Nearly everything in construction is considered time sensitive, hence the need for real-time insights.
You have to submit your bids on time, hire enough help before the job begins, and, of course, meet the completion deadlines. One misstep along the way could have a big impact on the timeline for each phase of the project.
From a subcontractor’s point of view, a missed deadline could mean a tarnished relationship with a general contractor and a loss of future business. Two things you can’t afford.
So how do you combat this? There are three common mistakes made when managing bids and projects that, if avoided by using real-time insights, could improve your overall performance.
Real-Time Insights for Three Common Scenarios
Common Scenario #1: Spending time on work that is not valuable.
Many times, project managers and their teams will spend 80% of their effort on 20% of tasks that aren’t that important; which leaves only 20% of effort for the really important tasks. Project-Management.com explains this as the Pareto principle and says, “Most people waste most of their effort on the wrong tasks.”
Solution: Try to identify the 20% of tasks that are a higher priority and will bring the most value, and have your teams focus on those. While it seems obvious, sometimes actually being able to prioritize those items is tough for your team. That’s where the real-time insights of Thunderbolt Pipeline’s dashboard view comes in.
Using this functionality, the leadership team can get a full overview of the entire workforce, as well as segment the views by project manager, estimator, foreman, etc. Leveraging these real-time insights, the focus can be targeted at team members who may need extra assistance with prioritizing tasks. Alternately, you’ll also see team members who are highly performing and in line for extra recognition or compensation. Access to this data allows you to shift your thinking and focus at any point in the project.
Common Scenario #2: Unknown Short Term & Long Term Capacity
If you aren’t fully in the know of your company’s current status on all projects, you won’t be prepared to make a bid on a new one. Many times, contractors and subcontractors will miss out on bidding opportunities because they don’t truly know how much more they can take on and they don’t have the time to analyze historic job output.
Solution #2: Be in the know. Using Thunderbolt’s work in progress dashboard you will get the project overview you need to help you make a decision on whether to bid or not. This dashboard gives you percent complete and remaining value across all of your projects. You can also easily create a custom report to view all projects completed historically during the same time period to evaluate your short term and long term capacity for new work.
Common Scenario #3: Your Next Project Falls Through.
Who among us is not familiar with this one? A project falls through or gets put on hold and you’re stuck with a crew who have no work to do.
Solution #3 Thunderbolt has dashboards for that, too: the Sales Projection & Hot Jobs Reports.
Visit the “Hot Jobs” report to get a fast color-coded snapshot of which jobs you are likely to win. Segmenting these by date you can quickly see potential jobs that could fill a gap in your schedule. If you’re working with a longer timeline, you can track all of your pending bids on the Sales Projection report. This snapshot view allows leadership to keep tabs on jobs based on the quarter they are anticipated to close. When leadership can track jobs at this high level, they can easily facilitate insight, reminders, and tasks for the project team to help them close the job successfully.
Whether you find these scenarios common in your organization or in your own work, the one common denominator here is technology. Having a platform like Thunderbolt, with real-time insights, at your fingertips will only make you more accurate in your planning and will make time-sensitive decisions more easily attainable.
