White Papers

As a construction project manager, you'll find this story familiar. You're in the field and you need data from a few supervisors and five different subcontractors. You communicate with them all through different channels to gather the data you need, which comes in various formats—some in emails, some in spreadsheets, some via phone calls or team meetings, and some on paper forms handed to you on the job site. You drive to the office to enter the data into your company's ERP and project management systems that calculate job costs, timelines and other factors—standalone tools that only work in a single environment. By the time you have gathered and cleaned numerous sets of project data from multiple independent sources and input them into your own system, some of the data is already out of date and inaccurate. It's too late to make quick adjustments to the project when you discover issues, which means teams will have to go back and rework elements of the project instead of being able to adjust on the fly. Progress on your project is in danger of stalling, and costs are climbing. You're under pressure to meet project goals on time and under budget, but your stalled workflows are making that impossible. Like many project managers, you're familiar with the idea of working "lean"—that is, delivering value without excess resource waste, and with fewer flaws in the process. You're also aware of agile principles and how they allow companies to effortlessly respond to changes as they occur. These approaches may sound great in principle, but applying them to your disjointed, siloed system seems like an unattainable dream. The lean project management methodology, originally developed in a manufacturing setting during the 1960s, strives to prioritize activities that drive value for the customer or end user, and identify and eliminate those that do not.This means streamlining workflows and processes to minimize the amount of time needed to finish tasks—reducing the need for excess inventory, staff or tools. The agile methodology, developed in the early 2000s and widely adopted by computer software engineers by the mid-2010s, embraces change as a necessary part of the production process rather than as a problem. Although the two methodologies differ in some particulars, they share a few core principles that make them well- suited for the construction industry period. These include: • Respecting people • Focus on the flow of work • Striving for continuous learning and improvement When applied to construction, lean and agile principles enable stronger communication and collaboration. This helps contractors better navigate change, minimize waste, streamline work and generate more value for all involved stakeholders. How lean and agile apply to construction The case for connected construction: A day in the life of a project manager Connected Construction Whitepaper | 2 Connected Construction Whitepaper

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