Seize the Benefits of Committed Collaboration
By: Mark Butler
Building successful team collaboration involves specific proactive decisive steps. Project managers need to communicate project goals and expectations upfront with respect to collaboration. Once communicated, trust becomes a significant part of the success of the collaboration. Stakeholders need to understand everyone must have a “trust bank” at the beginning with equal amounts of “currency.” As the projects evolves, withdrawals and deposits are made, and trust is built or dismantled based on performance. Project managers need to check “trust accounts” from time to time to ensure the team of stakeholders understands the big picture and where they are throughout the project.
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Henry Ford said, “Coming together is a beginning, staying together is progress and working together is success.” Collaboration is, by definition, working together to achieve a common goal. It’s that “secret sauce” of project success, which allows stakeholders to work together to achieve the desired outcome, especially in the execution of fast-track products. Driving results through collaboration is a goal all stakeholders can rally behind and fully support.
Communication
Communication is critical to every project and collaboration delivers the needed energy flow and momentum. Communication and collaboration provide the synergy needed, allowing everyone on the team to feel encouraged to contribute to the flow in the march toward success. With it, the outcome of the project is elevated, and everyone involved has the greatest opportunity for success.
Considerations
Today, in the COVID-19 environment, there are many considerations and issues which must be coordinated and aligned early in a project’s timeline. Specifically, material purchases and availability can impact the detail design and the coordination of the actual product installation. The overall timing of decisions needs to happen as early as possible during planning and design stages rather than months down the road when the design is ready for contractor bidding. Working together and collaborating with trades early in the process can save valuable time during construction—avoiding rework, delays, ordering confusion over products, scope of work and execution responsibilities.
Optimal result?
What is the optimal result? In project delivery, stakeholders can achieve accelerated schedules, fewer errors, less re-work, and fewer substitutions because the right questions were asked and answered early in the project. Though less quantifiable, collaboration also results in a deep sense of pride and satisfaction which comes from having been a part of a unique and special project team. Collaboration plays a huge role in the overall success of a project, but successful collaboration is not without challenges.
Challenges to creating successful collaborations
Upfront communication
Building successful team collaboration involves specific proactive decisive steps. Project managers need to communicate project goals and expectations upfront with respect to collaboration. Once communicated, trust becomes a significant part of the success of the collaboration. Stakeholders need to understand everyone must have a “trust bank” at the beginning with equal amounts of “currency.” As the project evolves, withdrawals and deposits are made, and trust is built or dismantled based on performance. Project managers need to check “trust accounts” from time to time to ensure the team of stakeholders understands the big picture and where they are throughout the project.
Through the course of the project, a contractor’s plan may require changes to achieve better results for the overall project schedule. For example, to gain a better overall schedule when sequencing construction, one trade contractor may need to adjust his/her approach which could actually add a few days to installation but ultimately save a week or two in the overall schedule for another contractor whose work would have been more difficult had the adjustment not been made. In this instance, both contractors are trusting the change for the overall good of the project.
Resistance to change
Another challenge often encountered is resistance to change. In many organizations, management resists collaboration, fearing a loss of control over the daily activities. Fast track projects require fast decision-making, which is impossible if teams must constantly go to management and ask permission.
As a result, some organizations may not be well suited to collaboration as a result of their culture. It is important to understand the culture of potential collaborators ahead of time, to ascertain expectations and challenges.
Fragmentation
And, traditionally, construction is a fragmented industry, involving a series of stakeholders including architect, engineer, mechanical contractor, electrical contractor, general contractor, etc. It is not that teams choose not to work cohesively, but obstacles of collaboration arise from the way projects are contracted at the beginning.
Construction is highly priced and competitive with each contractor seeking to optimize his or her labor and minimize the materials used. Contractors are often jockeying to protect their margins on a project for which they provided the lowest bid. As a result, team members are frequently more interested in meeting short-term individual goals, rather than collaborating on the project’s long-term end goal. For example, this could occur when the sprinkler contractor hangs piping before any other trade is installed and the remaining trades have to rework their plans to accommodate the piping rather than spending the time to coordinate zones for each of the services above the ceiling.
Effective solutions for collaboration and project delivery
Interrelated obstacles
Effective solutions for collaboration and project delivery mean overcoming a series of interrelated obstacles and growing pains associated with new technology (software/systems), workplace and job site cultures, resistance to change, and potentially higher upfront costs.
Project managers need to communicate the schedule and cost goals to the team and collaborate with the trades to ensure the overall schedule is maintained. This is accomplished by demonstrating how all the work ties together rather than having each trade focused on their individual segments of the project. Through proper planning and collaboration, team members work together rather than separately with a narrow perspective of the project—inherently preventing adversarial situations from arising.
Clearly defined project goals
Effective solutions for collaboration and project delivery mean overcoming a series of interrelated obstacles and growing pains associated with new technology (software/systems), workplace and job site cultures, resistance to change, and potentially higher upfront costs.
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Because project management drives projects forward and keeps them on track, competing goals/objectives on behalf of the owner/client and contractors can potentially stall projects. To ensure on-time delivery, all project team members can be prepared to collaborate, all aligned around project goals. Clearly defined project goals act as a guide to solve issues. For example, if the project budget and adhering to corporate standards are factors driving the project, realistic goal setting is required. Of course, if a specific make or model is required to meet corporate guidelines but funding is tight, project guidelines may need to be revised.
Shared ultimate end goal
Open communication and collaborative brainstorming sessions can help solve problems while keeping everyone aligned with the shared ultimate end goal. Solutions not fully factoring the shared end goal can result in project delays, making it crucial to ensure everyone’s voice is heard. Leading everyone to communicate and collaborate effectively is vital to success, requiring breaking down barriers to develop a collaborative environment.
Contractors, supply chain collaborators + subcontractors
Project collaboration tends to align contractors on the scope of the work. Bringing supply chain collaborators into the project early can help avoid poor coordination between trades, incomplete drawings and specifications, and underfunding by the owner who based his/her funding request on incomplete drawings without constructability reviews. When conflict and delays arise on a project, subcontractors are traditionally not treated as equal partners in the process, and punitive contract clauses reduce trust between all parties.
True commitment + true collaboration = embrace IFOA contracts
New forms of contracts, Integrated Form of Agreement (IFOA), create parity among all parties—architects, engineers, contractors—who each share in the profits and losses of a project. Collaboration, communication, and a collective mindset delivers a successful project as opposed to inequities, poor communication, and litigation which seldom lead to success. These types of agreements are making their way into projects though progress has been slowed by companies who are intimidated by the effects of shaking up the system and truly committing to collaboration.
Insights on collaboration
Optimize design-assist
The design-assist program must be collaborative not competitive. With design-assist, contractors are engaged in the project at the same time as the engineering team. The design team does the work they have always done—field surveys, design concepts, calculations, building system selections and the building design. The construction team contributes their expertise to the design process and provides input on site conditions, constructability, means and methods of installation, availability of cost.
Because contractors are involved early, the project team can draw on the others’ knowledge to improve the overall quality of the project, removing redundant design models and replacing them with enhanced consultation throughout the process. Here, collaboration isn’t reducing architect/engineer hours but rather placing them where they are better utilized. When your design-assist partner is also your construction partner, you have a team already primed for construction, who understands the design intent, has accounted for potential issues, and have already thought through constructability as well as pricing and scheduling.
Decisive project execution
Having contractors engaged in planning yields more accurate scheduling and planning sessions. Pull planning, a lean project delivery technique, brings in the contractors together to help plan and schedule rather than placing all the responsibility on a project manager. Through project collaboration and pull planning, projects can stay on track even when materials arrive late or must be returned, thus improving efficiency and project schedules.
Embrace advanced technology
Technology enhances project collaboration. As many industries have been disrupted, the originators of the technological ideas have fallen by the wayside and new developments arrived on the scene which are faster, involve less cost, and are more appreciated by users. The challenge to the industry is to find ways to accept the changes and respect them to avoid being bypassed by those who do. Technological advances aid supply chain alignment and collaboration and more, allowing industry leaders to collaborate, survive and thrive—delivering projects successfully, though differently.
Technology tools leading change into the future
There are many collaboration tools available to support and improve communication, productivity, and streamline workflows as a project moves throughout its lifecycle - from design boards through document turnover. The pandemic has taught the world that remote working will be here long after normalcy returns. Many architectural, engineering, and construction companies have developed distributed workforces where design is performed in the cloud with workers accessing design models and collaborating on documents across the globe. Technology allows team members to work in design models in real time and collaborate via web calls and chat rooms to finalize design documents and streamline design packages for contractors in the field.
Technology tools help teams communicate and collaborate more effectively than ever before. Applications like HoloBuilder, Procore, BIM Primavera Cloud, and many others improve workflows and minimize re-work to help project teams deliver projects faster. Autodesk BIM 360 enables collaboration with multiple users and has workflows built to simplify collaboration between design and construction from design documents to documentation turnover, leveraging data and providing a central location for models and real-time design collaboration. With today’s technology it has never been easier to collaborate on a project!
Mark A. Butler is the President and Managing Director—Americas with IPS and can be reached at mbutler@ipsdb.com.