Taking Care of your AEC Back Office

Joe G.

Hi, everybody. It’s Joe Giegerich and Shaili Modi-Oza once again on the ProjectReady Podcast. Today’s podcast is about taking care of the back office and, you know, back office, I looked it up just to make sure I was referring to it correctly, but it’s all that operational stuff within a built project, right, AEC or? Ohh and by back office we mean things like how do you handle document control reporting? Are you downloading data? All this kind of stuff. And for an industry with really, really, really slim margins, I hear about it all the time. We can’t invest in technology to improve our processes because we have no money. I would argue very strongly the other way that the one area that the industry would have enormous benefit from would be addressing the back office operational aspect of a project. Yes, there’s, you know, most of the projects budget is out there in the field. Building things, innovating in engineering and architectural design. But it’s still a business that needs to be run, and it’s a business that has unique needs is an Autodesk article will reshare, but you know they have tons of facts and stats and like. But when you look at it, for one, there’s a labor shortage, so you have to use the folks that you have. Efficiently. 95% of the data captured in a construction project goes unused and you know 36% of construction professionals. I’m just reading at you cited the reason technology failed was because of a poor fit with current processes and procedures. Right? And and when you look at it, there is another stat that I like to quote 1.6. Trillion dollars is lost in the industry every year by deploying things like manual brute force download, upload data entry and the rest of it. And if you look at financial services, financial services is all about profit. They do very well at that cause. They invent money, but look at the way trading floors and other industries handle this. They they do it with extreme efficiency. And when you look at AI coming along, this is yet another an opportunity to really run the place lean, mean and efficiently. The industry is rightfully. Fascinated with technology advancements and you know, fiber optic cameras that can go through. Plumbing systems and and drones and GIS. I’m not Pooh poohing. That is the heart and soul of the industry. But I I think it. I think it’s healthy for the bottom line to really take care of the back office and make sure that you’re operating efficiently. OK. So that that’s that’s my intro, I figured I would just you know kind of factoid throw stuff at you, but it it really is the driver and and the value frankly that we bring. To the industry is we address that we’re software company, we’re software developers, we’re process experts, they’re not construction experts, we’re not engineers, but what we are expert in and think that we bring value to our customers in is how can you do this? Really redundant, really. Highly risky. Kind of work. Efficiently. And how do you remove the risk and what do I mean by risk? I mean 52% of rework is caused by poor data and miscommunication, and there’s no industry that has more need or opportunity for improved collaboration and collaboration is not just like, hey, Bob, how was the weekend collaboration is on information, it’s on data, it’s on content. You know, exacerbating that or making it even more challenging is like, how do you have a lot of data? There’s just a plethora of information that has to be ingested, massaged, worked through, agreed upon, audited and traced. I said I was going to finish with factoids, but apparently I hit it with a couple more. So let let’s let’s turn our attention to. Shelley. What? What are some back office tasks that you find are not only critical to project success, but are kind of necessary in wanting that would help.

Shaili M.

I think definitely you mentioned document control to start with, but even before we get there, I think basic project management how projects are set up managed right from managing the project information to all the different tasks and activities that happen in a project as well as all the different systems that go into working on a project. Just that setting up of the project, we’ve seen so many times that there’s no process around it, it’s a very tedious process to get all the systems together and in place. And as you mentioned, the industry is so much focused into, OK, if you’re working on designs and you need that tool, people just start working on so many different systems. But at a project level, it all needs to come together because that needs to be organized, managed. The data needs to be in one place, so just bringing all of this together I think is very important in terms of just the overall management of the project.

Joe G.

Right, there’s the project management per se resource allocation, how you handling all that software and maintaining all that software, how you creating the workspaces which will be in multiple systems for the various stakeholders on a project, right? And then there’s the security and the administration of that and bringing that data together it’s. Always more than just bringing the information together as well, it’s bringing together in a way that you can make sense of it and use it advantageous.

Shaili M.

Right. And depending on organizations we’ve seen from small to big, sometimes when the organization is too small, they don’t have enough support from IT and search to set all of this up. But if there are huge organizations, then the IT and Systems team is busy doing other things. So it’s just very hard for the end users like designers, architects, engineers. We’re busy doing other things to kind of make sure all of these back-office operations are also managed because that is equally important.

Joe G.

And you don’t know what you. Don’t know what to ask for if you. How can I put it? You won’t ask for something if you don’t know that you. Can do it. And that is awesome, right? And to your point, rightfully, all these professional folks are focused on their core skill Set.

Joe G.

Now, but the other thing too is even in large AEC institutions I don’t have the state on hand, but it it still spends less. On these kind of systems and that kind of applied technology than any industry sands agriculture, which is. You know, if you look at innovation as an expense as opposed to innovation that that also tends to. To really darken that landscape in a negative way, focusing in a bit as well is look at even the use of M365. This is near and dear to our heart. In your experience, how have you seen companies use M365 as it relates to projects as it relates to their institution and what would you say good or ill?

Shaili M.

Yeah. I think with M365, SharePoint is very powerful yet complicated to set up and that is both a good and bad thing because we’ve seen so many times that the way companies set it up is a single site and then they put their entire file folder structure into a single library. Really, people don’t really have an idea on how to segregate the information properly. Security trimit it basically becomes like a Dropbox at that level, which doesn’t really help with any of the functionalities that M365 and SharePoint are really useful for.

Joe G.

Right, this is a skew that they already owned the licensing for and to your point there, you know, here’s a library with 100 folders. It just doesn’t scale and it’s actually worse, I mean cause like Dropbox is at least built for external sharing in large measure, arguably sticking everything in one folder. I don’t know how you manage the governance on that.

Shaili M.

Yeah, it’s it’s all over the place. So yeah, definitely. The first thing I would say is just setting it up properly, but then even within that as we are talking about security, the ongoing maintenance is a lot as team members come in and out of projects, our external sharing, as you mentioned, all of this is equally important for that. Or seamless collaboration on the project for sure, and any level of automation there would just reduce so much time to manage the project.

Joe G.

So to summarize, you know on what some common challenges you see out there are data silos and integration, right? And how do you address that cyber security threats, just the overhead of maintaining like you said, Shirley, if you got people coming on and off a project, how you’re managing that security, how you setting up with the various systems that they use? And there is a resistance to change within the industry. Although I have seen a. Huge and demonstrable. Law. In that direction. So let me ask you this then. Can you give me some common examples that you that we’ve seen at institutions that you think are just unduly or unnecessarily labor intensive and how you know that can be addressed?

Shaili M.

Yeah. As we’ve been talking about M365 and SharePoint, we’ve we touched on it a little bit, but yes, setting up a new project, we’ve seen that it takes. Days, if not weeks, sometimes to just go through that whole process of setting the project up, making sure the right team members have been invited. The security is set up. We talk about SharePoint. There are lots of lists and libraries and folders that need to be set up. So we’ve seen that it it could take from days to weeks. For large projects, especially for when there’s a lot of data, there’s just a lot of overhead for the entire team, including IT. To get something set up.

Joe G.

Yeah. And I’m thinking even, you know, higher level. So your design firm and you have to get documents from the GC out in the field and vice versa, right? So typically what you see is people literally going in downloading massive zip files, unpacking it, logging it in the spreadsheet, and then putting it back up on their side. So just dealing with content. Itself, what I refer to as brute force manual labor, that is one glaringly large issue that one alone. And you know, if you can synchronize the content, if you can build trust between the systems, all stuff that. You do. You get rid of an enormous amount of overhead, and again, it’s risky because you may well be working with the wrong version of a document, because if it takes you, you know X amount of time just to download it. These can be some really beefy packs of information, and then the next day it’s up and running. What has happened in the last 24 hours. You really don’t know. I think another thing that is you, you just see a lot is the over reliance on Excel. Like, where do you see Excel used too frequently if you will, Shelley.

Shaili M.

Especially in terms of the document control workflows and like if we talk about transmittal submittals, we’ve been talking about the manual processes especially because there are so many different systems. People don’t want to kind of collaborate into a single system. So there’s a lot of manual effort where you have one internal system you download. Everything you manually enter the entire log in Excel with the list of documents and property. Is like a document register for an example and then you have to manually upload all of that into another system. All of that is basically tracked manually in Excel for so many different operations like that.

Joe G.

And big chunks of project management P6, an amazing tool industry standard Microsoft project, indispensable. But typically the the start of a project, the closeout of a project, high level milestone tracking that too. Far too commonly see relegated to a spreadsheet.

Shaili M.

Yeah, definitely. Yeah. We just talked to a client who they have physics and such, but they don’t need that level of complicated project management. So they’re just using Excel to open up a file in SharePoint and then like we’re just using that for now to manage all our tasks for the project and the milestones.

Joe G.

Right. And then how does that scale, right? You can’t report against it. You can’t see it across other projects and you know, one of our great sponsors up North, I think one of their projects they have using our project management system like over 3000 tasks. But the but those tasks actually relate back to P6, so they have what and think just how many tasks are inside P6 at that point, right? So but they need a distillate view to track that high level milestone. The grim details are what they are grim details and you know in of itself bit of a time suck to work through all that data. So and this is a fairly short podcast because I think, you know, folks are aware of what these issues are, but there are ways to approach this, right? You know, even internally just to get a handle at the beginning of a project as to what data has to come together, not after the fact. And then trying to find more and more efficient ways to use the products you already own. You know, every tends to use three or four different platforms for a little piece of this or a little piece of that. Or conversely, they try to overuse a platform that’s really not very good at something. So for one, for us, it’s best to breed, right. This is something that we think that really will help with efficiency and then to shamelessly plug what we do right. We automate all that, it overhead, all that governance and security and then provide project management and document control that is simple, straight ahead to use and gives you portfolio and program level reporting. So be it doing homegrown at home where you’re building out provisioning tools, coming up with different ways to ingest information without having to send. Somebody with a college degree or a Masters degree to go do that stuff is is really the beginning and the end of of where you have to take that journey. And if you don’t, everybody talks about AI and this relates to some many of the podcasts we’ve had of late. If you don’t have a handle on that data structure, if you don’t have a way to connect the dots, understand who’s worked on what. When and where and why there is nothing that AI can do for you, it will just. Be a failed attempt. Garbage in garbage. Out. So anyway so. We really do think we address this and we see other companies addressing it. Even without us. I hate to say but, but it is something that I really think the industry warrants taking a heavy look at is that if you have slim margins, if you’re operating a 5% and you’re burning 20% of your staff time, there’s your money and that that, that’s where I think it lives. Ultimately, there’s more than the field. Ultimately, there’s more than design, and there’s a lot of really great shiny stuff out there. But the good old how you get it done efficiently is really where you’re going to be able to drive those margins efficiency, reduce, rework, litigation, all those necessary if not terribly sexy things about a project that really is where you can realize an incredible amount of improvement.