The modern construction environment relies quite a lot on both project management and construction collaboration, and their importance is rather difficult to underestimate. In this context, it is easy to see how there is an entire market of software and solutions that offer both project management and collaboration features for construction projects. Such software is incredibly helpful when it comes to controlling a specific project’s quality, time, cost, and many other characteristics.
Construction collaboration is a relatively simple term at first glance – a number of different teams collaborating with each other in order to reach the same goal. Ideally, every project participant can contribute to the same goal with no competition and no gatekeeping while also being able to see the goal of the current project.
From the project’s overall standpoint, there are also plenty of different advantages, such as higher profit, fewer delays, better overall results, and so on. There are plenty of arguments for effective collaboration being one of the most important factors for a lot of companies’ overall performance in the construction industry.
However, can also be rather challenging in terms of implementation – mainly because the industry itself is extremely old, and many of its operations use age-old principles and mechanics in their day-to-day work. The competition in the construction industry works on several different levels – not only is it describing one construction company competing with another, but there is also the massive issue of different stakeholders within the same project competing with each other. Most companies tend to prioritize short-term goals of their own instead of long-term goals, such as completing a shared construction project.
This particular approach still exists and is rather widespread in the construction industry – with every different part of a single project being treated as a separate job, with a separate stakeholder that has its own interests and priorities. The project itself is not treated as a big and extensive combination of interconnected events but rather as a disjointed chain of unrelated tasks.
This kind of approach is also the reason why plenty of construction projects are created in an adversarial environment – with every project stakeholder competing with each other to acquire more profit. It should not be that surprising to learn that conflicts and disputes are commonplace in such environments, leading to inevitable project delays.
Not all of the project stakeholders and subcontractors are treated as equal partners in a project, creating even more issues and conflicts between different parties. In this context, the overall results of the collaboration are severely limited, and the project quality is far lower than it could have been.
Most of these problems are rooted deeply in the overall culture of the construction industry, which is why fixing them is always expected to be a long and arduous process. Attempting to change something this fundamental is a long and expensive process that would also receive a lot of resistance from the more conservative side of the industry.
Successful collaboration is not a solution to every problem, though. It is more cost-effective in the long run for most companies, but short-term benefits are rather limited, which is why there is not that much motivation to try and change the existing state of the industry.
As for general benefits of construction collaboration, there are plenty of them that can be presented, such as:
- Lower resource waste – since there is little to no disconnect between different stakeholders in a project, there are also no errors based on miscommunication, and since every miscommunication error has to be fixed sooner or later, the total amount of resources spent on a single project is getting lower.
- Better reputation – projects performed with no reworks/conflicts are a great advantage for a company’s portfolio, and the overall conservative nature of the industry makes such cases to be relatively rare in general.
- More realistic estimates – construction communication software is a great way to gain access to the entirety of the up-to-date project information in a single place, which makes both budget and time estimates that much easier (and the fact that there are little to no delays/errors makes this even better).
- Higher construction quality – widely considered one of the biggest advantages of construction collaboration, general project efficiency improves greatly as a result of more effective communication between stakeholders. Having a single centralized source of information about the project creates far fewer conflicts and makes it a lot easier to detect errors at the earliest construction stages.
- Higher client satisfaction rates – quite a lot of companies tend to forget that a client is also a part of the project they have requested, and every error, miscommunication, or incorrect estimate is a problem from a client’s standpoint since the project itself is not getting delivered in time or at a specific quality level. Construction collaboration solves most, if not all, of those issues.
- Significantly fewer delays – most miscalculations and errors should be easy to notice at the design stage of a project, removing the need to spend additional resources to fix every issue during the actual construction part of a project. As a result of that, no reworks result in very few or no delays whatsoever.
Of course, construction collaboration software is not a miracle solution to all of the industry’s problems, and there needs to be an effort involved from both the company that is responsible for the project and the stakeholders. There are four main areas that need to be worked on to achieve better construction collaboration in the first place:
- Quality management in project planning. The entirety of a construction project has to act as a single streamlined process with all of the different processes involved, such as quality management.
- Up-to-date notifications and communication tools. A rather large part of the existing communication issues within the industry is its reliance on Excel, WhatsApp, and emails when it comes to some of the most important communication efforts, and solving that issue is a big step toward better collaboration.
- Standardization. Information from past projects and existing guidelines are both incredibly useful when it comes to improving existing processes within a company and creating new, more effective ones.
- A single source of truth. The lack of a single source of information that is accessible by every stakeholder is one of the biggest reasons for all of the miscommunication errors, and creating that single source of truth is incredibly helpful.
There are plenty of different construction collaboration solutions on the market, and every company can find one solution that fits them the most. However, construction collaboration is also not just about the correct software, and remembering this simple fact is a great start on the road to significant changes.