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The Construction Workforce Future: Where Will They Come From?
August 14, 2012
Arizona Construction Career Days A Huge Hit
October 10, 2012
Team meetings in construction offices are transforming as we speak. After reading this CNN article, ‘Generation Y’ set to transform office life and a tweet from Jennifer Hicks it made me think about what is happening in the AEC industry. We’re all so mobile that unless we can all work together on our own schedules and collaborate effectively we’re doomed to failure.
Conversations are Team Meetings
What the construction industry is counting on is technology to make our communications clearer. Industry leaders use video conferencing to have conversations – important to capture body language cues and readily available, apps abound on many smartphones and social networks today. Seems like the project managers I know send an email following a conversation to recap and document what they just said.
Project Documents are Changing
Our documents are easily accessible from Sharepoint, Construction Imaging, project management team portals, or Box.net as all generations are wanting access from anywhere, anytime. (If you haven’t made the transition to electronic documents you better be thinking about it before you get busy again.) Mark-ups and edits occur on documents frequently and the construction plans seem to pose the biggest challenges. Versioning control is a decision everyday. Your records management integrity depends on it.
Collaborative Construction Communications Technology
What do construction team meetings look like today? They’re collaborative, mobile and transparent. At least the successful ones are. If you expect to collaborate solely with email you will need more hours in your day. It’s time to transform your methods and it needs to work for internal and external teams. One such solution is gaining respect in the industry. It’s called Bluebeam Studio and I’m luckily part of their partner program. Watch this short video and see what you think. Your socks are about to be blown off!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nTo2q8NllLc
The value is in working simultaneously or on your own time. If you can’t make it to the Studio session it can be left open for you to chime in later. If you’re running a pre-construction meeting you can meet virtually and work together. The flexibility is all there. Have you used Studio? Would you like to experience it for yourself? Leave a comment and I’ll invite you and your team to a Studio project and collaborate together today.
This crosses all workforce generations and makes a visual record that’s easy to learn, review, share and save to your project document repository.
2 Comments
Team building is important, and whilst video conferencing can help, it will play a bigger role in areas such as training, especially within the construction industry. Being able to hold meetings with all stake holders using this technology will also be a big help, especially on large projects.
Partnering cloud computing with video conferencing will make the sharing of documents much easier as well.
Cutting a project timeline by 1/3 is absolutely huge. You are talking $1000s to $1 millions. The organization value alone is worth it. Even if the time table doesn’t cut down that much, having a team that knows the projects milestones and a complete timeline is wonderful.