Unlocking Project Intelligence: Moving from Raw Data to Actionable Insights

By

Jeff Halper

and Kacie Goff

Last Updated Dec 17, 2025

By

Jeff Halper

and Kacie Goff

The construction industry faces a wide range of challenges, from ongoing labor shortages to frequent cost overruns. But some the biggest hurdles all stem from unpredictability. The general contractors (GCs) who thrive in this challenging environment are the ones who find ways to mitigate risks while improving their prediction capabilities. 

Fortunately, technology makes that easier. With a wealth of data available on any given project, GCs have the potential to get more insights into their work than ever before. The trick, though, is moving past pure data collection. 

Just compiling the data isn’t enough. GC firms need to find a way to analyze it, then apply what they learn to improve project outcomes. When applied in this way, project data becomes a strategic asset to make projects more predictable and support better decisions across the firm’s entire portfolio. In short, they unlock project intelligence. 

Defining Project Intelligence

At its core, project intelligence is about connecting the dots. To provide a relatively simple definition: 

Project intelligence means gathering up project data, then using it to answer key questions, making it possible for the GC to see trends and enhance predictability across its entire portfolio. 

The important step here is querying the data that amasses from concept to turnover. Each GC firm will have its own unique questions to ask here. That starts with taking a step back. Before digging into the data, firms should figure out what they need or want to know. 

While the precise project intelligence process looks different at every general contracting company, the end result is the same. When done properly, these undertakings yield actionable insights. The GC can then apply those to that specific project, and to every other project in the company’s portfolio. 

You can call project intelligence turning data into information. It’s about understanding requirements, driving communication, and smoothing out processes.

Jeff Halper

Vice President, Procurement

Ryan Companies

How to Move From Raw Data to Actionable Insights

Most construction professionals would agree that getting answers from their data sounds nice. How do they actually accomplish that, though? To get actionable insights from their data, GCs can take the following steps.

1. Figure out which questions to ask.

Most construction professionals have had a situation where they wished they could predict the future. Pinpoint those moments. Where would the team benefit from advance knowledge — or, at least, getting the data in real-time rather than facing a lag?

To help here, the GC’s decision-making team might sit together and explore:

• What aspects of its projects feel most unpredictable?
• Where are they most frequently struggling to protect profit margins? 
• Are there any recurring factors across projects with happy owners and repeat customers? 
• How close are projects aligning with the estimate in important categories? 
• When projects get delayed, what factors are most commonly in play?
• Can they identify any early warning signs of scope creep?
• Are any quality issues recurring? 
• Where are projects commonly requiring rework?
• What types of projects are most profitable? 

To unlock project intelligence, it can be helpful to think in terms of master builders. What do those experienced experts know that greener team members don’t? Strong project intelligence processes can replace the institutional knowledge firms lose as longstanding construction professionals retire. 

By the end of this step, the GC’s team should have a list of questions that it aims to answer with better project intelligence. 

2. Break down data silos.

To answer those questions, the GC needs to find a way to connect all of its data. That’s a big challenge for most firms since teams generally tend to work — and maintain their own metrics and data — in their own sphere. What’s more, people might have their own personal resources (e.g., spreadsheets) living on their own devices, not even shared with their other team members. 

Like any company that wants to leverage its data, construction firms need to focus on breaking down these silos. To get accurate insights, data needs to flow from preconstruction to turnover. 

Two specific tactics help teams destroy silos to improve data integration:

1. Deciding on one unified platform: Different platforms can be integrated to support data flow, but that introduces technical challenges. It’s a lot easier for data to get gathered, then analyzed, when every team feeds it into the same place. 
2. Encouraging communication: A unified platform does the GC no good if no one references it. To encourage adoption of the platform and implementation of the insights it provides, hold regular team meetings. This consistent time at a shared table helps prevent people from making decisions in a vacuum. 

3. Establish a single source of truth.

It’s nearly impossible to have project-wide insights if data lives in different places, getting used in different ways by different people. To unlock project intelligence, GCs need to establish their unified data platform as a single source of truth. 

To adopt a single source of truth that team members will reference and contribute to, it helps to have one that’s: 

• ---

  Cloud-based

  This solves a lot of the historical challenges of connecting the field to the office, allowing anyone to access the platform from any device. This also supports the real-time collection of data, as users can input it right on the spot. 

• ---

  User-friendly

  Bad user interface (UI) drives teams away. When choosing a single source of truth, it’s important to pick a platform that’s easy and intuitive for all team members to use. 

• ---

  Analytical

  It’s easy to get the single source of truth to reveal project insights when it has built-in analytics. This way, teams can organize and interpret data right where it’s already stored, streamlining the process.

As an added benefit, with a single source of truth in place, it often gets easier for GCs to share information externally. It can create reports or dashboards to keep the owner informed, or add subcontractors to schedules. This way, the information shared with external stakeholders is accurate and consistent with the data the team is using internally to make decisions. 

4. Run analytics.

With all of the raw data compiled into one place, the firm is in a position to meaningfully analyze it. This means revisiting the questions the team identified in the first step. 

In many cases, if the unified platform of choice has a robust reporting feature, it will have pre-built reports to help answer a lot of those questions. Other times, the firm might need to create customized reports or dashboards to get the insights it needs. 

Their internal IT function should be able to help here. If they get stuck, the platform’s support team or an external data-focused consultancy can bridge the gap. 

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5. Work to cultivate buy-in — from all stakeholders.

Nobody likes administrative burden, particularly not busy construction professionals. It’s important to help team members understand the “why” behind the ask. If they’ll need to contribute certain data points, they should see what kind of reports and dashboards those power. If they need to create certain reports, they should see how they support informed decision-making for the company. 

In short, bring team members along so the processes used to drive project intelligence happen with them, not to them. 

It’s equally important to get buy-in from leadership, too. Decision-makers should be regularly referencing the results of the data analysis effort, then translating them into action items for teams. 

Unlocking project intelligence is largely a data-based process, but that data needs to be input, organized, and reviewed by people. The human element plays a key role. 

Getting Started: Building a Pilot Project

Developing strong project intelligence processes requires time and effort. It often helps to start with a test project. 

The GC might identify one area where it faces opaqueness, like labor productivity or cost modeling. Developing a pilot project to try unearthing and deploying project insights helps it build its data-based intelligence muscle.  

If the team doesn’t have an obvious area to jump in, scheduling is a prime candidate at most GCs. Developing construction schedules is far from easy, but challenges often get added. For starters, schedules might be more financially driven than based in reality. Data silos support this kind of segmented thinking. 

Secondly, schedule development often isn’t a collaborative effort. In other words, it often doesn’t pull in information from past schedules, from other departments, or from subcontractors. 

Deploying project intelligence for a schedule-focused pilot means choosing one job, then working to integrate and analyze data to improve that project’s schedule. Analyzing delays from past similar projects can help build in more lead time where needed, for example. Pulling data from subcontractors into the unified platform helps to surface potential issues like scope gaps. By gathering more data to inform the schedule and analyzing that data to uncover insights, the GC should find actionable ways to improve their planning here. 

Every GC increasingly has a mountain of raw data at its fingertips. By figuring out where the company lacks insights, then organizing data into a unified construction management platform to serve as a single source of truth, firms can start unlocking project intelligence from all of that data.

Written by

Jeff Halper

Vice President, Procurement | Ryan Companies

As an Operations executive, Jeff focuses on delivering value across the enterprise through understanding stakeholder needs, optimizing processes, and problem solving to reduce risk and improve performance. He has been successful in building and restructuring supply chain organizations, elevating the function to a strategic role while developing and implementing complex, enterprise wide business strategies. He is passionate about being customer-focused and creating a positive work environment.

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Kacie Goff

Contributing Writer | Procore Technologies

89 articles

Kacie Goff is a construction writer who grew up in a construction family — her dad owned a concrete company. Over the last decade, she’s blended that experience with her writing expertise to create content for the Construction Progress Coalition, Newsweek, CNET, and others. She founded and runs her own agency, Jot Content, from her home in Ventura, California.

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