How to Streamline Data for Construction Project Management Services
Those who work in construction project management services know that logistical overheads arise in every project. Disconnect between key players – such as the vendor, project manager, builder, and architects – is a common issue in construction projects. It relates to a broader problem caused by a lack of streamlined data within asset-owner organisations.
Scattered data affects many industries, but it has the greatest impact on the construction project management industry. Here, accurate, real-time data are critical to keeping projects on track. Visibility and control over timelines, contracts, communications, design approvals, and financials is essential. When it’s achieved it increases the efficiency and strategic value of any asset-owning company.
The Complete Construction Project Management Services Solution
pmo365 addresses the problem of scattered data in PPM. It’s a solution, built on the Microsoft Power Platform, to help PMOs manage large project portfolios. Its dedicated apps for construction services customers include ‘Project Centre’ (the main Capital Works app), ‘Cost Estimation’, and ‘Site Inspection’. Each app guides managers and project stakeholders to streamline their project management with a secure and reliable, cloud-based platform that is easy-to-use and share.
Importantly, pmo365 is not hosted or owned by a vendor. It is fully owned by you: the customer or asset-owner engaged in construction project management. The subscription service gives building and construction project managers full access to the entire pmo365 library of apps, flows, connectors, reports and dashboards (and all future updates). You also retain ownership of all the data. That means the service remains yours to use independently and autonomously forever, even after your subscription expires.
What’s more, it continues to be accessible by all third-party stakeholders, such as external consultants and contractors. So, any workers engaged in your construction or capital works projects will have access to the data for as long as it’s required.
A Solid Foundation for Building and Construction
On top of that, pmo365 stores all project portfolio data in real-time in one secure, cloud-based location. This ‘single source of truth’ (or ‘Dataverse’) connects data from existing project apps like Excel, as well as enterprise software (ERPs and CRMs) like Oracle, SAP, Salesforce, and Technology One. As a result, far-reaching visibility and control over the entire portfolio of capital works projects is possible, and all data instantaneously updates across the organisation.
This streamlined, all-in-one solution resolves the problem of scattered data plaguing so many construction project management jobs. Highly connected, efficient management processes and tools free up your project managers and PMO teams to work smarter, not harder.
- ‘Project Centre’ (Capital Works), for example, helps you deliver physical asset projects, such as construction. It also manages the upgrading or extension of assets through refurbishment, and the maintenance of existing physical assets.
- ‘Capital Works’ lets you perform cost estimates on quantities of materials, labor, and other professional services – and contains useful tools for procurement governance in the acquisition of services for design, building, and construction.
- ‘Site Inspection’ enables project managers to conduct real-time site inspections and audits of construction sites. It’s available on mobile devices to help users to capture crucial field data like photos and geo-locations, as well as complete important checklists of vital information relevant to each project.
Project Management for Construction
pmo365‘s project portfolio solution puts all project data right at your fingertips. It tracks approvals of project instruments (like design drawings and other construction artefacts) across all portfolios, keeps all project stakeholders updated on progress, and monitors budgets and estimations against actuals.
It also lets you perform important calculations automatically and builds powerful business insights using real-time reporting and dashboard tools in Microsoft BI.
With this complete PPM solution, builders, subcontractors, project managers, and PMOs can provide consistent and timely delivery of capital works and physical asset projects without adding to their administrative workload.
One Location, One Easy Solution – for Every Construction Project Manager
The great appeal of pmo365 is its ease of use. The interface is familiar, it works for all your existing business functions, and it seamlessly integrates with a huge number of third-party apps and data sources.
Real-time, instantaneous reports and dashboards keep all stakeholders abreast of progress. Alerts about site issues and performance trends guide the appropriate response before issues can create problems elsewhere. It drives greater efficiency and reduces administration, letting your building project managers get on with the job they have been employed to do.
See how pmo365 can help your Construction Project Management Service to deliver. Book a free demo with us today.
IIR: Introduce, Integrate, Replace
Step 01
Introduce
You cannot run a portfolio on Excel and PowerPoint alone.
Project portfolio management is the discipline of seeing every project in one place, prioritising the work that matters, allocating people against demand, and governing delivery with real numbers. It is not optional at any serious scale. The moment you have more projects than one person can hold in their head, you need a single, current view of status, schedule, cost, resource and risk.
Excel and PowerPoint feel free because there is no licence conversation. The real cost is elsewhere. It is the hours spent maintaining workbooks, the version confusion, and the numbers that go stale the moment they are pasted.
A spreadsheet cannot tell you, on demand, which projects are at risk, where your people are over-committed next quarter, or how much of the portfolio budget is actually spent.
Introducing a proper PPM platform is the first step. Not to add another tool for its own sake, but to give the portfolio one place where the data lives together and stays live.
Step 02
Integrate
The instinct after buying a PPM platform is to make everyone move into it. That is the fastest way to fail. Project managers already have tools they trust, and finance already has systems of record. Force a migration on day one and you get resistance, shadow spreadsheets, and a dataset nobody believes.
Integrate first. Meet the data where it already is. Two directions matter.
Direction 01
Enterprise systems
Connect to the finance or ERP layer so actuals, commitments and budgets flow in automatically. Reporting stops being a monthly reconciliation and becomes a live view. Nobody rekeys a spend figure again.
Direction 02
The tools PMs already use
The direction most platforms neglect, and arguably the more important. The portfolio should read from the PM's own tools, not force people to abandon them.
The reason this matters is simple. That data is already there, and it is kept current by the person closest to it. When the portfolio reads directly from these sources, the status report updates itself. No chasing, no copy and paste, no reporting lag. The PM keeps working the way they always have, and the board gets a live picture as a side effect.
Step 03
Replace
Integration buys you two things: trust, and live data. Once both are in place, you look at what can go.
Every organisation carries tools and spreadsheets that either do not do the job well or carry a heavy maintenance overhead. The classic example is the resource spreadsheet. It is a workbook someone maintains by hand to track who is on what. It is always slightly out of date, owned by one person, and impossible to reconcile against real demand.
Replace it with the equivalent function in your PPM.
A proper demand management capability does what the spreadsheet was reaching for, with none of the overhead. It models demand against capacity across the whole portfolio, updates as projects shift, and needs no manual upkeep.
Replace deliberately, one function at a time, and only after the platform has earned it. The test is simple: if a spreadsheet is high overhead or low quality, and the platform does the same job natively, retire the spreadsheet.
The payoff
You stop producing reports and start reading them
Follow IIR and the nature of reporting changes. The status view is current because it is fed by the tools people already use and the systems that already hold the money. The overhead that used to consume the last week of every month disappears, because there is nothing to assemble.
That is the whole point of real-time reporting. Not a prettier deck, but a portfolio you can look at any day of the month and trust, at a fraction of the effort it takes today.
Built on Microsoft 365. Native ground for IIR.
pmo365 integrates with the tools your teams already run in, so the path from Introduce to Integrate to Replace is a natural progression rather than a rip and replace.