Why we need to measure projects’ performance?

Regardless what industry your organization is in, measuring business performance is a must and not a choice. Measuring business performance helps to understand how our business is performing. When we have this understanding then we can monitor and control the business performance. This will enable us to manage the business by applying the proven management processes that could be specific to the nature of the business and industry we are in. Managing the business will provide us with the opportunity to improve it and make it more profitable and reduce the likelihood of business failure risk.

This common sense also applies to almost everything we do in our lives. Just imagine if you decide to lose some weight, the first thing you would need to do is to measure your current weight so when you start implementing your diet plan, you can measure you weight-loss. This will help you in monitoring and controlling the effectiveness of this plan. Accordingly, this will enable you to adopt the processes that are best for your weight-loss whether it will be food-related, sport-related or even life-style related. The repeated adoption of those processes gives you the opportunity to identify ways to how to improve them to accelerate your weight-loss objective.

Nevertheless, what is considered as common sense for business and our personal life, tend to be ignored when it comes to managing projects and in particular construction projects. Even for projects that performance measures are implemented, we tend to limit those measures to only project’s milestone dates and cost while ignoring the many other measures of risk, quality, safety, communications, resources among others. What makes it worse, is that most of measures continue to depend on manually captured performance data that increase the risk of wrong data, whether intentionally or by accident, and delayed data sharing.

It is a known fact that the construction industry is lagging behind other industries when it comes to the adoption of technology in managing construction projects. This can be attributed to many reasons but one of the reasons could be the absence of regulations and laws that enforce governance, transparency and accountability in the construction industry similar to other industries. Nevertheless, we are seeing now some change among the leaders in this industry when it comes to the need to have real-time trust-worthy monitoring and evaluation of projects’ performance. They understand that if they continue to fail to measure, monitor and evaluate the performance of their projects in an effective and integrated format, the risk of their business failure will drastically increase, and the examples of those failures are many.

How Can Technology Improve Managing Construction Projects?

Although we have seen growing adoption of technology when it comes to the engineering design of construction projects, nevertheless, this falls short when it comes to the everyday processes of managing a construction project. We continue to see manual forms being used to document and communicate the different processes needed to manage a project. Those forms are then either distributed manually, via the personal email application or using collaboration applications. Regardless of the method used to share this information, the connection with the data source is lost. This even becomes worse when this information needs to be consolidated and shared with other project’s audience as we end using MS XLS as the information register. So now not only the connection with the data source is lost but the particulars of how this data was shared, reviewed and approved is also lost. The deterioration of project information does not even stop here. Since there will be different MS XLS files to log the different type of information like RFI, NCR, Change Orders, Progress Invoices, Meeting Minutes, Submittals among others, further information loss will be encountered when it comes to combining this information to generate the project’s performance report. Again, further information loss will be encountered when it comes to the projects’ portfolio performance reporting where MS XLS files need to be brought from different projects and combined for the projects' portfolio dashboard.

Using a Project Management Information System (PMIS) like PMWeb will not only stop this information quality deterioration but will ensure that this information is presented in the form and format that each project’s executive needs to have so he or she has the insight for better and faster informed decisions. In addition, it will provide the platform to capture the knowledge from performing those everyday project management processes thus creating an organizational asset that not only will increase the value of the business but provide the knowledge the improve the performance of projects’ execution. This knowledge will enable the organization to become an innovative organization by developing solutions and applications that uses artificial intelligence, machine learning and deep learning practices.

Step #1: Ensuring Data Quality

The root cause of why the construction industry continue to lack real-time single version of the truth performance measuring, monitoring and evaluation is the disconnection between data source and shared information. To avoid this cause, the organization needs to have a platform that will ensure that all originated projects’ data are robust, reliable, relevant, auditable, appropriate, attributable, traceable, transparent and trustworthy. PMWeb PMIS pre-defined and custom input forms will be used to capture the needed data for each project management process along with the supportive documents which will be stored in the PMWeb document management repository. The output form for each process will be designed to meet the formal communication requirements set for each project.

Step #2: Ensuring Transparency and Accountability in Data Sharing, Reviewing and Approving

The submit, review and approval steps for each process will be mapped into PMWeb automated conditional workflow to ensure that collaboration is achieved in accordance with the established roles and approval authorities. PMWeb workflow module allows the organization to take into consideration all possible scenarios when it comes to reviewing and approving processes such as multiple reviewers, reviewer delegation and replacement, escalation of delayed approvals among others. In addition, the organization can have a real-time log of all processes and if there is a delay in any process and the party responsible for this delay.

Step #3: Real-Time Single Version of the Truth Project’s Information

The data captured in the PMIS will enable the organization to measure, monitor and evaluate how the different project management processes are performing. Having a PMIS solution like PMWeb helps to provide the organization with real-time single version of the truth reporting on the performance of each project management process, project management discipline, project, program and even the complete project’s portfolio. Since this information is based on the real-time data captured form the different project management processes, project team members can drilldown to the data source to verify the shared information should this be needed.

Conclusion

The disconnection between the data source of everyday project management processes and shared information is the root cause for the high risk of ineffective performance measuring, monitoring and evaluation that the majority of construction projects suffer from. A risk with high exposure score because it has high likelihood to occur as well as significant impact on successful construction projects’ delivery if it occurs. One of the available risk response actions to mitigate project’s risks is to simply avoid the cause of the risk. Adopting the recommended three-steps approach presented above will help organizations in having an effective performance measuring, monitoring and evaluation which will enable them to better manage and improve the delivery of their projects’ portfolio as well as build knowledge that will increase the value of their business.