Adopting technology is a team effort: Skanska exec

Adopting new expertise requires everybody to purchase in, mentioned Danielle O’Connell, senior director of rising expertise for Skanska USA, the U.S. arm of the Swedish builder.

The contractor makes use of what O’Connell calls its Eight-Step Plan, a tech addition roadmap that lays out important strikes to assist it assess and combine merchandise. With it, the corporate takes measured actions to scale new options, determine use instances and hold everybody on the identical web page.

Right here, O’Connell talks with Development Dive about its strategy, how the agency smoothed out wrinkles within the course of and recommendation for smaller builders seeking to scale tech on their very own.

Editor’s Be aware: This interview has been edited for brevity and readability.

CONSTRUCTION DIVE: What’s the Eight-Step Plan, and the way does Skanska USA put it to make use of?

DANIELLE O’CONNELL: Our Eight-Step Plan is our tech enablement course of.

The method begins with figuring out the issue that we’re attempting to unravel. In lots of types, that comes both from a venture workforce that claims they’re actually battling this factor, or possibly they have been speaking with a vendor or visiting a convention and had been uncovered to one thing that they thought might remedy an issue on their venture.

In different instances, my workforce, the rising tech workforce or others in our group are seeing issues they assume could make an influence. 

Step one is figuring out the issue after which determining what to do. From there, we go right into a deep dive with every of the distributors that we’re working with to know the make-up of their firm — what their resolution does, what issues it solves, knowledge safety and cybersecurity questions.

As soon as we get via that stuff, the subsequent step is to pilot an answer on a venture. All through the pilot, we keep related to it to know the way it’s going.

Usually, you are seeing pilots which can be at the very least a 12 months or the period of the venture to know how the instruments actually work. We’ll verify in regularly with them, get suggestions after which we’ll make choices and proposals to the enterprise round what scaling the answer appears like.

Might you give an instance of a tech that you just evaluated via this framework?

So, cmBuilder, a building logistics platform, was one of many early distributors that we assessed via this course of. The workforce out at our LaGuardia Airport Terminal B Redevelopment venture got here to us and mentioned they discovered this new device for 3D logistics.

We usually use Bluebeam for 2D logistics right this moment. And if I take into consideration what number of of our superintendents, our venture managers, our operations employees are capable of now use Bluebeam to do these 2D logistics, cmBuilder is a web-based platform that permits them to now do 3D logistics.

The workforce introduced cmBuilder via this course of. And after they went via the entire evaluation and we kicked off the pilot, we checked out a number of completely different initiatives, bought suggestions from the workforce and determined that this is able to make sense to scale.

We bought buy-in from our COO, in order that led to us rolling out an enterprise settlement with cmBuilder and getting this device into the fingers of these individuals that actually wanted it to speak logistics and phasing, and the way we’d work across the jobsite all through the venture.

What roadblocks did you encounter that you just needed to iron out?

There’s at all times adjustments to the method. Within the spirit of steady enchancment, we’re at all times on the lookout for methods to make it higher. We’ve tweaked the system and the questionnaires over time to make sure that we’re not placing an excessive amount of burden on the distributors as they are going via this. 

It is a prolonged course of, and we notice that they are filling out these questionnaires and sending them again to us, and there is a workforce on our finish who’s really reviewing them.

I’d say one of many issues that we have executed to assist enhance and talk round why this course of is vital is to speak about it like we speak about bringing on dangerous subcontractors onto our jobsites.

If a small to mid-sized builder wished to implement one thing of their tech stack, what recommendation would you give them?

I’d inform them to go sluggish and work throughout their completely different departments. 

I believe one of many issues that we did not do nicely previously is that this collaboration between the authorized workforce that is reviewing contract language and what it means to be an enterprise accomplice, for instance, with all of the completely different points of the IT workforce, akin to understanding what compliance we’ve got to comply with for Basic Information Safety Regulation necessities from the European Union, or the California Privateness Rights Act. 

I’d encourage them to see how these instruments match into their general tech stack as nicely. Spend the time to know and talk concerning the course of.