital project produces and distill it into performance metrics dashboards and reports that break down the barriers to project information and status. One relationship being positively impacted by this level of reporting transparency is the owner-contractor relationship.
Proactively keeping owners apprised of progress on their projects — on-target, high-performing and underperforming areas — helps build trust between the two parties as well as confidence in the contractor’s ability to manage the build process. It even introduces a collaborative element, where the success of the project depends on shared responsibility and accountability.
Today, you need a collaborative model designed to make your capital projects more successful. To bring this model to life, consider InEight’s integrated platform solutions to connect data across all functions and among all project teams and stakeholders for a full 360° approach to managing and delivering your capital projects. Want to experience it for yourself? Request a demo for you and your team.
