Construction Viz

Project Management Perfect

Marcy Spiker

Capture Construction Project Reviews and Approvals on Just About Everything!

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Construction projects involve owners and contractors submitting, reviewing, and approving information throughout the project’s life cycle. It’s a complex web of information transfer, often time-sensitive, and requires a well-documented e-paper trail to avoid legal issues.

For some projects, the review and approval process needs to be more granular than just the form, set of documents, or a drawing set level; it needs to be down to a single document page or an individual drawing sheet.

That level of detailed review tracking is why we created the Construction Viz Review Comments Matrix and the Contractor Response Matrix components. These components work in tandem to ensure detailed comments and approvals are captured at the right level of detail to improve communication, avoid delays, and prevent future claims.

For example, you might want to capture internal owner/CM team comments on each page of a contractor’s project management plan attached to their submittal. Also, you might want to keep some comments internal, while others you might want to share with the contractor.

Review Comments Matrix component

With the Review Comments Matrix component, your team can add comments for each individual page of the attached project management plan. The component automatically logs all saved comments into an interactive grid not visible to contractors.

Suppose you need to share comments with the contractors. In that case, you can select the comment(s) and click Finalize Selected, making those comments available to the contractor in the Contractor Response Matrix component and denoting that comment as a final comment.

Contractor Response Matrix component

The Contractor Response Matrix component displays only those comments needing a response from the contractor.

The component captures the ongoing back and forth exchange between the owner/CM and the contractor in an interactive grid complete with comment-specific statuses. The contractor just needs to click edit next to each comment and add their response.

What happens to the comments if the contractor needs to revise and resubmit the form? In the case of a revision, the component automatically includes all previous comments in the form revision, ensuring the complete history is always available for reporting.

These two components combine to provide that extra level of review capability that can help improve turnaround times and minimize communication issues. As with any Construction Viz components, they can be added to any form, turned on or off, or modified as needed. This functionality is excellent for Submittals and RFIs to ensure contractor responses are tracked and given a formal status before the overall form submission is accepted.

Get a demo of Construction Viz

Construction Viz is the only enterprise-scale construction management solution available for Microsoft 365. You can learn more about what makes Construction Viz different from its competitors and the available apps on the Features and Apps pages. To set up a demo, click here.

Visualize Your Project Data in a Calendar View with Microsoft Lists and Construction Viz

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We recently shared how you can generate a Power BI dashboard from Microsoft Lists in three clicks with Construction Viz. Here is another handy tip for using the two applications together. 

To recap, the Microsoft Lists app allows users to view and create interactive lists for managing items such as tasks, issues, and even assets for a construction project. If you have used Microsoft SharePoint Online, Lists will seem familiar since it uses the same list technology. 

Using Microsoft Lists calendar view in Construction Viz 

Microsoft recently released a new Calendar view for Microsoft Lists. It's a nice feature that allows you to visualize your list data in a familiar calendar UI. 

Because Construction Viz and Microsoft Lists both utilize Microsoft SharePoint lists and libraries under the hood, this new feature can provide a nice calendar view of project data, such as all of your RFIs by the submitted date and the target due dates. Check out a preview in the animated graphic below.  

CV_Lists_Calendar-View

You can find out more about Microsoft Lists here.  

Want to manage your construction projects in Microsoft 365? 

Using the Microsoft Lists calendar view is just one of many integrations with Microsoft 365 services that Construction Viz can leverage. Construction Viz empowers you to manage construction projects in Microsoft 365. Better yet, Construction Viz is available as standalone apps, allowing you to combine the specific features you want into a project management tool that is perfect for you and your workflow.  

You can request a demo of Construction Viz here to learn how to get the most out of your Microsoft 365 investment to manage your construction projects. 

Got SharePoint? Use it to Manage Your Projects with Construction Viz

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Microsoft SharePoint is the industry-leading collaboration and information management tool. Combined with Construction Viz, it can also be the ideal platform for managing your construction projects.

I will wager that your organization has Microsoft SharePoint, either deployed on-premise or as part of Microsoft 365. I’d also assume that, besides storing documents, you don’t use SharePoint to manage your construction projects. Few construction companies or owners do. This is a shame because SharePoint has everything you need to manage your construction projects of any size or complexity.

With Construction Viz, we optimize SharePoint to be the ultimate construction project management solution. Read on to learn how.

Can I really use SharePoint for construction project management?

You sure can. Lydon Solutions has been building construction project management solutions in SharePoint since 2009. Our clients, who include some of the largest and most prominent construction managers, owners, and utility companies around, use our SharePoint-based tools every day to manage multi-billion dollar projects and programs.

Our clients love SharePoint as a project management tool for several reasons:

  • SharePoint includes all the core features they need and is exceptionally customizable besides.
  • They appreciate having all their project data centralized in one place.
  • They welcome SharePoint’s integrations with other applications.
  • They know that SharePoint, as a flagship Microsoft product, will always have updates and support available.

So, why don’t more organizations use SharePoint in this way?

Because SharePoint is intimidating and challenging to use out-of-the-box – and getting it configured to manage construction projects takes a great deal of know-how.

Enter Construction Viz, a solution we designed to unlock SharePoint’s potential for construction project teams. We poured the best of everything we learned from over a decade delivering custom SharePoint solutions into Construction Viz, making it the most flexible and easy-to-use construction project management solution available today.

Construction Viz empowers you to work your way

What makes Construction Viz the most easy-to-use and flexible construction management solution? First and foremost: Construction Viz gives YOU the power to choose how to manage your projects.

You choose the solution – Construction Viz is available turnkey in the cloud, on-premise, or as à la carte apps for SharePoint and Microsoft 365.

You choose the features – Our Construction Viz Apps let you select and pay for only the features you want. No more bloated software where you only use 10% of the product. Select the apps you want to start and add or remove others over time as your requirements change.

You choose the hosting – You can get Construction Viz where and how you need it:

  • We can host it for you: You can have Construction Viz as a turnkey cloud solution that we host for you in our Microsoft Azure data center.
  • You can self-host it in your datacenter: You can deploy Construction Viz behind your firewall on your (or your client’s) on-premise SharePoint environment.
  • You can install it in Microsoft 365: You can install Construction Viz in SharePoint Online if you are on Microsoft 365.

You can even move between and combine any of these three options to fit your needs. With Construction Viz, your project management solution is mobile, just like you.

Project management perfected – Powered by SharePoint

Construction Viz enables all the features you need to manage your projects of any size right in SharePoint. We’ve done all the heavy lifting customizing the entire experience for construction project management teams.

Construction Viz Features:

  • Over 25 construction project forms
  • Workflows
  • Scheduling
  • Cost management
  • Program management
  • Dashboards and reporting
  • Task management
  • Document management
  • Permission controls
  • And much more

Get started quickly – Grow as you need

Construction Viz has all the essential functionality to get you up and running fast and help your company be more productive while reducing cost.

But we know that every organization’s needs are unique. If you require a specific feature or more customized solution, we can tailor Construction Viz to do just about anything to help your team be successful.

So, if you’ve got SharePoint, you’ve also got the foundation of a comprehensive construction project management solution with Construction Viz.

Contact us today for a no-obligation consultation and demo.