Overcoming Common Challenges faced by Construction Projects

When was the last time you were able to complete a big project in time and without going over budget? The answer might be hard for you. Some recent findings from a survey involving over 1,000 industry decision-makers told us that the majority of projects encounter setbacks, facing delays in both time and cost. A staggering 64% of projects are affected, enduring at least a 20% delay. This is what is contributing to the lack of productivity, frustrated teams, and ultimately, projects that overshoot budgets and deadlines.

Project Pitfalls

In today’s fast paced work environments, teams usually find themselves tangled in problematic, disjointed, and unproductive workflows. The frantic pace of work leaves very little room for long term planning. Because of that what happens is that projects are handled by isolated teams following their own distinct methods and tools. This approach sometimes works but usually leads to a lot of challenges in the long run. Of course when you are working on a construction project any challenges that arise are going to result in you spending a lot of money to solve them and ultimately the project is once again dealing with budget related issues.

Understanding the True Costs

With so many different types of band aid solutions companies end up with a myriad of problems. Having lots of software programs can also overwhelm the staff and disorganization is naturally the result. Employees waste time searching for information in a maze of temporary fixes. They mostly find manual workarounds that only hamper productivity and overall discontent due to misunderstandings, disconnections, and time lost. A lot of companies put staff to work immediately after hiring without any kind of training and even the older employees are usually too busy to guide the new workers. Working on construction projects without proper training and guidance is a terrible idea because it sooner or later ends up in a disaster.

Importance of Analyzing and Acting

In order to recover from these challenges, it is very important to identify the issues impacting your teams, projects, and the overall workforce. Engage in surveys or roundtable discussions to gain insights into your company’s working experiences and the potential reasons for project delays. This type of assessment will provide you a realistic view of where your company invests its time. You will find out if the employees spend a number of hours per week on un-impactful tasks.

The knee-jerk reaction of “Technology can fix this!” can also make this issue worse by leading to overinvestment in new software. You should instead, pause and consider the major shifts in how your company has worked over the past decade. The core of any operation is the people that are involved. It is very important to understand their collaborative needs.

So, rather than masking gaps with new tools, try & bring people together to explore and lay out workflows. I know it is a rarity in most organizations, but you will see it works wonders on productivity. Visualizing workflows via diagrams can be helpful for comprehension. They can depict the sequence of activities among teams and systems. If you start with an understanding of people and processes, it will allow a more logical selection of platforms and tools. This way you will have a stable foundation for technology integration in your company.