Construction Viz

Project Management Perfect

project management

Improve Project Efficiency with New Schedule Views for Construction Viz

Forms |

Construction forms such as submittals, RFIs, and daily reports are tightly integrated with project schedules but can get lost among the hundreds or thousands of potential activities. To manage forms effectively, it’s not enough to just see them included in a weekly schedule report. It is essential to evaluate inquiries promptly and efficiently in real-time to address any possible schedule disruptions.

These inquiries may include the following:

  • Did the contractor adhere to the contractual obligations by submitting their documents on time?
  • Was the review of Requests for Information (RFIs) conducted within the agreed-upon deadlines?
  • Were the daily inspections conducted as scheduled?

You need a simple and quick way to answer these questions and more in your construction project management software solution. The problem is that the typical form logs found in most PMISs allow you to sort and filter on due dates, but it lacks form-specific Gantt chart views to manage deliverables.

Our new form view feature for Construction Viz solves this shortcoming.

Construction Viz gives you a clear view of your form data

With the new Construction Viz schedule views, you can visualize any of our apps in a traditional Gantt chart view accessible from within the app itself. Now, you have the best of both worlds, the detailed analysis of form data in interactive logs and a Gantt chart focused specifically on the form.

Construction Viz System Outage Request app All Items List (“Form Log”) View
Construction Viz System Outage Request app with new schedule view

Construction Viz Scheduler view sample

Customizable form-specific schedules

You can further tailor Construction Viz’s new schedule views for a specific form. For example, baseline vs. the current schedule, resources assignment, and critical path could be added to the submittal form app while not adding those features to the daily report app. And you can roll up schedule data captured in each form app into an overall master schedule.

The new schedule view keeps team leads and members focused on meeting their specific deliverable dates using an intuitive and interactive Gantt chart.

Find out more about Construction Viz features and apps for Microsoft 365 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…

Managing Multiple Construction Projects with Microsoft 365 and SharePoint Online

Project Management Tools |

So, you want to use Microsoft 365 and SharePoint Online to manage your construction projects? With out-of-the-box SharePoint, you will have to decide whether you will use one site per project or multiple projects per site. Fortunately, Construction Viz is flexible enough to accommodate both approaches.

Two Ways to Set Up Microsoft SharePoint to Manage Construction Projects

Before we highlight the value Construction Viz can bring, let’s look at the two ways you can setup SharePoint to manage multiple projects and the pros and cons of each approach:

Option 1: Create a SharePoint site for every project.

  • Pro: This approach ensures you wall off project data between projects and lets you easily restrict permissions to each site.
  • Con: Going this route requires more administration to update and maintain multiple site configurations and aggregate data for reporting.

Option 2: Create a single site for all projects

  • Pro: This approach makes it easier to aggregate and report on your project data.
  • Con: Using a single site can make permissions management complex and complicated depending on security requirements. You also have to decide how to define a project across all of the SharePoint assets (e.g., pages, folders, and project metadata across lists and libraries).

Unfortunately, there is no right or wrong way; the approach often depends on many factors. However, whatever method you select, Construction Viz can streamline the process for you.

How Construction Viz Simplifies Managing Multiple Projects in SharePoint

When we designed the Construction Viz Hub, we wanted to give clients the ability to manage projects the way they want in the same application within Microsoft SharePoint. With Construction Viz, you can manage a project, program, or portfolio within one site or multiple. It’s up to you!

Highlights of Construction Viz’s Multi-Project Management Features 

Simplified access management – We built our own access management solution on top of SharePoint to streamline the process of adding internal and external users to our applications. This custom solution reduces the administrative burden of permissions management.

Expanded project settings – We integrated multi-project information across all the apps within a deployment. We also made it so that project pickers and default values can be unique by application, allowing for robust configuration depending on deployment requirements.

Expanded personnel settings – We incorporated both SharePoint user and non-user management within a central location for easier access management. This feature allows for easier administration of access and distribution groups across projects.

Expanded project-specific company settings – We added the ability to assign companies to one or more projects so they can be restricted and re-used across multiple projects or a program.

Included data and reporting rollup by program and portfolio – We built data rollup capabilities and reports for one or more sites to report project status across the portfolio.

We made all these design considerations so that Construction Viz can provide you with the best way to manage your projects, programs, and portfolios in the most efficient way possible. You can learn more about the capabilities and features of Construction Viz on our website.

No PMIS is an Island: Integrating Smartsheet and Construction Viz

Reporting |

It is not uncommon for organizations to use many disparate web-based project management tools on a construction project. From real estate transactions, environmental assessments, and contract awards to project scheduling, the mix of software systems used across construction organizations can span many different departments and stakeholders.  The challenge is integrating these various solutions into a single view of the project and ensuring the aggregated data is accurate, reliable, and timely.

Smartsheet is one such project management tool we often encounter. Smartsheet is used across many industries and can be a data source and reporting solution for construction information. So it made sense for our team to integrate Smartsheet with Construction Viz to allow our clients using this tool to have the best features of both applications.

While Smartsheet has an API for integrating data, our goal was to build flexible integrated solutions to solve our clients’ unique data challenges. Construction Viz can leverage SQL and SharePoint as the back-end database – with the specifics of how this works depending on the selected apps, client data restrictions, and client-specific customizations. Our Smartsheet integration solution thus needed to be flexible and scalable while offering real-time connectivity to Smartsheet for both SQL and SharePoint.

We deploy our SQL integration solution as an Azure WebJob within an Azure web app. Utilizing Azure web apps as the execution platform enables easy scheduling, automatic restarts, guaranteed stability and uptime, built-in logging, performance tracking, and nearly infinite scalability. Our SharePoint integration solution utilizes industry-standard connectivity via SharePoint’s REST Service.

Intergration Examples

SQL Integration highlights

  • A customer needed a Two-way integration with Smartsheet, so both systems are always up to date.
  • Users can use schedule data created in Smartsheet in our Construction Viz Project Tracker and a custom performance metrics application, so data needed to flow seamlessly between both systems.
  • ConstViz application extensions allow the Customer to add and remove Smartsheet Links as needed for a no-code expansion of the integration scope to new projects.
  • Integration can be scheduled daily with refresh rates that can be adjusted as needed.
  • For troubleshooting any potential integration issues, we implemented user-managed error logs.

SharePoint Integration highlights

  • A customer needed a simple One-way integration with Construction Viz, which allows Smartsheet to access document libraries.
  • Ability to handle large daily data loads as Construction Viz program sites may include up to 6,000 projects.
  • An integration approach that overcomes Smartsheet API limitations:
    • The Smartsheet API limits automated file attachment uploads to 30MB
    • The SharePoint online attachment limitation is 250MB
    • We built a solution to log oversized files into Smartsheet in the appropriate locations and hyperlinks back to the original SharePoint files for retrieval via other methods

Smartsheet is one of many integrations into Construction Viz (SQL and SharePoint) that we have built. From Oracle P6 to Arc GIS, we understand the client’s need to centralize data to manage large-scale construction projects. You can find out more by requesting a consultation here.

Capture Construction Project Reviews and Approvals on Just About Everything!

Dashboards |

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

Project Management |

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.