Construction Viz

Project Management Perfect

Sharepoint

Linked apps, where have you been?

Forms |

The new linked apps feature in Construction Viz allows creating any form within another form, like an action item within a meeting minute form or a change request in a risk form. Find out how this new feature can save time and improve your overall document control processes.

A need based on common real-world scenarios

If you think about the evolution of a change on a project, it might start with an issue, move to risk, get added to an RFI, and finally move to a change request to implement the change. Typically, these are all separate forms, but they are all part of an interrelated process to document and disposition a project change.

Taking a step back and looking at the entire change process, each form builds on the prior, from inception to implementation. Additional details, further justification, subsequent approvals, etc., are added at each stage of the change lifecycle.

If you can relate these separate processes together, project teams can streamline the process and build an audit trail to support the justification of the change.

Enter Construction Viz’s linked apps

With the new Construction Viz connected apps feature, you can create one or more form apps within another. For example, if you are filling out a risk form and want to generate a related change request, you can add the change request form linked component to the risk form settings.

When a user completes a risk form, the new component will show a window into the change request app where they can create one or more change requests without ever leaving the risk form. And the change request will automatically link back to the risk form and vice versa.

This functionality can be added to any form, creating a one-to-many relationship so that an entire process can be automatically related.

Linked apps are just one of the many features we have added to Construction Viz to enhance information management on a project further. You can request a demo of Construction here.

Not ready to move to an enterprise construction management system or need help with Microsoft 365? You can request a free 1-hour Microsoft 365 consultation request with our experts here.

Construction Viz for Microsoft 365 Product Demo
Webinar - September 7, 2023, 11:00 AM PST
Participate in this interactive session to share your challenges and learn more about Construction Viz for Microsoft 365.
Learn More

ChatGPT (Microsoft CoPilot) for Construction Viz

News |

Microsoft Build 2023 was filled with AI Copilot (ChatGPT) features across the entire Microsoft 365 and Windows ecosystem. There is no question that AI has arrived and will change how we work going forward.

Co-Pilot_1

Times a changing with generative AI tools

“A recent report from Goldman Sachs estimates around 300 million jobs could be affected by generative AI, meaning 18% of work globally could be automated—with more advanced economies heavily impacted than emerging markets,” Jack Kelly via Forbes on March 31, 2023.

“The [Goldman Sachs] report also predicts two-thirds of jobs in the U.S. and Europe ‘are exposed to some degree of AI automation,’ and around a quarter of all jobs could be performed by AI entirely,” Adrianna Johnson via Forbes on March 30, 2023.

The impact of AI on construction

AI will have a significant impact on construction. The changes will be broad and far-reaching, from faster and more accurate designs to AI-controlled drones for mapping and inspections. AI will force organizations to change by adopting these cutting-edge technologies to compete in the world of tomorrow.

If you are on Microsoft 365 and Azure, you’re in luck. What once would take millions of dollars in R&D to develop AI models is now made available by Microsoft to integrate into your existing applications.

Co-Pilot_2

Construction Viz and Copilot AI (ChatGPT)

Lydon Solutions is excited to announce that we have started exploring this game-changing technology made available to us in Microsoft 365. We aim to revolutionize construction management by integrating Copilot (ChatGPT) with Construction Viz. Since Construction Viz uses your Microsoft 365 SharePoint lists and libraries, Microsoft Copilot (ChatGPT) allows us to incorporate AI naturally into our product.

No other construction management solution can boast what we will be able to do with AI using your data delivered securely in your Microsoft 365 tenant.

The Construction Viz AI gameplan

In the coming months, we will enhance Clover, our AI assistant bot you can activate in the Construction Viz Hub.

Our team will expand Clover to leverage your data stored in your Microsoft 365 SharePoint online and allow you, through a common language, to analyze your construction project data. For example, we are exploring enabling real-time analyses using simple language, including:

  • Scope change management lifecycle—Scoping documents, risk management, RFIs, change requests, change orders, and more.
  • Smart scheduling—What if analysis, time impact analysis, and schedule development.
  • Inspection—Inspection data analysis for delays, issues, log of vendors on site, and progress and productivity
  • Task management—Generate reports on your tasks, overdue tasks, and plan for the day

These are only some areas we will consider as part of this initiative. AI is a brave new world, and Lydon Solutions will bring this technology to a construction project near you soon.

Subscribe to our newsletter from our website footer to stay in the loop on this AI journey! Also, you can request a demo of Construction viz for Microsoft 365 here.

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’s Spreadsheet Component Meets You Where You Work

Reporting |

The most common software used on construction projects is Microsoft Excel. The catch-all tool has allowed project teams to build localized solutions for tracking, reporting, and sharing project information. Unfortunately, Excel has created a problem for most project management information systems (PMIS) on the market that expect users to give up their Excel files and adopt their platform. The bottom line is that users are entrenched in Excel and, more often than not, don't give it up.

The new Construction Viz Spreadsheet component embraces Excel

Over the years, we have found that disregarding Excel in favor of only using a web-based PMIS can create resentment among project teams, with users ultimately returning to their old faithful at the end of the day.

At Lydon Solutions, we choose our battles wisely, meeting users where they work: Excel, Outlook, and Teams. We built the new Spreadsheet component to bridge the gap between our Construction Viz PMIS and Excel users, delivering a best of both worlds approach.

What is the Spreadsheet Component?

We build Construction Viz applications to use components like mini-applications that perform discrete tasks, such as attaching documents, uploading images, and capturing approvals. Components can be combined to deliver turnkey applications like RFI or daily report forms. Adding the Spreadsheet component to an application enables interaction with Excel files saved to Construction Viz, allowing users to display, modify, and extract data from worksheets.

How Does it Work?

The process of using the Spreadsheet component in a Construction Viz form would go like this:

  • Create a new form record, like a status report, and fill in the required fields.
  • Upload your Excel file(s) using the Document Attachment component within the form. The file is automatically tagged and stored in the supporting SharePoint Online library.
  • Open the Spreadsheet component in the form and select the Excel file you uploaded from the list.
  • The Spreadsheet component will display the Excel file selected and extract data from rows, columns, or cells as identified in the setup and displayed beneath the spreadsheet.
  • You can then make changes to the spreadsheet (formatting, adding columns, adding formulas, etc), save it locally, and then upload it back to the Document Attachments component.

How is this different than Excel Online and your Construction Viz Cost Report application?

Excel Online displays an Excel file in the browser once stored in a SharePoint document library. If you want to extract data from that Excel file to use in another SharePoint list, application, or report, you will need to build and maintain a Power Automate workflow. Our Cost Report application leverages a Power Automate Workflow or Microsoft Graph to extract data out of Excel, but this approach is limited to data stored within a specific Excel table.

Organizations can add the Construction Viz Spreadsheet component to any of our applications to enable their users to read and display Excel files directly without needing a workflow. The Spreadsheet component can also read data from anywhere in an Excel file (rows, columns, and cells) and is not limited to an Excel table.

To find out more about the new Spreadsheet component or any of our applications, visit Construction Viz.com to sign up for a free demo. If you are not ready for an enterprise construction management PMIS like Construction Viz but want to manage your projects in Microsoft 365, you can visit LydonSolutions.com and submit a request for a free one-hour consultation to help you on your way.

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.

The new Construction Viz Questionnaire component provides even more choice

Project Management Tools |

In construction, questionnaires are essential for gathering qualitative and quantitative information on a project. As a project manager, you want your field team to use questionnaires to report on various construction activities including, but not limited to, job site safety, project progress, quality control, identification of issues and defects, and adherence to specification and contractual requirements.

For those using Construction Viz, you may already be familiar with our standard Area of Work (AOW) component which allows you to create ad hoc questions in the Daily Report or Inspection forms. Field personnel respond to the AOW questions through set yes, no, and N/A response fields. While the functionality of the AOW component has worked great for documenting and reporting on field activities and project progress, we wanted to give our clients even more flexibility when creating unique questionnaires.

Area of Work (AOW) Component

Introducing the new customized “Questionnaire” component, for any Construction Viz form!

The new “Questionnaire” component expands on our standard AOW component in multiple ways:

  • Custom Deployment. Your customized “Questionnaire” component is deployed per your requirements. Name your component and choose from various response field types that will be available in questionnaires within your component, including:
    • Text fields. Capture open-ended responses.
    • Standardize responses and minimize data input.
    • Date fields. Capture key dates, such as start and/or completion dates, delivery dates.
    • Number fields. Restrict responses to numerical values to track various measurable data such as quantities, hours, cost, etc.
  • Dynamic Component Configuration. You can create multiple questionnaires within your custom component, and have full control over configuration:
    • Component Configuration. As the project progresses, you can create new, or hide old, questionnaires, and re-order the questionnaires within the component so the questions are responded to in a logical sequence of project activities, etc.
    • Questionnaire Configuration. For each questionnaire, restrict how field personnel respond to your questions by selecting from the available response field types, and configure the order of the active columns and individual questions in which they appear within the questionnaire.

New Questionnaire Component

More than one customized “Questionnaire” component can be deployed within any Construction Viz form, and each component can be uniquely customized and configured, giving you endless possibilities for gathering the information you need manage your project.

The customized “Questionnaire” component is just one of many dynamic components we have available for Construction Viz. Let us customize your construction management experience. Check out our Construction Viz features page to learn more about what’s possible. And you can schedule a consultation and demo to discover how Construction Viz can enhance your project management workflows.