Buildots
Amir Berman believes that contractors can unlock productivity gains and use AI-based workflows when they’ve standardized project data to look at and analyze their whole portfolio of projects. Photo courtesy of Buildots
Amir Berman
Construction profit margins are notoriously thin. One underperforming project can erase a portfolio’s gains. For executives, this fragility brings enormous pressure, yet they’re often the last to know when a project veers off course. By then, course-correcting is costly or impossible.
Why does this happen? It starts with fragmented, inconsistent reporting. Often, each project in a portfolio reports progress differently and with a distinct agenda or bias—some focus on milestone completion, others on budget variance, while still others emphasize schedule adherence. Moreover, much of the data that executives see is of poor quality and lacks the predictive risk insights needed to anticipate upcoming issues.
This patchwork of incompatible reports and disjointed data points obscures rather than illuminates the decision-making process. This represents a strategic crisis that prevents growth, optimization and efficiency.
Beyond Individual Projects
Historically, construction has operated within a siloed, project-by-project mindset. Each job site operates as its own fiefdom, with unique teams, profit and loss (P&L) statements, and progress reporting methods. An unfortunate side effect is that this creates fragmented data environments, making it nearly impossible to identify organizational trends or replicate success across projects.
The industry, necessarily, is starting to shift. Forward-thinking firms are now using technology and standardized data to optimize performance at the project level, and looking ahead, the real opportunity lies in scaling those insights across entire portfolios. Scale is not a limitation for technology. In fact, its superiority over manual, human-driven processes becomes most evident when dealing with large and complex portfolios.
As one executive at a large construction firm recently told us: “It’s great to see tech starting to drive efficiency on a few projects, but to extract full value from our tech investments, our ultimate goal has to be company-wide change.”
It’s essential to recognize that data standardization isn’t just a means to check a box or report better—it’s crucial for driving transformation at both the portfolio and company level. Here are some reasons why:
It gives executives visibility into the health of their portfolio: When reporting is done differently on each project, reports are inevitably prone to bias, whether they present an overly optimistic view that masks risks or a pessimistic one that exaggerates issues. Moreover, each report has a different structure, timing and level of accuracy, creating a fragmented picture of progress that makes it difficult to compare “apples for apples.” Standardization allows executives to compare the risk levels of different projects and prioritize resources accordingly. Also, instead of discovering problems after they’ve escalated, executives can finally identify early warning signs and intervene when fixes are still simple and low-cost.
It reveals organization-wide inefficiencies: Standardizing data collection and reporting at the portfolio level enables executives to ask (and answer) strategic questions like: “Are we consistently underperforming in MEP rough-ins?” or “Do we have specific trades that underperform across multiple projects?” Once you measure these inefficiencies, you can improve them, marking the beginning of true organizational transformation.
It enables cross-project learning at scale: In the same way that data standardization enables you to isolate and address inefficiencies, it can also help you scale best practices, transforming isolated project experiences into organizational knowledge. Organizations can tap into the power of incremental gains here, with small efficiency gains on each project translating into huge leaps forward over time. Nonetheless, it’s important to note that this compound effect is only possible when data is collected consistently, performance metrics are standardized, insights are shared and implemented organization-wide, and benchmarks are established and regularly updated.
How Organizations are Making the Shift The shift from project-centric to portfolio- and organization-centric thinking requires more than just new technology. It requires a cultural shift— backed by rigorous processes—on the part of construction companies. Here’s how some forward-thinking firms are putting it into practice.
Implementing unified data standards: Construction companies establish enterprise-wide data collection standards. Every project captures the same metrics in the same format at the same intervals.
Investing in executive visibility: Portfolio dashboards that provide standardized views of all active projects are becoming essential for senior leadership. These enhance project-level management by providing the organizational context necessary for strategic decision-making.
Creating cross-project learning systems: The most advanced organizations are establishing collaborative planning groups and processes that ensure insights from one project rapidly inform others. Rather than imposing rigid standardization, this is about creating systematic knowledge transfer.
Measuring what matters at scale: Instead of getting lost in project-specific details, these organizations focus on a core set of performance indicators that can be consistently measured and compared across the entire portfolio: production pace, area utilization, critical path health and quality metrics.
The shift from looking at individual projects to a portfolio-wide mindset demands new tools, updated processes and fresh thinking. Executives intuitively grasp the need for a straightforward, objective and data-driven approach to portfolio control—even if such a solution was previously out of their grasp due to technology limitations. Now, change is possible. The challenge lies in confronting the temporary discomfort that change brings. However, once committed, executives will find themselves operating in the way they’ve always envisioned.
Organizations that recognize that and act upon it will pull ahead of competitors still trapped in a vicious cycle of inefficiency.
Amir Berman is vice president of industry transformation at Buildots
VP of Industry Transformation at Buildots
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