Construction Viz

Project Management Perfect

project management

Solving the Action Items Dilemma with Construction Viz

Action Item |

Learn how we integrated the Construction Viz Meeting Minutes and Action Item apps to turbocharge action item management for construction project teams.

Here is a common scenario for many construction organizations:

  • Your project teams hold meetings to review progress and capture action items in meeting minutes.
  • In most cases, team members probably document meeting minutes in Microsoft Word.
  • Next, someone likely re-enters action items into a separate log using Microsoft Excel.

Not only is this not a very efficient way to collect meeting information, but it is also error-prone and difficult to keep in sync. It is also challenging to ensure that your team is working off the most up-to-date versions of these documents.

We took a step back and analyzed the above process when designing the Construction Viz Meeting Minutes and Action Items apps. The result was a deep integration between these two tools to create a streamlined and always-up-to-date bidirectional connection between meeting minutes and action items.

How Construction Viz improves action item management

The bidirectional flow of data between our Construction Viz Meeting Minutes and Action items apps offers construction project teams many benefits:

  • You can create action items directly within the Meeting Minutes app.
  • Action items created within a meeting minutes record automatically generate entries within the Action Items app.
  • Both apps automatically generate cross-links, relating action items and meeting minutes records to each other. Now you can easily cross-reference action items and meetings, giving you a complete log as a single source of truth.
  • If you duplicate a meeting minute form, you can selectively carry forward action items, creating a history of assigned and open action items, as well as a record of the meeting in which you first entered them.

Get a free demo and consultation

Streamlining meeting minutes and action items is just another example of how our team applied our real-world construction project management experience to help organizations save time and cost. Find out how Construction Viz can help your team better manage your projects. Check out our full lineup of Construction Viz apps and schedule your free demo and consultation today.

If you can measure it, you can manage it with Construction Viz Task Manager

Project Management Tools |

Being a construction project manager is a demanding job where all responsibility for a project's success falls on your shoulders. You spend most of your time herding cats, trying to hold your team members accountable while working in a matrixed organization. It's not enough to email a team member when a deliverable is due. You need constant reminders when follow-ups are required and a simple but effective means to monitor and report progress.

We designed the Construction Viz Task Manager App for project managers like you. Construction Viz Task Manager has everything you need to plan, track, and report on your team's project and program tasks within one powerful app.

Construction Viz Task Manager Key Features

The Construction Viz Task Manager app installs easily into the Construction Viz Hub and integrates with our full lineup of construction project management apps. Task Manager provides a 360-degree approach to managing tasks, including the following features:

  • Dashboard summary. As a PM, your time is limited. Task Manager lets you quickly see the status of your project team's tasks in configurable dashboards with drill-down capability.
  • List view. Task Manager lets you see all your tasks consolidated into a centralized list view. You can use this pre-defined view to quickly group, filter, search, and report on your team's tasks.
  • Board view. Want an easy way to see the progress of a task? Task Manager's board view uses a Kanban approach to managing tasks with configurable buckets and swim lanes so you can see progress made by each team member. The app highlights any behind schedule tasks in red, allowing you to target those items for immediate follow up.
  • Calendar view. Seeing when tasks are due in a familiar calendar layout is invaluable. Task Manager's calendar allows you to proactively manage when tasks are forecast to be complete using daily, weekly, or monthly views. Since Construction Viz uses SharePoint as the backend, you can even link your Task Manager calendar to your Outlook calendar.
  • When you assign a task to someone in Task Manager, the app automatically sends the assignee an email with a link for them to take action. Task Manager integrates with Microsoft Power Automate, letting you tailor the timing and frequency of email notifications for your business processes so that frequent reminders do not go unnoticed. Like all of our apps, tasks from Task Manager also display in the Construction Viz notification center, ensuring you and your team always know about items requiring your attention.
  • Task Manager integrates with other Construction Viz forms and apps. Task Manager integrates across the suite of Construction Viz apps, streamlining your workflows. For example, if you are in a Construction Viz RFI form, you could create a task and assign it to a team member, thereby associating the two records. Now, anyone viewing the task can see the linked RFI record and vice versa. With Task Manager, you no longer have to bounce between one system to know when a task is due and another to view the work item. Everything is readily accessible and interlinked directly in all the relevant Construction Viz apps.
  • Use any device with full mobile responsive and offline support. Task Manager, like all our apps, is fully responsive on any device. You can also work offline without an internet connection.  So whether you are at the office or in the field, you can always manage your tasks.
  • Adaptive Cards integration. Task Manager takes advantage of Microsoft's Adaptive Card technology, allowing team members to work in Outlook without ever logging into any system.  Task-driven cards make it easy for team members to respond to tasks wherever they are and on any device using Microsoft Outlook. You can read more about Construction Viz and Microsoft Adaptive Cards in this blog post.

See what Construction Viz Task Manager can do for you

Construction Viz is the most flexible construction project management solution available for Microsoft 365 and SharePoint. Find out how Construction Viz and the Task Manager app can help you better manage your construction projects and programs with a free consultation and demo.

Simpler Project Management with the Construction Viz Project Tracker App

Project Tracker |

When planning a construction project and seeing it through to closeout, it’s essential that you use the right tools to keep the entire project team on track. We created the Construction Viz Project Tracker app to assist with this process.

The Construction Viz Project Tracking app, available for Microsoft 365 and SharePoint, combines all of your critical project information into a single interactive dashboard for easy reporting, resolving issues, and monitoring the schedule and budget.

The benefits of using Project Tracker

Keep track of everything you need to know about your projects with the Project Tracker app. You can use Project Tracker to:

1. Keep track of 1000s of projects with ease. The Project Tracker app allows you to manage tasks for one or several customers associated with a project. Roll up tasks from multiple customers into one easy-to-read dashboard to see everything at a glance.
2. Manage permits to issuance. Identify permitting requirements and work on hundreds of permits to keep your team on track.
3. Prepare the Job Package Binder. With a click of a button, the Project Tracker can prepare the job package binder for your construction foreman to take on the job site.
4. Be productive anywhere with full mobile and offline support. Use our lineup of Construction Viz offline mobile forms, such as The Daily Inspection Report, to track programs and projects from a mobile device.
5. Always know where your projects are happening with GIS integration. View your projects spatially. Load in GIS layers to overlay on top of your projects.
6. Tag documents in seconds. Construction Viz makes document management for your project easy, letting you tag documents to one or many projects based on the dynamic that you define.
7. Integrate with Power Automate. The Project Tracker app integrates into Microsoft Power Automate to give you the option to send alerts or create workflows.

Check out our presentation about the Project Tracker app to learn more and see how one major California utility company uses the tool to manage complex maintenance projects involving over six thousand transmission towers.

Get started with Project Tracker and Construction Viz

The Project Tracker app is a part of the Construction Viz Suite, which offers more than thirty-one construction forms to assist with project management. Find out more about Construction Viz and see how we can help you better manage your projects by requesting a free demo today.

How Construction Viz Streamlines Email Approvals

Collaboration |

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.

Codes Metadata in Construction Viz

Video |

Construction Viz lets you utilize metadata to track work breakdown structure, specifications, and dynamic relation matrices for your projects.

Watch our newest video to see how Construction Viz makes this process easy in both SharePoint and Office 365.

Available Metadata and Other Features in Construction Viz:

• Work Breakdown Structure (WBS)
• Project Specifications
• Dynamic Relation Matrices (DRM)
• Standardized metadata across all Apps for every record
• Metadata can be queried and reported across Construction Viz
• Available for Microsoft SharePoint and Office365

Find out more about how Construction Viz can help use project information for reporting and streamlining projects. Schedule your free consultation today!

Introducing No-App, Offline Forms for Construction Viz (Video)

Forms |

Forms are an essential part of your construction project workflow. Construction Viz Form Apps let you and your team complete digital forms anywhere, on any device and even without an internet connection.

Watch our latest video to see how you can streamline your construction project workflows even when you're offline with our no-app, offline forms for Construction Viz.

Key Features of Our No-App, Offline Forms

  • No app to install: Get full access to your construction project forms right in your browser on any modern device.
  • No internet? No problem: You can edit forms without a internet connection, and then sync changes when you're back online. This allows for continuous access with the ability to make changes even in the field.
  • Full-featured construction management forms: Our library of mobile-responsive construction project forms have built-in permissions, comments, workflows, and reminders.
  • Powered by technology you trust: Construction Viz is integrated with SharePoint and Office 365.

Discover Project Management Perfected with our complete suite of offline forms designed to help you manage your projects anytime, anywhere. Contact us today to schedule a demo and receive more information about Construction Viz Apps for Microsoft SharePoint & Office 365.