Listening to the construction ecosystem

On a con­struc­tion site, every­one from the site man­ag­er to a brick­lay­er work­ing the morn­ing shift is in con­stant com­mu­ni­ca­tion with their col­leagues. You might hear some­one shout­ing for more mor­tar, for instance, or ask­ing anoth­er work­er to low­er their lad­der from the top of the build­ing. These are all feed­back loops and they’re a fun­da­men­tal part of how peo­ple col­lab­o­rate on a build­ing project.

So before dis­cussing the more the­o­ret­i­cal aspects of feed­back loops, it’s impor­tant to make one thing clear: they are fun­da­men­tal­ly about peo­ple talk­ing to oth­er peo­ple to get things done.

Of course, the site fore­man and his crew aren’t the only peo­ple involved in a build­ing project. While they’re obvi­ous­ly very impor­tant, the con­struc­tion ecosys­tem includes a wide vari­ety of stake­hold­ers. Some of them might be sat in an office on the oth­er side of the world to the site itself. Oth­ers are respon­si­ble for dri­ving the lor­ries that deliv­er mate­ri­als or equip­ment. And they all need to co-ordi­nate their efforts to pro­duce a built asset suc­cess­ful­ly.

Speaking the same language

When Asite was estab­lished in 2001, our goal was to improve effi­cien­cies in the con­struc­tion indus­try so things not only got done, but were done bet­ter. One of the first things we not­ed was that com­mu­ni­ca­tion is often repeat­ed. That’s a per­fect­ly nor­mal, human thing. But a lot of repeat­ed com­mu­ni­ca­tion is based on the wrong infor­ma­tion, which can lead to cost­ly mis­takes. Or to put it anoth­er way, the soon­er you find mis­takes, the cheap­er it is to fix them.

In fact, the best time to dis­cov­er mis­takes is before they’ve occurred in the phys­i­cal world. Not so long ago, teams had to rely on blue­prints to iden­ti­fy poten­tial issues at this stage of a project, and when the archi­tect was on ver­sion three and the site man­ag­er was on ver­sion two, the effec­tive­ness and accu­ra­cy of any feed­back loops could quick­ly fall apart. 

Now mobile tech­nol­o­gy also means every­one quite lit­er­al­ly has the plans for a built asset in their pock­et. Mod­ern dig­i­tal tools also allow every­one to com­mu­ni­cate with ease and can track what’s been said or decid­ed for future ref­er­ence. For exam­ple, build­ing infor­ma­tion mod­el­ling (BIM) and Asite’s cloud col­lab­o­ra­tion sys­tem allow every­one to work from the same real-time dig­i­tal “blue­print” and com­mu­ni­cate seam­less­ly to resolve prob­lems. In oth­er words, every­one has access to the same infor­ma­tion and speaks the same lan­guage.

This abil­i­ty to access data and col­lab­o­rate with col­leagues any­time, any­where has been a game-chang­er for the indus­try. But the flip side to this increased access is infor­ma­tion over­load.

We’re inun­dat­ed with noti­fi­ca­tions and mes­sages from peo­ple who are keen to get our atten­tion and left unchecked this del­uge of data can eas­i­ly over­whelm us. Fur­ther­more, if some­one instant­ly receives the wrong infor­ma­tion, it could be even more dam­ag­ing to a project than them not receiv­ing the infor­ma­tion at all. So while it’s great every­one on site has instant access to data, it needs to be the right, prop­er­ly struc­tured data to be tru­ly use­ful and sup­port feed­back loops that will enhance effi­cien­cy.

Single source of truth

That struc­ture and exac­ti­tude is a fun­da­men­tal part of BIM and our col­lab­o­ra­tive plat­form, as well as dig­i­tal twins. The lat­ter are dig­i­tal mod­els of phys­i­cal assets that are con­nect­ed in real time, which means events that occur in the phys­i­cal world can be cap­tured, tracked and mod­elled. At the same time, the dig­i­tal twin can mes­sage the phys­i­cal asset. This is a sys­tem-to-sys­tem feed­back loop that, while cur­rent­ly gov­erned by peo­ple, could even­tu­al­ly be auto­mat­ed and con­trolled by arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence. 

BIM, dig­i­tal twins and col­lab­o­ra­tion plat­forms ulti­mate­ly act as a sin­gle source of truth for the con­struc­tion and main­te­nance of a built asset. Any­thing that does­n’t get cap­tured will there­fore lie out­side the scope of a feed­back loop and, if it’s impor­tant infor­ma­tion, that’s bound to cause prob­lems. Human nature being what it is, you can nev­er ensure every stake­hold­er and par­tic­i­pant will cap­ture every­thing you’d like them to cap­ture. But what you can do is ensure your sys­tem is total­ly open. 

This means that regard­less of whether some­one uses an iPhone, an Android device or even a Black­Ber­ry, it won’t affect their abil­i­ty to cap­ture some­thing and col­lab­o­rate on a suc­cess­ful out­come for the project. Such an open, decen­tralised sys­tem also means feed­back can eas­i­ly be scaled to include all the rel­e­vant par­ties. In short, the tech­nol­o­gy that sup­ports feed­back loops should be just as intu­itive as shout­ing for some more mor­tar or ask­ing some­one to retrieve a lad­der.