Construction Viz

Project Management Perfect

Jeff Lydon

Don’t Let an Outage Manage You: The New Construction Viz Outage Request App

Forms |

Keeping your entire team in the loop when planning an outage can be challenging. Effectively managing an outage event involves many more steps and considerations than just placing an activity into the master schedule to identify an outage. You must consider documentation needs and the formal approvals required to manage the event effectively.

Construction Viz Outrage Request form app

We designed the Construction Viz System Outage Request form app to capture as much information as possible to prevent an outage from negatively impacting the overall project schedule. The form app captures outage information such as start and end times, location, systems affected, justification, and work groups required to plan the outage and minimize downtime.

In addition to capturing outage-specific information, users can identify assets impacted, relate drawings, add document attachments, upload images, add links, route for review and approval, issue email notifications, and capture revisions. Also, because all Construction Viz apps are deployable into your Microsoft 365 tenant, you can add your custom Power Automate workflows. For example, you could use Power Automate to automatically update team members on changes, add Power BI dashboards and reports, and update Microsoft Teams with workflow progress.

With the Construction Viz Outage Request form app, you will be better prepared to plan and manage outages while keeping your team members in the know.

Visit the apps section of ConstrictionViz.com to learn more about our entire lineup of apps for construction project management. Schedule a free one-hour consultation here to get more information about Construction Viz or how we can help with Microsoft 365 services.

Powerful and Smart Permit Management: The New Construction Viz Permit App

Forms |

Effective permit management is one of the biggest challenges I have seen organizations struggle with during my years working on construction projects. Often, effective permit management determines whether a team completes a project on time.

Managing permits should be pretty simple: add the permit need date and issue date to a schedule, and off you go. Unfortunately, permits have a life of their own and, if not carefully managed, can have substantial downstream impacts.

The above is why our latest app for Construction Viz will be invaluable to construction project managers. Read on to learn more.

Introducing the new Construction Viz Permit App for Microsoft 365

With the Construction Viz Permit App, we wanted to focus on four areas of permits management:

  1. Planning – You can create a placeholder form for each permit type required on a project. These placeholder forms capture the needed date of when that permit must be issued so as not to affect the schedule.
  2. Filing and Issued Dates – Once you file a permit, it can get lost in the shuffle and requires constant follow-up. With the Permit app’s grid view you can filter by status, see when the permit was filed, and if it has been issued yet.
  3. Expiration Dates – Expiring permits can be a significant issue on larger long-duration projects with many permits. The Permit app lets users filter and sort the permit grid view by expiration date so that you can re-submit a permit that is due to expire in a timely manner.
  4. Notifications – Team members need to be notified as soon as possible if permit need dates are not going to be met or when a permit will expire. We’ve included our notification email component in the Permit app so that at any point in time, you can easily email all of your stakeholders with an update. Also, we can include a Power Automate workflow that checks all permit need dates in advance and makes the owner aware of the due dates and expiration dates in email and Microsoft Teams.

To extend the capabilities even further, we’ve also included, by default, the ability to assign a WBS, add links specifications, connect to the Drawings app, create permit revisions, and even add a formal review process to ensure permits are dispositioned in a timely manner. We tried to cover all bases with the new Permit app, so you can hit the ground running.

Find out more about the new Permit app or any of our other construction apps for Microsoft 365 by visiting https://constructionviz.com/apps/  or by requesting a demo here.

Construction Viz Then, Now, and Tomorrow

News |

I was cleaning up my office over the weekend and found an article in ENR that I wrote back in 2017 announcing Construction Viz to the world. Little did I know what the future would hold. If you ever have a dream, think the challenge is too hard, and want to give up, I hope this article helps inspire you.

Rewind to 2017 and the launch of Construction Viz

“The only time you should look back in life, is to see how far you have come.”
— Kevin Hart

Until 2017, when I wrote this advertisement article for ENR, we had been strictly developing and hosting SharePoint-based solutions for the construction industry. With Construction Viz, our goal was to create a flexible app-driven platform that we could host or deploy into a client’s SharePoint. We wanted to use the latest and greatest technology and speed up the development and implementation times.

We knew SharePoint, but this was new ground.

In the first iterations of Construction Viz, we built custom JavaScript and Angular components connected to SharePoint lists and libraries. At the time, we had to deploy client-side code into SharePoint sites for the functionality to work.

Going out of the gate was a little rough since we were developing a completely new system while still managing our existing SharePoint clients. We didn’t know where this whole thing would go, but we knew we needed to move away from custom SharePoint development and hosting and into more of a product for Microsoft 365. In 2017, Microsoft 365 started picking up steam with Teams and the Power Platform. We knew Microsoft 365 would be the future, and we needed to change our approach.

Fast forward five years

“Don’t look back unless you can smile; don’t look ahead unless you can dream.”
— Irish Saying

While we had many ups and downs over the years, we stuck it out with Construction Viz for Microsoft 365, which has paid off! We have deployed Construction Viz for our clients on muti billion-dollar programs across many construction sectors.

So, how did we get here?

LookingBackCV_2

Bet on our people

Everyone on our team brings a unique skillset from technical architecture, UI/UX, front-end and back-end developers, and product managers. Everyone played a significant role in the direction of the product. The key was to listen to everyone and let the best idea win. The teams managed themselves; they took ownership of the product and were vested in its success.

Stayed nimble

There have been many challenges along the way that make you want to throw your hands up, like when Microsoft restricted deploying code into Microsoft 365. It literally stopped us in our tracks. We had to completely change our deployment model and fast. Construction Viz’s code now runs in the cloud in Lydon Solutions’ Azure data center while the lists and libraries are deployed into SharePoint. It seemed like a curse at the time, but now, the entire solution can be deployed into a client’s Microsoft 365 or SharePoint on-premises or hosted in our Azure environment.

Allowed for continuous improvement

We continually leverage the latest and greatest technology to compete with the larger companies still stuck on ten-year-old technology. We switched our client-side code to React JS, which has provided many needed benefits and made the entire solution a progressive web app (PWA) so a user on any device with a modern browser can access Construction Viz online or offline. We also created a portal to manage projects and programs across a portfolio.

Focused on time to market

Our clients want products quickly, so we needed to remove as many barriers as possible. We needed to scale the solution so deployments could happen the same day. We built a deployment model that could run with a single line of code and include diagnostics to ensure successful implementations.

Offered an attractive price model

Other vendors charge exorbitant prices for project management information systems (PMIS), which were still on old technology and resisted any product changes. We changed our pricing to a per-user/month model based on the applications selected so that clients weren’t paying for a bloated system where they might only use 5%.

The Future of Construction Viz

“You can’t connect the dots looking forward, you can only connect them looking backwards.”
— Steve Jobs

Having an IT company that provides services and products means that you have to be ready to adjust to market conditions. Today, clients want solutions now and don’t want to wait.

Our roadmap for Construction Viz includes a marketplace to purchase our applications online. The game plan is to offer an affordable suite of apps that can deliver 80-90% of the market need. Clients will be able to buy apps using a credit card and deploy them into their Microsoft 365 tenant themselves. A touchless Construction Viz deployment model will allow clients to take advantage of the Microsoft 365 ecosystem they have already purchased.

Stay tuned…

Training Made Easy with Construction Viz and Microsoft Stream

Collaboration |

If you are unfamiliar with Microsoft Stream, in a nutshell, it’s a video management service included with your Microsoft 365 subscription. To find out more, you can check out a prior post, “Microsoft 365 Stream for your Construction Videos.”

Stream home page
Stream home page

Stream isn’t just another file drop-off application. It is designed to manage videos specifically. The real value of Stream is the ability to aggregate and share all of your videos into a central location accessible from your Microsoft 365 login.

How can I use Construction Viz and Microsoft Stream to help with training project teams?

Construction Viz is an enterprise construction PMIS that can be deployed into a Microsoft 365 tenant. It allows you to leverage all Microsoft 365 services using your same Microsoft 365 credentials.

On-demand training videos can be made available as part of a Construction Viz deployment. With Stream, Construction Viz training videos can be easily uploaded and shared across Microsoft 365 Groups and Users, including guest users. Further, these videos can be accessed from within any Construction Viz Hub.

Construction Viz Links App with link to a Stream training session
Construction Viz Links App with link to a Stream training session

Want to create training videos and add them to Microsoft Stream, but you are not a videographer? Not a problem.

Microsoft has recently provided the ability to publish PowerPoint presentations directly to Stream. So, if you are a PowerPoint guru, you can easily make robust training videos from your existing presentations.

PowerPoint Publish to Stream menu
PowerPoint Publish to Stream menu

Sounds promising, but we like to use surveys and quizzes to test learning objectives.

You can add surveys and quizzes to Stream videos using Microsoft Forms. Survey results are automatically tabulated and made available within the Forms app in Microsoft 365.

Microsoft Forms quiz added to Stream training
Microsoft Forms quiz added to Stream training

What if we like to schedule and provide both in-person and virtual live training sessions?

You can live stream events in Stream! These events can be added to user calendars, and the recordings can be available for future on-demand training.

So, if you want to do video training, check out Microsoft Stream.

If you are looking for a project management information system (PMIS) that uses Microsoft 365, request a Construction Viz demo.