Collaboration

How Project Tracker Makes Remote Teams More Productive

November 18, 2021 by da_admin Leave a Comment

Managing your construction projects with remote team members presents its challenges. The Construction Viz Project Tracker app helps your remote project teams stay in the loop and on track.

The Remote Work Challenge

Working remotely is becoming the new normal. Remote team members need access to collaborative tools that work efficiently in increasingly disjointed environments. Using email for project communication has always been pervasive, but now it is the band-aid way to replace face-to-face team discussion.

The new normal of remote work puts even more burden on project managers. Not only do they have their core responsibilities, but now they often find themselves assuming the role of data entry clerks collecting project information from many different sources to update excel spreadsheets.

Without in-person meetings or the ability to stop by someone’s desk for a quick update, project teams need to embrace a new paradigm to make remote work more efficient.

Construction Viz Project Tracker as the Remote Work Productivity Solution

Wouldn’t it be nice if your team could make their updates directly in an easy-to-use web-based work management application, thereby allowing your project manager to focus on analyzing and forecasting project progress? No more wasted time on data entry and online meetings.

The Construction Viz Project Tracker app puts the team at the forefront. Project Tracker has enough detail that each stakeholder can quickly provide scope, schedule, and budget updates for their tasks. The app displays project milestone statuses in an intuitive stop-light dashboard. Updates are made by simply filtering on your tasks and clicking on the status icon. Team members automatically receive email alerts when tasks are due. They can get directly to their tasks with interactive configurable dashboard views, minimizing the need to chase down and follow-up with responsible parties.

The Project Tracker has been successfully used to manage multi-million dollar programs across many different disciplines. In one program alone, a client used it to manage over 6,000 projects and almost 400,000 activities, spread across seven functional teams.

Find out more about how the Project Tracker and our suite of collaborative apps can help you remotely manage project teams by scheduling a no-obligation demo and consultation today.

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

January 26, 2021 by Marcy Spiker Leave a Comment

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.

Why Access Management Matters For Your Projects

November 30, 2020 by da_admin Leave a Comment

Construction projects involve many different stakeholders that create, edit, and review project information, making it challenging to ensure sensitive data doesn't end up in the wrong hands. Thus, using a robust Project Management Information System (PMIS) with the right access management tools is essential.

For companies utilizing Microsoft 365 or SharePoint as a PMIS, you are probably aware of these tools' powerful access level capabilities out of the box. While you can assign granular permissions at a site, library, folder, and even a specific file level, you can very quickly create a spiderweb of complexity that can be too unwieldy to manage. Construction Viz, our construction project management solution powered by Microsoft 365 and SharePoint, lets you take full control of access management for your projects.

Leveraging SharePoint Access Management with Construction Viz

For over 11 years, Lydon Solutions has been building SharePoint-based construction management solutions, including our very own PMIS, Construction Viz. One of the thorniest issues organizations encounter using SharePoint to manage construction projects is access management. This is why our goal when we built Construction Viz was to leverage SharePoint's underlying access controls while providing a simplified user interface for easier permissions administration.

What makes the Construction Viz Access Management layer so great?

Construction-centric. With years of experience building custom solutions in SharePoint and providing document control services, we know how teams typically share and control project information. We designed Construction Viz Access Management around groups, users, apps, and specific content related to contractors and companies. For example, a project team could give certain users access to the Submittal app but only allow them to see and edit submittals from their company or for a specific project.

Simplified Management. Access Management is centralized in the Construction Viz Hub to simplify access administration. As you activate Construction Viz apps within the Hub, they are automatically added to the access management module, allowing administrators to grant users access right away. You can manage access in two ways:

From Groups Management, an administrator can create access groups, assigning each different access rights - such as read, write, or none - on a per contractor, company, or app basis. From Users Management, an administrator can then assign individual users to a specific access group, thus automatically assigning the user the same rights defined under Groups Management.
If the administrator needs to set special access rules for a user, they can give a user custom access rather than adding them to a specific access group.

You can display all groups or users' access levels in an interactive grid from either Groups Management or Access Management views. This data can then be exported to Excel and printed as a PDF for further analysis and reporting.

Powerful Customization. Construction Viz Access Management provides consistent access control across all apps in the suite. You can define access down to the component level (such as form header, attachments, links, reviews, and so) and even to the field level (such as initiator, status, and description) depending on your needs. For example, you could set up your RFI forms with access controls that only allow the contractor who submitted the form to edit the description field. In this same form, the general contractor reviewing this information might only have access to the response fields in their assigned review section. Similarly, the owner could have access to just their response fields in their review section.

With Construction Viz Access Management, we built in the capabilities for managing stakeholder access for construction projects of any size in a way that minimizes the level of effort required to administer.

Learn More About Construction Viz Access Management

Access Management is a feature we built into our apps to ensure access to project data can be managed easily across our suite of apps. Find out other ways that Construction Viz can help your projects be successful by contacting us for a free consultation and demo. If you need help getting your construction projects up and running quickly, Lydon Solutions also offers managed services for Microsoft 365 and SharePoint.

How Construction Viz Streamlines Email Approvals

September 10, 2020 by da_admin Leave a Comment

Construction Viz enables your team to get more done with the tools they already know and use most. In this post, we’ll share how stakeholders can view and respond to approval workflows directly within Microsoft Outlook – all without needing to sign into any other construction project management platform.

Your construction project team already spends a lot of their day working in Microsoft Excel, Word, and Outlook. One of our goals with Construction Viz is empowering project teams to keep using their Microsoft products instead of having to learn a new Project Management Information System (PMIS). Our recently introduced Construction Viz Cost Report app is an example of this philosophy in action. In our blog post introducing the new app, we explained how the tool enables cost engineers to use their preferred software, Excel, while automatically importing cost data into Microsoft SharePoint for viewing and reporting by other team members.

Read on to learn how Construction Viz can let you leverage Microsoft Outlook to collect input and approval from team members via email without requiring users to sign into anything else.

The Problems with Typical Approval Workflows

Before talking about what Construction Viz can do, let’s review how other platforms handle the approval workflow.

Most construction project management systems on the market send an email to designated users when an approval workflow is triggered. This email has some basic information captured from the workflow and a link to view the entire item being submitted for approval directly in the project management system. To proceed, the user needs to sign in to the software platform that generated the email.

The above process is probably familiar and may seem simple enough, but it includes multiple assumptions, including that the user receiving the email:

Has an active account in the project system.
Can sign in to the system from the device they are currently using.
Remembers their password.
Is trained and familiar with the system.
Knows how to navigate the system to provide their response to the correct record.

As you can see, each of those assumptions puts the burden on the end-user. If any of those assumptions turn out to be incorrect, the approval process stops dead in its tracks.

With Construction Viz, we threw out all these assumptions and designed something better.

Construction Viz Simplifies Approval Workflow Emails

We have worked with and analyzed the workflows of numerous construction companies over the years. As a result, we’ve seen that most team members who review and approve records do not need to use the construction project management system for any other reason. So why make them log in every time they need to respond to an approval request?

Knowing the above, we designed Construction Viz to streamline the review and approval process. We built a workflow using Microsoft Power Automate to email approval requests to project team members, even if they don’t have a Construction Viz or Microsoft 365 account.

Microsoft Power Automate workflow example

The email generated by Construction Viz has all the necessary information and attachments required to approve the record, as well as a linked lightweight Microsoft Form that the recipient can use to respond to the request. There is no need for them to sign into Construction Viz or any other system. The approver can review and make updates directly in the included form, and Microsoft Power Automate automatically pushes those updates back to Construction Viz. For the recipient, it could not be simpler to respond to the request, no matter what device they are using.

Taking Approvals to the Next Level

Construction Viz streamlines the approval workflow process and enables team members to do more with email, a tool they regularly use throughout the day.

But what if users are not even in Outlook at all? Could Construction Viz display approval request forms in any application, or even in the notification area of a user’s mobile device? We think that would be a great feature. Stay tuned for more details on what we have planned next to do just that.

Get Construction Viz for your Team

Construction Viz is a web-based construction project management solution that you can deploy into Microsoft 365 and SharePoint. There are many advantages to this deployment model, such as having your data stay with you in your Microsoft 365 tenant. Also, you can leverage the full power of Microsoft 365 application services with Construction Viz, all with the same Microsoft user credentials.

If you need help setting up your construction projects in Microsoft 365, visit LydonSolutions.com, where you can find out more on our Microsoft 365 Managed Services and submit a no-obligation consultation request. If you prefer a turnkey, enterprise-ready project management software solution, contact us today for a free demo.

Project Portals for Remote Collaboration

May 12, 2020 by da_admin Leave a Comment

Remote project management can be challenging when trying to bring together many different disciplines on a construction project. Let’s face it, every stakeholder has their own responsibilities and focus areas that don’t fit neatly into the traditional off the shelf Project Management Information System (PMIS).

This is why we built Construction Viz Portals.

Portals are discipline-focused information windows into the project health. They display easily digestible snippets of information such as KPIs, dashboards, web pages, and maps. Best of all these can be built in any Microsoft 365 application and then surfaced in Construction Viz Portals. Have a Power BI Report or a SharePoint web page that you want to build and share with team members, simply grab the URL and paste into the builder. Select from a pre-set list of portals or build your own and connect them yourself.

Portals allow you to share information the way you want, using the applications you use everyday. Get a free demo to learn more about Construction Viz Portals and how we can deliver a tailored solution to manage your projects. If you need help optimizing Microsoft 365 for managing your projects, check out our managed services at LydonSolutions.com.

Collaborate on your Projects with Construction Viz and Microsoft Teams

September 19, 2019 by da_admin Leave a Comment

Microsoft Teams, the company’s group chat software application, has been gaining in popularity of late. Microsoft continues to add functionality to Teams and is even phasing out Skype for Business in favor of it. As a result, many organizations are beginning to use Teams for collaboration and communication.

Teams is also fast becoming a leading project management tool thanks to how it combines with Office 365 and SharePoint Online. When you create a new team in the application, Teams automatically generates a linked SharePoint Online site collection. You can access your team’s SharePoint site by clicking on the globe in the top navigation.

Construction Viz, which is powered by SharePoint, seamlessly integrates into Teams, allowing you to access all your project information from one location. Read on to learn how. 

Connecting Construction Viz with Microsoft Teams

We provide organizations looking to use Construction Viz and Teams together with several options:

1. Teams SharePoint Site

We can deploy Construction Viz into the SharePoint site that Teams created for you. This keeps all your team’s project data in one place and tied to your Office 365 credentials (no need to log into multiple sites/systems).

2. SharePoint Online Site

As an alternative, we can deploy Construction Viz to another location in your Office 365/ SharePoint Online environment. Then we can add a tab in Teams linking to Construction Viz. As above, your Office 365 credentials will allow access to both Teams and Construction Viz.

3. Externally Hosted SharePoint

If you prefer a turnkey and cloud-based solution, Lydon Solutions can provide web hosting and support of Construction Viz. In this case, we add a tab in Teams linking to our hosted instance of Construction Viz.

Learn More About Construction Viz

Construction Viz is about choice and it is the only construction management platform designed around how you work and where you work.

Contact us today to find out more about Teams and Construction Viz as well as how we can help you better manage your projects.