Move your schedule and all project communication to the cloud
Moving all of your project information to a shared, live location in the cloud ensures that all stakeholders have access to the same data. By doing this, everyone gets an up-to-date picture of what exactly is happening on site. When armed with instant information, people on the ground can act instantly when a problem arises and resolve any issue before it expands out of proportion.
If your project data and communication are not made available to everyone in real time, valuable project information will become fragmented and “stuck” in different tools and formats, which causes misunderstandings, work stoppages, and construction disputes.
Use a construction-specific tool
Many project managers rely on WhatsApp, Excel, Messenger, phone calls and emails to communicate their progress to on-site teams. These tools are excellent for communicating simple messages, but in a complex project environment with multiple stakeholders and related activities, this type of fragmented communication can result in a lot of unnecessary administration and wasted time. The worst part? It causes confusion, making it impossible for people to collaborate efficiently and leaving them without a clear view of where they stand in terms of their individual tasks. Updates about bugs and restrictions reach the right people late, fueling delays and waste.
This is where a tool built specifically for team communication in construction comes in. Imagine if you had a tool that allowed you to connect all project stakeholders around the same live version of your program, where they could share real-time updates with each other. . By providing everyone with the same tool where they can easily communicate and share critical information, everyone can make informed decisions faster, avoid issues, and resolve issues early before they become threats to project delivery. Now you can have a proactive team instead of a reactive one.
Focus on preparation
Many project managers tend to lack focus on preparing for a construction project. There is still a lot of room for improvement, except in the case of external events outside the project manager's control, such as bad weather.
However, one essential thing to note: preparation does not begin or end with the launch of a work. Anticipation and preparation calculated around adjustments in delivery, orders, projects, decisions and workforce availability help mitigate and avoid issues and problems that may arise on site.
When relevant parties fail to plan and consider things together, problems arise. The same problems can occur when adequate work preparation is delayed, creating errors and last-minute work or rework.
An example would be having your prefabricated elements delivered late to site. This delay can greatly impact your project schedule. To avoid this problem in the future, you must bring together all interested parties (engineers, suppliers, buyers, etc.), discuss the cause of the problem, identify other future causes and implement different solution scenarios. By doing so, you establish a proactive problem-solving approach to project preparation and constraint resolution, giving you an edge in handling unexpected circumstances so they don't end in disaster.
Standardize as much as you can
Another important key to effective collaboration between workers and on-site stakeholders is ensuring that your project information is standardized and communicated smoothly from one worker to another. The fundamental approach in this case is to move your project timeline to the cloud and collect all critical tasks and project information in a centralized location to establish seamless collaboration.
Think about how you would file your documents ten years ago. You would print them daily and store them in a file. Best case scenario, you would convert them to PDFs and email them to relevant stakeholders. As soon as someone changed or adjusted something in the feature, design or supply chain, they had to redo the document and resend it to everyone. Fortunately, digital technology has completely changed the way we record project documents and disseminate information. But why are you still stuck doing the same thing in your planning?
Give all your team members instant access to the latest changes by basing your team communication on a central, dynamic plan. Now your team members know exactly when to show up on site. No more waiting for pending tasks to start the day; they can simply rearrange their to-do lists and work on a different task to save time.
As a project manager, this is how you help your teams and subcontractors: by empowering them to recognize opportunities that add value to your project. This gives them the most significant lesson in identifying elements for standardizing a construction project: what can we learn from this process and how can we improve next time?
Then you wouldn't have to build the same apartment differently each time.
Connect your schedules
Project managers, site managers, procurement teams and subcontractors currently struggle to see the pile of changes on their projects and the impacts and problems they can cause. Because they keep all critical information separated across multiple disconnected tools and formats (Excel, MS Project, Primavera P6, Powerproject, PDFs, paper notes, whiteboards, etc.) and send it through multiple communication channels (email, SMS, WhatsApp messages, phone calls), they have difficulty seeing the bigger picture and are unable to make timely and informed decisions.
Wouldn't it be easier if every team and every team member could share updates to their own schedule in real time? Wouldn't it be better than receiving disconnected programs and outdated emails? Similar to how you share your drawings through Dropbox, Google Drive or One Drive, you would need a digital tool that focuses on all vital communications related to planning in a collaborative environment. This would allow you to:
- Facilitate communication with your teams and subcontractors
- Improve planning transparency and visibility
- Perform complete alignment between local and external teams
- Reach all important milestones and developments without missing a thing
- Quickly identify which tasks to focus on to deliver other value-adding tasks
Easily resolve project constraints
In summary, the key to resolving project constraints is to use a centralized tool that connects your teams and subcontractors around project planning. Having a central, active plan provides you and your teams with timely, relevant information that allows everyone to easily collaborate, align schedules, resolve conflicts, avoid errors, and make well-informed decisions so you can successfully deliver your projects while saving money. time and everyone's time. a lot of money.
