The two sides of modern construction IT

“The management can track what I’m doing in real time? How terrible!”

Recently, I heard an amusing anecdote from one of our sales guys. He was giving a demo to the middle management – engineering heads, quality managers, project managers – of an established EPC organisation, and after running through some of the more advanced features of WRENCH SMARTPROJECT the engineering head (who had been growing increasingly restive through the demo) suddenly blurted out “Wait a sec – so you’re saying that my bosses in Delhi* and London will know immediately of any mistake or slip-up? They can see what I’m doing in real time? How terrible…!”

His consternation, though comical, is understandable.

You see, managers in construction projects are overworked and overextended. In many cases, they juggle multiple projects and multiple teams, not to mention anxious clients and very tight deadlines. Slip-ups and delays in such an environment are inevitable. Naturally, a system that makes such slip-ups even more visible will not be welcomed by all – except perhaps the very senior management.

Now, as those who know me can attest, I’m a pretty hands-on kind of guy, more at home on the field than a boardroom. (I’m an engineer first and a CEO second.) And in my experience, the people who work on engineering and construction projects are some of the most hardworking people I’ve ever met. In many ways, they have a thankless job – they’re under constant pressure to deliver on time, even though the timelines and specs they work with are usually very very challenging, and even unrealistic. Further up the ladder, their managers are under similar pressures from their managers. And those managers have had to agree to those timelines because of business and competitive pressures, if not outright survival. So it’s a very tricky and vulnerable business in some ways.

One of the challenges I face in my business (which is to make the business of EPC more efficient and more cost-effective) is the huge misconception about the benefits of IT in EPC. It’s not about ‘better, faster, cheaper’ – it’s about profit. My belief is that the right kind of IT can transform the way construction companies carry out their business and directly affect their bottom line. But for most of them, there is an instinctive distrust of ‘IT hype’. So much so that I’ve often had to deliberately undersell just to sound credible. My product, for example, has been proven to reduce engineering cycle times by 60% – but many of my clients find that difficult to believe, so I’ve had to ‘dial it down’. Another factor has been the rather conservative nature of engineering organisations. (Understandable, when you’re dealing with billions of dollars but the unfortunate result is that it makes you wary of exploring the very thing that could help you save money.) But things are changing, slowly. Today most organisations are open to what I call ‘isolated’ IT systems, like say, document management, or collaboration management but not to a holistic, integrated system that addresses the project cycle as a whole and solve problems from the bottom up. Perhaps that will still take some time.

So while I chuckle at my sales manager’s stories I also find myself a bit saddened. I strongly believe that an IT system must make life better and easier (and faster) for the guy at the bottom of the ladder and that efficiency will trickle up. Both as an engineer and a CEO I wish it was easier to do that – the systems exist, but is the market ready? Time will tell.

But at least one story has a happy ending. After that outburst from the engineering head, my sales manager was able to quickly reassure him of two things: first, that a system like this benefits everybody, not just top management because it makes everybody accountable. (After all, most delays and mistakes are the cumulative result of a series of smaller missteps.) Second, although this system does ‘force’ people to be more efficient, it also empowers them to become more efficient. In other words, technology creates more demands on the individual but also increases the individual’s ability to fulfil those demands. A win-win.

Speaking for myself, I’m very proud to have created a technology that enforces both more accountability on the one hand, and creates more empowerment on the other. I hope that the latter will soon make the former something to be welcomed and not feared.

Your thoughts? Let me know in the comments below.

^*Names and places changed.