Why Collaboration in Construction is Vital for Success
What Does Collaboration in Construction Mean?
Collaboration: the action of working with someone to produce or create something. Or in our world, working together as a collective group of people and companies to design and build something truly awesome. But what does that mean, really? What is it about collaboration that can make or break the success of a project? To answer that, let’s begin with a little history.
Why Collaboration in Construction is Important
On May 1, 1931, 45 days ahead of schedule, the Empire State Building opened. It was the tallest building in the world at that time and rose in a mere 18 months. At the same time, it was completed by spending only two-thirds of the construction budget. Despite incredible time and space constraints, this original mega project was a great success.
Almost eight decades later, another towering project was completed, the Burj Khalifa. Depending on who you ask, this project was anywhere between three and nine months late and $300M-$600M over budget (not knowing the true answer should be our first clue). Despite a wide-open site and much less traffic, the current world record holder for tallest building had a vastly different construction experience, but why?
Many people don’t realize that the Empire State Building began construction before the design was completed. To their credit, the team leaned on a heavy dose of collaboration to get the job done. A so-called “board of directors” group, including the owner, architect, contractors and engineers, worked collectively through design issues to speed up decision making, and they did so collocated in-person.
Meanwhile, the Burj Khalifa was the brainchild of a wide-spread global team. The architect was in North America, the engineer in Europe and the builder a joint venture of European and Asian companies. In a time where digital technologies were still maturing, this left collaboration a significant challenge. Interior design back-and-forth alone caused a four-month delay.
What was missing from the Burj Khalifa was one of the best kept secrets of pre-globalized construction: Building a culture of collaboration in project teams is vital for successful projects.
Benefits of Collaboration in Construction
What is it about collaboration that impacts how a project is built? It’s not like we’re going to partner up and alternate swings of the hammer at a nail. No, collaboration is one of those soft skills that is often seen better than explained. However, let’s give it a try.
Stronger Relationships Among Stakeholders
Collaboration is founded on a level of trust and mutual respect amongst the project team. Creating trust is no cakewalk, but the best teams do so by building strong relationships. They take the time to discover who one another are as people, not just as workers. When you truly trust the capabilities and intentions of your partners on a project, differing opinions are welcome and problem solving becomes a team effort.
Improved Project Efficiency
Not only that, but trust and respect open a plethora of transparent communication channels for a team. People have the freedom to openly dialogue across organizations, and the rate of which feedback can be consumed is greatly reduced. This leads to considerable efficiency gains when it comes to decision making, as teams are encouraged and empowered to work together. It is no longer a worry of protecting their own interests, but rather a chase for a common goal.
Prevents Project from Going Over-Budget
Add all of that up and you have a project that is efficiently mitigating both risk and change. These are the two primary villains of a successful project, and let’s face it, stuff is going to happen in construction. But with the project team effectively collaborating to constantly adapt and move forward, these two painful causes of lost time and budget are kept in check.
Challenges of Implementing Collaborative Construction
So, what is it about collaboration that is so difficult for project teams today? We can all agree it’s good for us, yet we struggle to implement it.
Resistance to Change
It starts with our resistance to change for one. For far too long construction has built up an “us vs. them” mentality between owners and contractors. Opening lines of communication and building trust are often the last things on our minds. Instead, as mentioned before, many are often more concerned about protecting their own interests. This is especially true as issues arise and changes occur.
Difficulty Integrating with Existing Systems
And often, the software we use is only making matters worse. The lack of integration between systems creates a siloed source of information to begin with. We get lost in making decisions using only a fraction of the available information due to fear of opening up and collaborating as a team. Thus, the one-size-fits-all project management system has become just another deterrent to collaboration.
Disorganized Documentation
Whether it’s misplaced communications or construction documents you don’t have access to, when you are working with disorganized, partial data, it is extremely difficult to make informed decisions on shared goals. Add to that a siloed set of systems and not only is the data disorganized, but you likely have to search and enter things multiple times. There are double the chances of entering something incorrectly, or worse, losing it altogether.
Changes in Management and Stakeholders
And of course, as great as a project team might be, it is often temporary. People change projects, teams get divided up and new relationships need to be formed. While not entirely impossible, it is much more difficult to merge in new team members when you’re fighting the right software access and workflow provisions.
How to Encourage Collaboration in Construction
It’s not all doom and gloom for projects moving forward. There are steps we can take today to revitalize collaboration in construction and overcome the challenges that divide us.
Implement Collaborative Software
First off, we can reinvigorate the environment of open communication and trust through a truly collaborative program management system ... a system that not only breaks down the data silos but the organizational silos as well. This helps to empower teams by igniting the real-time communication needed for faster decision making, all while ultimately driving accountability through integrated task management and detailed analytics.
Define Clear Roles and Responsibilities
While we’re breaking down the walls for open communication, defining clear roles and responsibilities assists in streamlining the problem-solving process. There are certain checks and balances that are necessary in even the most empowering environments. Developing workflows that alert the right person for the right decision is paramount for consistency. And with the ability to delegate when appropriate, for efficiency.
Establish Clear Communication Channels
Finally, this newly found understanding of collaborative systems opens the communication channels wide, bringing teams together around a clear vision and shared goals. With the democratization of the data, learning opportunities and continuous improvement become core tenants of the working environment. Thus, allowing you to lean into the analytics to not only hold people accountable, but to celebrate the successes as well.
Overhaul Collaboration in Construction with Kahua
At Kahua, we understood that a one-size-fits-all project management system was not enough to solve the collaboration conundrum in construction. That’s why our mission from the beginning was to allow customers to build on a foundation of collaboration, first and foremost. In doing so, we developed a platform as a service (PaaS), with collaboration at its core, that empowers companies to move beyond the way things have always been.
And with a collaborative platform at the core, roles are well defined, communication is wide open and information is readily available, all while allowing for the little nuances of running your particular project. In other words, the vital secret that’s been missing for project success is back.
