Transparency, though sometimes elusive, is a key component of a successful project. Why? Because transparency means ensuring that the project team, stakeholders, and owners are all making decisions based on the same information; information that they can trust.
This requires everyone to have access to the same comprehensive project data. Transparency means all interested parties resting assured that they can accurately assess project health at any time, with an elevated level of confidence in their personnel and systems. Yet having a consumable, extensive, timely, and accurate picture of your projects can only be achieved through connectivity.
When data can freely flow among systems, it eliminates additional efforts that need to be made by the project team to ensure that data is delivered to the right hands or entered into the correct systems. This also speeds up the process of getting the right information to the right people. Connectivity of systems allows for connectivity of people. Connectivity among people will significantly contribute to a project’s success, as well as ensure that there is a feeling of transparency across the project; for the team and for invested stakeholders.
The Necessity of Reliable Communication
Communication is a necessary piece of and for true transparency. This means you must have open communication among project teams. This can be made possible by using the right technology and connected systems. Communication could even be as simple as access to the data that someone may need to make decisions. What matters most is that when stakeholders know that they are using the same information that the project team is, it can go a long way toward building a relationship based on transparency.
To ensure that information is actively shared across your project, it must be easily stored and consumed. Staff and craft must also find value in the technology rather than perceive it as an inconvenience because what you might have chosen turns out to be clunky and unintuitive.
Platforms that do the work of making the dataflow connections on the back end alleviates a lot of time and effort that your team will need to spend making sure they communicate with other team members. This will ensure that any and all information they may need is available within a system they can access.
By leveraging connected technologies to pass information across a project, you are also removing the liabilities that come with relying on physically handing off paper records or even worse, word of mouth communication with no traceability. The same goes for communicating with project stakeholders and owners.
Connecting Your Stakeholders
When they are also utilizing the same platforms, the passing of documents and other communication becomes more dependable, consistent, and much simpler. Sometimes, connected systems can even enable automatic updates to be sent directly to the appropriate audiences.
Access to information is the first step, but for your project team and stakeholders to have the feeling of transparency they also need to be able to have confidence in the data they are consuming to continue to believe in the system they are using. Timeliness of your information will go a long way to help consumers of the data trust in the system.
Luckily, a connected platform can produce readable data to consumers in a matter of hours or days whereas more manual, disconnected processes can take weeks, or even months to produce comparable reporting. More immediate visibility into facets of the project such as productivity, for instance, can allow you to make the right decisions at the right time to ensure you are avoiding any big surprises come project review time.
Building Data You can Trust
The other element of trusting your data is accuracy. Connected systems are more likely to produce accurate data because they require less human intervention when sending the data back and forth between processes. They also eliminate multiple points of data entry for the same information. Not only that, but when the data is accurate, you can feel confident sharing it with stakeholders.
If stakeholders feel as though they are receiving inaccurate data from project teams, or multiple siloed systems, their confidence in the project data and perception of the relationship among project teams, stakeholders, and owners could incur a severe negative impact.
Integrity of information is imperative to project transparency. Why? Because inaccurate data can cause feelings of mistrust not only in your people, but in your processes or systems. This is something very important to consider when evaluating manual processes across your organization.
Once everyone has access to the data they need, it is important that users find it trustworthy to fully feel as though there is actual transparency across the project. This is a unique benefit of a connected platform. Having timely access to information combined with the security of knowing the data is accurate will establish confidence in the system and team.
And, if project teams and stakeholders have confidence in the systems they are using, the data they can consume about the project will truly give them the sense that they know exactly what is happening. This will then allow for them to make the right decisions for the outcome of the project.
Connected systems provide great benefits when working to achieve project transparency. Passing information from process to process or team to team with the press of a button ensures consistency, proving more reliable than relying on the effort of physically passing documents from hand to hand.
Ready to take a deeper dive? Download the full report here, then schedule a one-on-one consultation to find out how InEight can help you succeed in your construction digitalization and modeling journey.
