Making your construction schedule actionable

DAVID KADYSHEWICH: Hello, everyone. Welcome to our presentation about how to make your construction schedule actionable. Before we begin, we're going to talk about some Autodesk products that some are not totally available yet, some strategic intents. Please just make sure not to take any purchase decision according to this and keep everything-- sorry. I'm sorry. I'm going to start. OK? Sorry. [INAUDIBLE], I'm sorry, just a ramble through my [INAUDIBLE].

AUDIENCE: Yeah, right. It's all right, man.

DAVID KADYSHEWICH: There is a part on the back end that is responsible for English. And I got it all messed up currently.

AUDIENCE: No, it's all right, man. Just regather and whenever you're ready to start again, just give me that countdown and then feel free to begin.

DAVID KADYSHEWICH: So 3, 2, 1, hello, everyone and welcome to our presentation about how to make your construction schedule actionable. Before we begin, just a quick safe harbor. So we're going to talk about some Autodesk products that not a totally valuable, some strategic intent. Let's not make any purchase decision according to this.

My name is David Kadyshewich. I'm a Product Manager in Autodesk, working primarily on schedule tools, planning tools, stuff like this. Simon.

SIMON TRITSCHLER: And. hello, everybody. My name is Simon Tritschler I'm a Digital Construction Specialist with BAM in Ireland. And I'm with BAM about eight years. And today we're going to give a brief overview of how we see work plan working. David.

DAVID KADYSHEWICH: OK, so we're going to start with some introduction to BAM that Simon will gave us. We'll talk about the construction value stream. And then we're going to move into Autodesk solution, how we digitize. Our digitized solution can help. What's next in our product side? And then how BAM looks at all of this. Take it, Simon.

SIMON TRITSCHLER: So, hello, everybody. My name is Simon Tritschler. I work for BAM. BAM is a large construction company, two divisions, 150 years old. Sorry, David, next slide there, yeah.

And so for almost 150 years, BAM have been operating across Europe. We are currently two divisions, one in the Netherlands and a second one across UK and Ireland. I work for Digital Product Solutions in the UK and Ireland division, where we strive to achieve first-right time through digital ways of working.

Over the past few years, BAM has been undergoing a transformation in its business, divesting, consolidating, and refocusing its attention to make the business a more sustainable as we you into an ever evolving marketplace. Sustainability is more than just marketing. At a recent event in the UK, our new sustainability director explained what this means.

For BAM, sustainability is about developing the people, developing the business. It's about making sure that every day we go home better. Our people go home better. Our business improves. And our satisfaction for our customers improves, as well.

We've been awarded a very prestigious award there with the CPD. And BAM is very much moving towards a sustainable model that's digital and value-driven. Next slide, yeah. So BAM is made up of different components in Ireland. We have BAM Infrastructure and BAM Construction.

And for those of you that have visited Ireland, when you land in Ireland, you will land at Dublin airport. And you can see, we have an award-winning tower there in Dublin airport. Even though it's won architectural awards, it's obviously infrastructure. So you land in Ireland and you'll see that.

And as you travel down the west coast, you go across another famous-- named after a famous person quite familiar to Americans. But we have a bridge down in New Ross that's a large suspension bridge, single-span suspension bridge. It's won a few awards for us, as well.

As you go further down the road, in Waterford on the southeast coast of Ireland, we're currently developing a large mixed-infrastructure project that is both docklands, bridges over the river-- you can see the model there-- and also railway infrastructure that's going to be added onto that structure.

And as we move on to construction, we've been quite busy in construction. I suppose the best way of putting it is that we have delivered schools. We've delivered courthouses ever since I've been in BAM. And you can see on the screen there, we have two large buildings, well, three large buildings. One, which is a hospital, one of the most expensive in the Irish state history.

And we also have two buildings there that represent European headquarters for large tech businesses that are well known to everyone in the room. One is Microsoft Place. And the other one is owned by a large search company that's been recently filled in there on the Boland's Mills around Dublin.

Now, as well as that [INAUDIBLE], previously we've been lucky enough to work on some large-scale projects internationally. And one of those would have been the Museum of the Future in Dubai, where the Irish digital team were largely and heavily involved in the digital asset delivery of that project.

But what I want to talk about today, and start off talking about it, is a really simple basic concept. And you'll see here some slides that are not your standard sales-pitch slides. They're very basic, simple slides. And I gave these recently at a conference simply because they represent what we do in a very simple way.

So as we look at the slide here, you can see we've got element designed. And underneath the element design are three little boxes. And those little boxes represent the tasks that support each one of those phases.

So for those of you that aren't familiar with construction, an element is designed-- a door, a wall, or whatever it is-- and in the planning stage, then we will understand all the things that need to happen to make sure that we put everything in place to build that in delivery. Now, when we go into the engineering phase, or the delivery phase-- go ahead there, David.

Yeah, when we go into those phases there and we're out on site or out on grounds, we still have the same micro tasks below us. We position the elements, IE, we set it out or put it where it needs to be. We position this validate. We validate where it is. And then we make sure that materials are delivered so that the element is installed correctly.

Now you'll see there that there's two different colors. There's an orange and yellow color box. And there's green boxes. And these highlight very different things. Go ahead, David. So when we look at the green boxes, they are value add. And when we look at the yellow boxes, they are essential, non-value add. Now for those of you that live in the world of lean culture, this will be a lot make a lot of sense.

But for those of you that don't, one of the things that we have here is that the client, who is paying for this infrastructure, or this building, or whatever it may be, they find value when they get what they pay for. So when we install a building, when we put in a wall, they have paid for a wall to be put in there. And that's when they get value for the money that they've spent.

For the construction of GC Company, we get value from this process when we validate that the install is complete, that the things have been put in the right place, that everything is there, that everything's been signed off and everything works. And that's when the GC can get paid.

All of the rest of the other tasks are essential to making sure that the element is installed, the door is put into place, the wall is put in place, whatever it may be. But we can change those. We can work around those. There are things that we have to do but we don't necessarily get paid for.

Now, when we-- next slide, David. So when we look at how this looks, in the ideal state we are going to build, basically, a structure, much like construction. And in the ideal state for the structure, it will be sound. The structure will be sound. The foundations will be sound. Everything will be there in such a way that we can see that it's going to work.

The difficulty arises-- go ahead there, David. The difficulty arises when we start missing some of the micro tasks so something doesn't get done. We miss a date. We don't deliver all of the information. Some of the information doesn't get delivered at all. Go ahead, David. And what happens then is, when we don't have all the information, sometimes we miss too much.

And this affects our value. It means that we don't receive value for what we do. It means that we end up without having the instrument installed correctly. And it means that we then have to go and do a lot of rework, which in the world of construction is something that we want to avoid at all costs. Rework is the thing where we lose value. It's going to save money but we lose that, too. Go ahead there, David.

DAVID KADYSHEWICH: So maybe part of the question here, Simon, is can we as Autodesk, as a provider of digital solutions, can we help also with this? And we try.

And the way we think about it is, we're trying to create plans, or work plans, that are inside the context. And why is it connected to the value stream? Because when we saw those big boxes with all those small boxes, we control them. We control them, call them a micro task, maybe. So we have the large task and then all those micro tasks. And you need to make sure that this building will not fall.

So you need to make sure those small tasks support the higher tasks. So when you go back to schedule, you have the long-term plan. You have a lot of big, big stones, and big yellow stones, big green stones, in the long-term plan. But then you need to go and define them and to get the short-term planning to get those small boxes that support everything, the one that Simon just showed us, how sometimes they got just dropped until everything collapsed.

You need to make sure that this is happening, the definition process. But, also, and this is where a lot of things get failed, where information from the plan, from the construction site, go all the way to the long term to make sure that the place on the master schedule with all those big boxes are captured. It's aligned with what's happening on the site because sometimes things fall because things are just not aligned. You think this is your plan but the construction site just go in a very different way.

We want to create a process that provide all the cycle. We want to create a process where you have this long term, those big boxes. And you move those boxes, the boundaries of the boxes, the milestones around them, into the process of definition all the way to the short-term planning.

And in the short-term planning, you have all the plan inside the context of this master schedule. And if things doesn't get right, you have some schedule risk popping up on the long-term schedule to make sure that you can change things and to keep this structure that Simon showed us really, really solid because it's shaky all the time. You need to make sure that things are aligned all the time.

So we practically built a tool to provide this process. And what I'm going to show you while you listen to this, it's going to be already available. We're creating a work-planning tool inside our schedule product in Build. This is the schedule product in Build. So we created one place to manage everything because information that live in silos is unconnected. And if it's not connected, then you don't have communication between those parts of information. The building will fall.

You need to make sure that everything is aligned. So we have a place for everything, both your schedules. And this is something that is available for a few years now, a place to hold your schedule to upload your P6, MSP, Asta, whatever, to view, and search, and filter those schedules.

Consume any way you want, connect reference and comments between people, suggest changes from the field to the master. And, my favorite, run the comparison tool, which you can see all the versions and to see what changed between the version.

And this is the schedule part of stuff which is valuable for more than a year now, maybe two years. What we're adding, and this is very new, is the plan part. And this is the work plan. This is what completes the cycle. We are creating a place to create and detail your work plans. And those work plans can be connected or disconnected from the schedule.

Of course, if you want to create a cycle, you make them connected. But you don't have to. You can create just a work plan, a standalone work plan to manage whatever.

You can really see here, inside our new home page, the connection between the schedule and the plans. You can see those weekly plans. And they can be weekly. They can be by phase, or by subcontractor, or whatever. But you can see them really connected into the schedule.

So let's see a bit of what does it mean to be connected. And how does it work with the cycle that we talked about? So inside schedule, let's go into Schedule, this is now. You can see here the Schedule page. Gantt, as everyone that use the schedule tool in Build know it, there is a new functionality here.

You can choose activities because now this is the time to disallow those activities. Those activities are the yellow big blocks that Simon showed us. And now you need to create all those small micro texts in order to support them, to bring them to finish. So those are the big boxes. They are actually inside your schedule. And you can choose them now. And once you choose them, and you can choose whatever, it depends on the schedule. Your schedule or each scheduler works in different way.

So maybe you want to choose a higher-level activity, maybe a low-level activity, maybe a milestone. You can do whatever you want. And you can push them into a plan. You can push them into a new plan. You can push them into existing plan because a lot of time you want to have one gigantic plan that captures all the information in the site.

And you just want every few weeks to push more and more and more yellow boxes, activities from the schedule, into this plan. You can have both. Good thing is that actually you can push one activity to multiple plans. So if you create a plan for your plumber, and a plan for the person who's doing the gardening, they can see the same activity from the schedule.

But what happened when I pushed those? When I push those, I actually create boundaries inside my new plan. So you can see the swimlane, in the plan area. So this is now the plan area. And you can see here the boundaries of the schedule activity that I just pushed. The demolish existing house is actually the activity that I pushed from my P6 or my MSP, whatever I had for my master schedule.

And now I can go and create all those micro tasks. You can see them demo one, demo three, demo four inside the boundaries of this activity. And you can make sure, with permission, you can make sure that everyone keeps inside the boundaries because this is a very hard boundary. And you cannot let anyone change it. Or you can let people change it if this is what's necessary for the site. So you can do both.

This view is cool because it show you the schedule context of your work plan. But you don't have to use it. You can switch off the schedule context and just see the information as a very, very normal work plan swimlane with all this connection to the AAA activity because we know that sometimes people that work on the site, they just want to see what's next for me. And they don't care about this connection to the schedule. So you can do both.

But the magic here is for the first time [INAUDIBLE], creating the work plan inside the context of the schedule. But sometimes things doesn't go exactly as you wanted, of course. That's OK. Things can change. We allow you, if you have the right permission, to actually extend those boundaries, even though the [INAUDIBLE] existing house, this activity originally came from the P6 schedule, the master scheduler, even though it came from there.

And we still allow you inside the work plan to extend it to push the boundaries. Why? Because we tell you, dear Mr. Planner, this is your plan. Reality sits inside the work plan. This is the documentation of what's happening on the site and what's going to happen on the site tomorrow. So we allow you to do it.

We're just creating this exclamation mark, telling you, just so you know, that inside P6, inside the master schedule that you originally came from, this activity, demolish existing house, is still only four days. And if you go to the schedule, the Gantt, the scheduler will have the same notification, letting him know that someone is planning towards this activity. And currently it doesn't align.

So we are actually doing this cycle closing, starting with the schedule-creating plan, planning inside the boundaries of the schedule activities, and letting the scheduler know when things doesn't get aligned in order to make sure that all those big boxes and small boxes stay aligned. We have a lot of features inside the work planning.

So we just saw the workflow of creating from high level to low level. But we created robust planning that you can do with lists, swimlanes, all the attributes that you want to have around activities, checkboxes, statuses, to perform group actions, cascading handoffs, which is not trivial for small work plans.

And we have them if you want them. If you don't want them, you can turn them off, of course. And we mean, like, you have handoffs. So if you push one activity, all the rest will follow. If you want it to be, you can grid the swimlane, of course, by assignment location, WPS. And we will also introduce in a while the ability to import-export and to copy part of the plan into other plans.

So the thought process here is that you can make a plan around workflows and then just copy the workflows into other plans, kind of templatizing the way you work. So this is what we have.

And we're going to have, also, we already, by the time you see us, we already released a tracking in mobile starting with Android and then following by OS. You can see inside the mobile. We think mobile is really, really crucial for the work plan. So you can see them, you can see all the activities and tasks inside the phone and report stats and percent complete. So you can start closing this loop, even from the site.

So this is what we have now. But what are we going to do next? And this is where we're going to start talking about things that we currently don't have. And so remember the safe harbor. This is where it applies.

And so we currently don't have metrics. We totally understand that metrics is a crucial part of this process. So we want to allow metrics that are not just KPIs but rather like a snapshot of what's happening now on the site because execution must have those snapshots. And you, the project manager, must know exactly what's happening on the site. So we will build those metrics to track changes. And you'll be able to filter them and slice and dice them by company, by location, by work type, by whatever.

We will also include in this process of metrics a robust commitment workflow if someone's working with last planning process, a commitment workflow with a activity task and set as committed. And then if someone need to move them, he will need to provide a root cause for this change which, of course, will trickle back to the metrics.

And you can see the PPC and those root causes by subcontractor, or by project, or by plan, or by, maybe even, multiple projects. So this is the way. This is our thought process. This is where we're going. It's not available yet. But this is where we go. And now the place that we really, really want to go to and we will, is the constraints management. Some of you maybe know it as a roadblocks management.

So every activity have those roadblocks, those constraints, things that must be checked before this activity-- this task can even begin. It can be in an RFI, an issue, a permit, or maybe material, whatever. And maybe this constraint is captured somewhere else in the system. Maybe it's kind of a connection to RFI.

But maybe it's just a manual entry of a few words that I just need to make sure to do this safety lecture to this person before I start it. So you'll be able to create this checklist. And until those things are checked, your task cannot be moved into the next status. So we will create this constraint management that can be viewed on the task level, or maybe on the plan level, or maybe even on the project level.

So another word about these constraints actually is also an opportunity for improvement. You do the cycle again and again on the same activities. So understand the constraints allow you to be better next time. So this is a very, very crucial part. And we're going ahead and--

The last part of our strategic intent, and where are we going to push this connection to schedule and plan even further, is we call it the complete edit flow. So imagine a place, or a world, where you create your plan schedule to context. You can do it now. This plan date changes just like we saw.

But then we're not just creating some kind of a alert, this exclamation mark that I showed you. We're actually creating a suggestion to the scheduler, to the person who owned the schedule. So we create a plan. The plan changes. It's not aligned with the schedule. We create an automatic or half-automatic suggestion.

And then when the scheduler gets a suggestion and prove it, we really, really update the schedule. Side build, we're not planning to create any two-way sync P6, MSP, or Asta. But the master schedule inside Build will be updated. And then, of course, you can keep planning. And you know that the context is right.

So this process of full-edit process, and it really, really keep, not just informed, but really keep everything tight, is something that we really, really, really going to want to go to. So this is also part of where we're heading. So, Simon, maybe tell us a few words. You saw this. You saw what we have. You play with what we have. Can you give us a few words about BAM's approach to everything that we talked about?

SIMON TRITSCHLER: Yeah, so what we want to talk about here is, Audit at BAM is a large construction company. We're a large GC. We have both infrastructure and we have construction. We have dedicated construction software. We've been an Autodesk house for quite a while. And Autodesk has evolved as an element-driven process.

So from starting off in AutoCAD moving into Revit, you know, it's the design process is element-based. We're building a wall. We're building a door. We're building a-- whatever it may be. And it's very much realized through this. And when all these elements are combined, we end up with our building.

The difficulty is construction people, builders, don't build elements. They link together tasks. And the software from Autodesk to date has been element-based. And it's been difficult within the software for construction companies to use the Autodesk system to plan out these elements.

Now with work plan in the platform, we can do that. It means now that we can have the best of both worlds. We can have a very strong element-driven aspect to our work where we get all the pre-planning work done. And then we can have a very strong execution phase, where we can manage the tasks that are going to be completed.

So this means that we'll be able to ensure that the information we capture, both at a design phase and a construction phase, can be merged together for handover to for the client. Doing this means that we can trace the value of every element that we have. So as an element has been designed, we can, if wanted, trace and track some of the tasks in the design process or the design handover process.

But more importantly, we can execute task management in the construction field where we're going to build things. This is a very different way for us to work from within the Autodesk platform. Some of Autodesk competitors do have task-orientated software. But the Autodesk platform with ACC and Work Plan is bringing both of those together to allow us to execute both more efficiently. It helps us streamline what we're doing on site. And it helps us deliver value across the project. Next slide there, David.

Why that's important-- and this is a very strange thing-- we're tracking the customers value need, not how much effort we have to put in what we believe needs to be done. So this is a fundamental shift, changing our expectation from how we've done things to how well we've done things. Have the right things been done?

Now this is a very different change because what we're measuring here, compared to a traditional PPC, or Project Percent Complete metric, where we're tracking the volume of work done, now we're going to track the number of value-adding tasks, whether it's enabling value or whether it's an actual value-adding task.

These metrics will allow us to understand the value that we do and to understand how we can improve that value because at the end of the day, value is more important than volume because the customer is paying for value. We get paid on value, not necessarily volume. So it's a very important metric.

The other thing with value stream, and tracking the value stream, is the mitigation of issues. So if we track the value throughout the process, what happens is we're going to mitigate the issues and not find them during the construction or the execution phase. So currently at the moment, on a lot of projects, when we go out and we're in construction, we have issues.

And those issues arise because in our nice, stable little structure, someone somewhere has missed one of those micro tasks. And that may lead to the wrong materials being delivered, the wrong materials being specified, a clash. It could be many, many things, the wrong drawing's been issued to the project, the wrong model being used.

There's loads of reasons why we might find an issue out in the field that doesn't exist if we were tracking that the value had been added at each phase of the design and planning lifecycle phase of the building. Next slide, David.

So what we're doing here is we want to digitize our processes. We want to take all those post-its that are stuck on the inside of cabin walls, container walls, that are stuck on schedules, that are being used to plan out all the little, small tasks and digitize them, and bring them out into the field. Next slide, David.

Now, for some of you who work in the lean culture or lean construction culture, this slide Is going to be very, very apparent. We're looking at look-ahead planning, last planner system, where we're looking at five-day commitments, three-week look ahead, six-week look ahead, and so on. That same process is going to work here.

The real difference for us, and the game changer for BAM, is going to be that we are going to digitize those tasks on a platform and combine them with all the other references in the ACC program.

So instead of going out and working from a checklist, or working from a plan, from a site supervisor's plan that was read out in the morning at the toolbox talk, we are going to be able to go out with the tasks in hand and enable all of our site teams, our site engineers, our site supervisors, our site foreman, to have all the information they need to complete the task. On the task, we'll be able to associate any specifications, any files, any relevant photos, any safety information that will be important.

The most important thing here is, we'll be able to plan this ahead so that instead of our site crews coming under pressure to make stuff up on the day, to make decisions based on information that they don't have, we will be able to provide them with task-focused work that will have all the relevant information attached to them, whether it's a process, a specification, a delivery material, whatever it may be.

And when we go out and do it the first time, for a first of a kind-type delivery, we'll be able to see if that process works. And, then, if you raise issues against us, we'll be able to understand where our issues are when we go and deliver that wall for the first time, that first type of a wall the first time, understand where our issues are and mitigate those issues by re-engineering the attachments that we have to our tasks.

So when that task is repeated, we will be able to deliver quality information through a digital workflow right, first time. And this is a big difference to having post-it notes stuck on the inside of a container where the site foreman, or the site supervisor, or the project management team are standing there telling you the tasks that are going to be happening. They're standing there, trying to understand from the group what the constraints are.

And they're standing there trying to feed back information of issues that have occurred before. The difference here is that we will be able to update our tasks, mitigate the issues, that we've experienced before, and deliver these onto the project for a much more successful delivery. David.

DAVID KADYSHEWICH: Yeah, OK. So thank you, everyone, for attending and listening to our talk, the band value-driven process, amazing value-driven process, if you ask me. I love to listen to this every time someone talks about it. And the way we plan to support it with our planning tool inside the schedule tool, it keeps evolving.

If you have any question, please feel free to reach out to Simon, and to me, now and in the future. And thanks, that's it, right, Simon?

SIMON TRITSCHLER: Yep. Thank you very much.

DAVID KADYSHEWICH: Thank you very much, everyone.