Turning great customer wins into bottom-line results and satisfied customers takes coordination, collaboration, and insight across every aspect of the end-to-end business. Organisations must rely on faultless management of both operational and project management processes.

So how can construction businesses get ahead, and stay ahead, in an industry that has traditionally been slow to optimise? How can they mobilise their IT landscapes to break down operational boundaries and remove information silos?

Project management complexities

It’s hard to imagine a project that is more complex and fragile than a large construction job. The path from initial estimate and quote to final approval and delivery is long. It is littered with potential pitfalls and bottlenecks. The critical components of the project itself – including resources, skill sets, physical materials and costs – need to be orchestrated across the foundational operational processes of the business. It draws in cross-department expertise such as finance, HR, sales, procurement, supply chain, logistics, project management, quality assurance and legal.

Typically, the interface between daily project management and business operations extends across multiple, disparate IT systems. Often, the consolidation of information across these systems is only possible with a lot of repetitive, manual work and some rather hefty Excel spreadsheets.

At best, this manual process is time-intensive and error-prone. At worst, the lack of real-time insight can mean that the process can go off the rails before the project team is even aware that there is an issue. The result can be missed deadlines, reduced profitability and dissatisfied customers. Not to mention stressed and frustrated employees.

Connecting operations and project management

Connecting the entire business in one cloud-based solution enables a free flow of business and project information across departments and functions. It also promotes a new level of collaboration and knowledge sharing across extended project teams.

Once implemented, the positive effect of truly joined-up solution like Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Project Operations will be seen and experienced across every area of the business.

Joined-up systems align daily activities and processes with operational practices and corporate goals. This, in turn, gives each employee a shared baseline from which to collaborate, share knowledge and leverage skill sets.

With IT and collaboration barriers removed, construction organisations can enable significant improvements. They can see this in the way they handle the daily task of monitoring, managing and delivering on project expectations. Improvements that can be seen and felt in the business every day in the complex and large-scale orchestration that is at the heart of modern construction.

As Paul Fryer, Construction Industry Account Executive at DXC*, a Microsoft partner states: “Project operations comes in multiple ‘flavours’. DXC helps customers decide how best to take advantage of project ops and get the most business value from it.”

Four real-world benefits of removing organisational silos

1. 1. More flexible and intuitive project management: Base your planning on accurate and actionable project information from across the organisation. Additionally, document and surface planning with familiar Microsoft Project capabilities and visualisations. Project managers can then spend less time building plans and more time on ensuring that projects are running smoothly. And the whole business can easily stay in the loop.
   2. More effective and satisfied employees: Scheduling the right people with the right skills at the right time will help you to avoid classic workload issues. You will also get the most from your project teams. Add in simplified processes for time tracking and expense management and reimbursement and you have a great baseline for optimising resource usage. It will also help find and keep the best talent in the industry.
   3. A more predictable and healthier bottom line: Discover more accurate, experience-based estimating, quoting and forecasting, more effective use of materials and resources, and more informed and compliant project accounting.  Your project profitability will reflect every cost you have saved and deadline you have nailed.
   4. Improved collaboration and insight: Make data-driven decisions in real-time and collaborate easier with an organisation-wide collaboration platform – such as Microsoft Teams. Each new decision is based on experience from previous engagements. This can be aligned to support business goals and changing market demands.

Build agility and resilience in project management

In the ultra-competitive and dynamic world of construction, success is dependent on the ability to react quickly to changing industry, economic, legislative and cultural factors. Retaining and building on this success relies on the ability to consistently make business decisions. These decisions must not only be sound. They must also more insightful than your competitors.

Construction is an industry where fortunes can be made and lost based on the success of a few key projects. Therefore, it is essential that the IT systems deployed by construction companies are more like the final brick and mortar solutions they deliver for their customers. Practical, accessible and built to last.

*Note: DXC is one of the Dynamics partners we have at Microsoft to help us deliver on this proposal. DXC has many years’ experience of rolling out multi-country professional services deployments, supported by close alignment with the Microsoft Product Team for PSA and now Project Operations, enabling us to stay ahead with product developments and ensuring deployments with security and best practice baked in.

Find out more

Learn more about Microsoft Dynamics 365 Project Operations

Take a guided tour of Dynamics 365 Project Operations

Discover Dynamics 365 Project Operations capabilities

About the author

Toby is a Technical Specialist for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations, focussing on Professional Services and the Construction industries. Critically, since the launch of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Project Operations, Toby has been the UK Field Lead for Project Operations working on global projects across a multitude of different industries. Toby has been working in the technology and ERP space for several years. He is passionate about driving and providing business and digital transformation by realising the business value through transformational systems. He enjoys empowering organisations to get that ‘competitive edge’ over their competitors.

Toby has been working with the Project Operations Core Engineering and Marketing teams to develop the GTM strategy for the new products and drive new revenue from customers adopting the new platform.

The post How digital modernisation can help innovate the construction industry appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.

Without the right tools, it can be difficult to manage projects. And if those tools don’t communicate effectively to each other, that makes it even harder. Using tools within Microsoft 365 helps streamline processes and keep employees on the right task. They also work together to ensure projects run on time.

We spoke to three Microsoft employees from different areas of the business to find out what their main challenges are in their day to day job and how they’ve tackled it.

1.      Create a hub of centralised information

The average worker spends nearly 20 percent of the work week looking for internal information or tracking down colleagues who can help with specific tasks. In many cases, information is spread out across disparate sources. We often find ourselves jumping from files saved to the desktop to specific SharePoint sites or as attachment within emails.

More often than not, information that isn’t stored on the cloud but on individual hard drives can cause considerable grief for project managers who collaborate frequently with others.

“Planning a marketing campaign has multiple dependencies, within my team and externally. Without the use of a dedicated project management tool it can be challenging to pulse check the status of each task and follow up when needed. Emails alone do not provide a holistic view of the project, especially when there are multiple versions of documents floating around,” says Alissa Warne, Digital Marketing Manager at Microsoft.

“Switching to Microsoft Project and ensuring that my main stakeholders also use it, centralises information so I only have to check one place for what needs to be done and what is completed. It also holds others accountable for their deliverables by sending them notifications.”

Project for the Web can help to provide visibility of the project’s current status through the Roadmap feature. This allows you to highlight specific project tasks or activities from several projects and share with different stakeholders.

Additionally, Project for the Web is embedded in Microsoft Teams. This makes it even easier for team members to see project status, task assignment, and any updates. Plus, it’s all in the same space where they communicate and collaborate. That means they can spend more time performing the work they need to do instead of switching between applications.

2.      Personalised assistants with AI

“Working in marketing you’d think that it’s all big campaigns and glamorous events, but as a product marketeer, I spend a lot of time managing projects. Projects means people, which means calendars,” says Hasan Javed, Microsoft Product Marketing Manager for Firstline Worker and Microsoft 365.

Finding the right time to meet between busy co-workers and customers can be difficult. Between finding time to brainstorm, map out the next quarter’s priorities, or plan events with partners, and even to answer emails from that ever-growing inbox. To help him effectively schedule his time, Hasan turns to Cortana, his virtual assistant.

“I can now email Cortana and ask her to schedule my meetings, book me a meeting room and set up a Teams meetings, all in one simple click. Cortana has improved my productivity by automating tasks that I, and 99 percent of people I know, hate doing. Thank you, Cortana, you’ve made my complex projects, just a little easier.”

Cortana not only can help manage your calendar, but can also remind you of your commitments, even if it’s just remembering to pick up milk on the way home. You can base your reminders on time, a location, or even people. This makes it easy to keep track during busy times, or when you have a full diary.

3.      Using analytics to organise your time

Jose Cortes, is a busy commercial executive at Microsoft. He often finds it challenging to strike a healthy balance between his work and personal life. Particularly with a young child and jam-packed schedule.

Effective time management and prioritisation of important tasks are key here.  He breaks his workload down to weekly chunks and prioritising tasks based on what will deliver the most impact. Doing this, Jose is able to determine how to effectively use his work day. He no longer has tasks that spill over into personal time.

“This is one of the most important things that Microsoft’s culture has taught me, in addition to having a growth mindset. Usually it is very easy to fall into executing tasks you enjoy doing, but not necessarily make impact in what you do. For instance, I sometimes find myself helping other colleagues or replying to emails in some topics that interest me. However, if at the end those email responses are not generating any value to my customers or my organisation, I’d park that email for a while. I focus on what really brings value, such as preparing for a negotiation with a customer. When I find some spare time, I take care of those other emails.”

Jose also credits AI-infused applications with helping him reclaim time back in his day. He uses the My Analytics feature within Microsoft 365.

“It not only lets me know how much time I’ve been multitasking in the past week, or who are the people I collaborate with the most, but also remind me of pending tasks or responses based on emails I sent to customers or colleagues. Where you say, for instance, ‘I’ll update you next week’ or ‘I’ll send you that email tomorrow,’” He says.

“When it sees you are getting too many meetings or calls together in a specific day, it books Focus Time in my calendar. This is technology really helps me make a difference at work and in my personal life.”

Tools like Microsoft Project enable Jose to have an overall view of all the current projects and what is on track or late. Project for the Web, in particular, highlights what tasks are overdue in different colours. This makes it easier to follow up at a glance. He can also use Power Automate to generate an automatic report with all overdue tasks.

Enabling productivity

These project management challenges are common to all of us. But by adopting digital tools and smarter working habits, it can contribute to the successful delivery of the project.

Using a cloud-based project and portfolio management solution will go a long way in helping employees align, prioritise, and optimise their projects. And once they harness these tools, it will give them the time they need to focus on adding value to the business, their roles, and creating an innovative, collaborative culture.

To find out more about selecting the right project management tool for you, check out my earlier blog. Or, read more about Project for the Web.

About the author

Paulina is a new Microsoft Aspire hire who just graduated from the University of Cambridge, where she completed her MBA. She is currently part of the Modern Workplace business group in the role of Product Marketing Manager for Project and Visio. She localises the benefits and uses of these Microsoft solutions to UK market. Paulina has a green belt in lean six sigma. She also has a strong belief in the search for constant improvement in everything we do. Be it learning a new language, improving at a particular sport, or just being smarter about the way we work.

The post 3 ways to tackle project management challenges and be more collaborative appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.