Using Digital Dashboards

Steffanie Schrader believes that: “As firms begin to collate project information, I would put the creation and design really into the hands of project engineers because, particularly in larger enterprises, they’re typically supposed to be owning document control.” This makes sense, because given the project engineer’s scope of duties, s/he already knows where everything is located, and can also be in charge of making sure it stays organised. “Then”, says Steffanie, “as far as who’s using the Dashboard, I feel like that can be everybody - including the project engineer.” n essence, digital dashboards are a PDF-based document management system concept that has rapidly been gaining momentum within the construction industry. Many firms are using them for closeout and turnover, as the organisation of a hyperlinked, digital PDF map is more visually appealing and navigable for owners as an alternative to traditional paperbased O&M packages.

For example, Barton Malow’s Sr. VDC Engineer Steffanie Schrader explains that: “In the past year, I’ve seen our project teams do more and more remarkably quick, comprehensive work with their closeout Dashboards, in particular; but you can do so many other things with them that create ease of access for everybody involved, which makes Dashboards an extremely valuable tool across the whole project management cycle.”

In short, Dashboards are all about ease of access across the raft of stakeholders - and thereby, transparency. They allow for document access so that anyone who needs to look at drawings can click through the entire file structure to find anything they need. It’s likely that there isn’t anyone on a given project who wouldn’t be able to use Dashboards. They are also being used for company branding and standardisation - and will take the place of security-vulnerable and corruptible aspects such as e-mail attachments stored on individual machines.

To summarise, then, there are three key areas where Dashboards can transition and transform workloads:

• Document Management, Control and Access

• Standardisation and Company Identity

• Project Turnover, O&M Packages

DASHBOARD DESIGN AND CREATION

A question often arising is ‘who actually creates the dashboards that the account and project stakeholders then work with?’

Part of the appeal of Dashboards is also the relative level of simplicity with which they can be created. It doesn’t take a CAD degree or coding design knowledge to create a fully functional setup. In fact, something as easy as PowerPoint can be used to create the design (or everything can be done within more sophisticated, integrated packages if you prefer).

Steffanie Schrader describes this part of the process as follows: “I generally create all of the aesthetics of the dashboard in PowerPoint, as I don’t have any design background, but I know how to use PowerPoint. I put all the pictures in and add all the icons, so when I’m ready to go, I export them all to PDF - and then I just put the hyperlinks on top of it.”

Dashboards And Client Presentations

Client presentations can of course make a powerful impression and solidify the three-way project relationship between owners, general contractors and consultants. In fact, Dashboards can become a ‘visual welcome’ to explain to owners how the project will be set up. They can demonstrate software and communications, relevant experience, a site logistics plan, put smart links and click-throughs onto schedules, and map out what is going to be happening at any point in the schedules or forecast.

Dashboards also ‘democratise’: if your organisation has staff changes, or new and relatively inexperienced teams, everyone is guaranteed to know exactly where they need to go all the time. They can be used throughout the company, for any level of seniority and - by definition - across multiple departments.

CONNECTING ‘EVERYTHING’

The construction aspect of the Dashboards is of course all-important, and it entails document access during the job. Aspects such as the following will all be included in the document access Dashboard –

• Safety specifications

• Financial data

• Site weather

• Project schedules

Everything is there and hyperlinked, and in this way, Dashboards become much like the layout people are familiar with on their smartphone; you can simply click on the icon or tab for whatever document category or aspect you might need to reference, and the link will take you to the PDF or stored location of the document or file.

Reporting

A classic use of Dashboards is in internal and external reporting functions. This is particularly true when it comes to project needs embracing a wide, static set of reports that need to be completed like clockwork - whether that means every week, two weeks, monthly, and then for closeout. As part of the process, Dashboards make it easy to access weekly metrics, procurement and supply chain data, weather delays, co-ordination, and so on. This reporting aspect of Dashboards can be shared with project stakeholders such as clients or architect administrators, in turn allowing your business to act proactively and avoiding the risk of clients and stakeholders feeling the process is running late - and then having to ask for this material themselves. They know that they can always find that information in the dashboard.

Thus, the Dashboard is always truly transparent and open-faced. This can (and often will) provoke debates about the organisation’s readiness to be this ‘mature’ - but that is of course a separate discussion…

Closeout

While closeout has previously meant cluttered, disorganised manuals and ferreting around for half-forgotten actions and project landmarks, Dashboards bring Consultants great value when it comes to simplifying and speeding-up the process. A digital PDF with everything required for turnover and servicing is a much more visually appealing alternative to the previous packages, which are tedious for all parties to compile at the end of a project. Instead, Dashboards allow that information to be compiled during the progress of a job, as opposed to just the last two weeks. This in turn can maximise time spent at the ‘front end’, explaining to clients how well everything went, and thereby paving the way for repeat or upgrade business.

TIME-EFFECTIVE

With a modicum of up-front time and effort, the value of the dashboard across the lifecycle of a job is justified many times over. Both Dashboard creation and Dashboard maintenance require a minimal time commitment. Indeed, this is almost a contradiction in terms, because Dashboards really shouldn’t have to be maintained at all if they are designed in the right way to start with. Example!

• Every week you run a new report for the same activity, and then, instead of renaming that report and re-filing, it’s always the current report - and so your hyperlink will not have to change.

• The hyperlink always goes to the same document; you don’t have to rework the dashboard at any time unless you want to make a major structural change.

• So, the dashboard itself will be static. It’s just the sheets which it’s referencing (which are in file folder locations) that need to be changing.

Dashboards are a safe and important investment towards your business’ future. In 2023, we are already seeing that they are gaining more and more traction; and the reality is that having all of your project information together in one place is so efficient, whether for design, security, reporting or project management via multiple stakeholders. Is there really any other way to work?

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