Construction Viz

Project Management Perfect

PMIS

Manage your projects in Outlook! No, really!

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Embracing new technology is often a challenge in construction. While technology can help organizations be more efficient, it is challenging to keep up with the constant changes and new systems required to do the job. To add to this dilemma, every contractor, construction manager, and owner have their own Project Management Information System (PMIS) that team members must learn to conduct business. As a result, actual construction productivity takes a hit due to additional training, double-entry, errors, and general user dissatisfaction. It's no wonder most construction organizations are hesitant to leave old faithful: Microsoft Outlook and Office.

So the challenge is, how do we make it as easy as possible for the construction team to do their job and remove the technology burden of learning and working with multiple PMISs? What if you could work in Outlook or Office entirely without ever having to log into another system?

Welcome to Adaptive Cards

With the flexibility of the Microsoft Power Platform and Adaptive Cards, we have removed the users' burden of learning another PMIS by allowing them to work directly in Microsoft Teams or Outlook. By leveraging Power Automate and Adaptive Cards technology, users can now receive actionable task-focused cards. To respond, users open a card to view the content, review a task, or respond with comments. Work entirely from email or Teams—no need to even log into a PMIS.

The Key Benefits of Adaptive Cards

You may be thinking that your PMIS already sends out emails when there are tasks due. How is this different? Adaptive Cards are the future of actionable messages and notifications. They are essentially small interactive applications.

The are many benefits to Adaptive Cards:

• Cards are responsive to any device.
• The card user interface can be simplified and tailored to perform specific tasks. Using the KISS (keep it simple) approach, we can make it easy for users to review content and respond.
• The cards can include logic to prompt questions and responses without logging into the actual PMIS and never leaving the email.
• Cards can read and write data with various systems such as Microsoft 365 or SharePoint, SAP, Oracle, etc.
• Cards can leverage Windows 10 notifications.
• Cards integrate with Microsoft Teams Chat, Timeline, and Outlook.
• Cards can leverage assistants such as Cortana or a web chatbot.
• Dashboards can be delivered using feeds from multiple Adaptive Cards.
• The cards can include security extended from native applications.

Lydon Solutions can build Adaptive Cards for any PMIS using our pre-defined templates. We even integrated Adaptive Cards into the notification system of Construction Viz, our PMIS for Microsoft 365 and SharePoint. By meeting the user where they work in Microsoft Office and Outlook email, Adaptive Cards keep users in their natural activity flow without interruption, making for more efficient and happier project teams. A win-win.

Adaptive Card for a Construction Viz Submittal Form email notification

Deploy Adaptive Cards for Your Construction Projects

Find out how we can leverage our existing Adaptive Card templates to simplify your workflows and provide team members access to project data in the applications they use every day. Contact us for a free consultation and see how we can help your organization with its digital transformation to Microsoft 365.

If you need a turnkey PMIS for managing your projects in Microsoft 365, learn more about using Construction Viz for project management.

How Construction Viz Streamlines Email Approvals

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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:

  1. Has an active account in the project system.
  2. Can sign in to the system from the device they are currently using.
  3. Remembers their password.
  4. Is trained and familiar with the system.
  5. 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.

Construction Viz email approval form

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.

Your Flows, Your PMIS: Power Automate & Construction Viz

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Power Automate is a Microsoft 365 service that automates time-consuming business tasks and processes. It makes it practical and simple for line-of-business users to build workflows across applications and services. Most PMIS systems on the market have their own proprietary workflow functionality, but what makes Microsoft’s Power Automate unique, is that it is a stand-alone service that can integrate with both Microsoft 365 as well as external applications.

Being that Construction Viz can be deployed into Microsoft 365, we deeply integrated Power Automate into our application so you can build, deploy, and support your flows from within the Construction Viz hub directly inside your Microsoft 365 tenant. With Microsoft’s free, on-premises data gateway, you can also connect Power Automate flows (as well as other Power Platform services) to line-of-business systems behind your corporate firewall. In fact, we have leveraged the Gateway to connect client’s Microsoft 365 environments to our hosted Construction Viz service offering which opens up a wide array of possibilities.

Power Automate

We make it easier than ever to add your own manual triggers and configurable buttons that allow users to link their flows and add it to any app.

So, What Could You do with Power Automate and Construction Viz?

Send out Construction Viz Action Items for review that will update one or more Microsoft 365 applications at one time from a single workflow. This is triggered by using a button you can add to the Action Item form. So not only will the alert notification display as an action item in a user’s ball-in-court, but it can also update:

• Microsoft To Do – as a task
• Outlook – as an email approval request, a task or event
• Planner – as an event
• Teams – as a post
• Excel – as an action item in a Worksheet

Why is this important? Because every company or employee might manage their work in different Microsoft 365 applications. For some users, it’s Excel. For others, it might be Outlook, and so on. With Power Automate, you can configure the workflow around how you work and what applications in Microsoft 365 you use frequently.

Other Power Automate workflows can include:

• Creating PDFs from Construction Viz forms as well as attachments
• Extracting data from Excel to use in Construction Viz apps
• Emailing alerts from Power BI dashboards embedded in Construction Viz

To get you started, we have built a set of Power Automate workflows that work with Construction Viz and can be imported into your Microsoft 365 tenant. Once imported, you can modify as needed to create the solution that works best for your organization.

Get Started with Power Automate

Get the most out of Microsoft 365 by combining Construction Viz with Power Automate to create unparalleled solutions.

To find out more, schedule a free demo of Construction Viz. If you need help with Microsoft 365 setup for your construction organization, check out our managed services at Lydon Solutions.