Holistic Portfolio Insights for Proactive Resource and Cost Management in Construction

Holistic portfolio insights help teams to get an understanding of progress, costs, resources and more. Construction companies rely on insights into their portfolios to make proactive decisions about their projects and the wider business. Without these insights, construction teams must make decisions in real-time, or worse — reactively, after an issue has arisen. 

Why Data Integrity is Everything in Construction Portfolio Insights

The ability to make proactive decisions based on data-driven insights requires a strong foundation of real-time, accurate data. However, many construction companies haven’t made the technology investments necessary to achieve this. 

Without real-time data, you are always operating with a lag from the current state of activity and progress on site. This makes it very difficult to make timely decisions to positively affect the project or programme, and even more difficult to intervene when a project is starting to fall behind schedule or incur extra costs. 

Outdated Technology and Integration Issues

Using outdated technology affects your ability to generate insights into your project portfolio. The inability to integrate disconnected tools and manual data streams is a common root cause. One of the most significant integration gaps between field reporting and finance results from the use of spreadsheets to track information. 

Spreadsheets were once a marker of innovation, but since their development all the way back in 1979, modern, innovative tools have been developed that integrate seamlessly and provide the real-time updates teams need to be proactive.

As well as being prone to manual errors, spreadsheets are time-intensive and commonly require project managers to update them on evenings or weekends as there’s often not enough time during the working day. 

By using a digital construction platform that integrates your data streams and shows you a real-time, single source of truth, you can adopt a data approach that helps you make early decisions that have a positive impact on a project. These platforms also offer huge productivity benefits, as you can dispense with manual updates of spreadsheets and spend more time problem-solving or engaging with the client. 

Metrics that Support Proactive Decisions in Construction

There are several metrics that companies can monitor to help them to identify where proactive decisions can change the course of a project. For example, tracking activity counts — a measure of the percentage of work completed — and productivity will show you if you have fallen behind on any tasks, which can have a knock-on effect on the programme. The sooner a team notices this, the earlier it can mitigate the situation to bring projects back on schedule. 

If a construction project manager notices a project is ahead of schedule, the team can benefit from the time savings. This could include finishing early, depending on critical path items, or building in a healthy buffer for the schedule. If a construction team is not tracking activity counts, it loses the ability to take advantage of that efficiency. 

The activity count can also link back to costs if the cost forecast is digitised. This can offer the holistic, integrated insight that teams need to accurately judge whether they are on track of both project progress and costs.

Strategies to Support Proactive Construction Decisions

As well as using holistic portfolio insights, there are other ways to manage a construction project that supports the ability to make proactive decisions. Some of these include:

Lock in suppliers early.

Late deliveries can create significant issues for construction teams, causing a delay in schedule which, if not mitigated, can lead to penalties due to a late handover. Locking in suppliers early provides certainty that all deliveries will happen on time and there will be enough materials to complete each phase of a project. 

Finalise designs as early as possible.

If you haven’t got the right design, it will impact your costs and productivity. Every time you need to make a change to the design, it creates a knock-on effect to the programme. Ideally, teams would finalise and lock the design before they started building, however this rarely happens. Finalising as early as possible is important to prevent delays and rework down the line. 

Align design data with cost forecasts and activity counts.

Achieving integration between the design data, cost forecasts and activity counts is an ideal state of holistic construction data which helps to understand if there are areas that could become a problem in terms of time, cost and potentially quality, too.

Maintain an open, transparent relationship with the client.

Data can help with so much, but it’s important not to forget that a conversation with a client can be just as helpful as trying to sort everything out. Regularly sharing project statuses and being proactive about having conversations can help to bring a project back on track before a more serious issue arises. 

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