Last week, as part of StartBUILD’s Future of Construction series, we heard from Founders of realtech companies on their thoughts on the Future of Construction. Each of the founders speaking at this event has developed and deployed a unique solution that improves either the safety, efficiency or sustainability of construction. This is a written reflection of my presentation focussed on efficiency, planning and empathy.
As CEO and Founder of TC Pinpoint and across my life experience I’ve ascertained that my super power is … planning.
Whether the planning process be for a working holiday around the world in my 20s, a wedding, or founding and growing a business, it’s the planning skill set that time and time again works in my favour.
Over my years of running businesses in retail project delivery my experience has proven the power of planning within a complex environment improves the outcomes achieved by virtue of completion of those projects.
As we move through the presentation I want to heighten the importance of planning and empathy across the delivery of projects and how TC Pinpoint is assisting our customers to do this. Particularly, at a time where uncertainty is evident and as humans we’re re-evaluating what the new ‘normal’ will be.
Now, more than ever we have the gift of re-setting, providing us with time to plan and be ready for what will be on the other side of this.
Rachel Kidwell
Complexities and the need for a plan
Take a retail development as an example. It is a complex process to take an environment from a 2 dimensional plan and deliver a fully complete base building and retail tenancy fitouts, ready for trade, triggering rental income for Landlords.
Based on my experience of undertaking the tenancy coordinator role within complex retail developments and operational environments, the complexities were paramount when it came to stakeholder engagement and understanding who needs to do what and when.
Multiple stakeholders had many inputs through a project’s delivery. What they do and when they did it was intrinsically linked to enabling other stakeholders to complete their tasks.
The Checklist Manifesto
Some of you may be aware of Atul Gawande’s The Checklist Manifesto whereby he investigates a number of different industries and their application of process and procedure.
Under conditions of complexity, not only are checklists a help, they are required for success. There must always be room for judgment, but judgment aided – and even enhanced – by procedure.
Atul Gawande
In the book Atul cites the entertainment industry and David Le Roth’s memoir, Crazy from the Heat, as a good example where an ingenious addition to process is included in the band’s contracts whereby a bowl of M&Ms is to be provided back stage, but with every single brown candy removed.
Page 80 goes on to explain “Van Halen was the first band to take huge productions into tertiary, third-level markets. We’d pull up with nine eighteen-wheeler trucks, full of gear, where the standard was three trucks, max. And there were many, many technical errors – whether it was the girders couldn’t support the weight, or the flooring would sink in, or the doors weren’t big enough to move the gear through. The contract rider read like a version of the Chinese Yellow Pages because there was so much equipment, and so many human beings to make it function.” So just as a little test, buried somewhere in the rider, would be article 126, the no-brown M&M clause. “When I would walk backstage, if I saw a brown M&M in that bowl,” he wrote, “well, we’d line-check the entire production. Guaranteed you’re going to arrive at a technical error … Guaranteed you’d run into a problem.” These weren’t trifles, the radio story pointed out. The mistakes could be life-threatening. In Colorado, the band found the local promoters had failed to read the weight requirements and the staging would have fallen through the arena floor.”
The similarities here to the construction industry are clear in relation to technical complexities and safety concerns. Procedure and process is paramount.
Empathy in process
This leads me to the second theme of today, empathy.
Empathy is the skill or ability to tap into our own experiences in order to connect with an experience someone is relating to us.
Brene Brown, Dare to lead
In the complex environment of construction, backed by the influence once person’s task can have on another, in my experience, the more you can understand and empathise to your fellow stakeholders and what they need to achieve, the better the final outcome for the project.
This is what TCPinpoint is doing for the industry.
We’re providing a collaboration and process planning tool to be the central depository for all of these stakeholders.
Why are we doing this? To bring property people together to work. In an environment where the process is clearly set out and understood.
TC Pinpoint knows that the way people work has changed for good, particularly in these current times with the application of remote working opportunities.
- People are looking for outcomes, not ownership
- Customisation, not generalisation
- Innovation by default given the level of disruption that world has experienced, and not the status quo
TC Pinpoint is changing the industry
TC Pinpoint replaces Excel spreadsheets and is focussed on moving the industry to an intuitive, cloud based platform enabling users to have an overview of project completeness and the ability to assess risk based on project status.
TC Pinpoint combines 3 disparate tenancy delivery tools into one platform, ie process management (Excel), communications (Email) and document storage (dropbox or the like). This then enables a ROI by virtue of :
- Informed decision making and shorter timeframes triggering rental income for the Landlords
- Improved communication, removing complex email trails.
- Aligned stakeholders, enabling management of intense and complex workloads.
In fact, the recent use of TC Pinpoint on the Adelaide Airport Terminal Expansion Project, Stage 1, showed a return of investment by way of increased transparency of information across stakeholders and future risk mitigation with tenancies open on time.
1400 documents are now easily accessible and not lost in people’s inboxes providing increased property valuations.
2,167 emails to inboxes have been preserved, further heightening efficiencies and transparency in the tenancy delivery process.
69 stakeholders were able to readily understand the influence their actions had on others involved in the process.
And, above all else, the IP sits within the platform and with the customer, not with the stakeholders on the project.
TC Pinpoint enables the reliable management of complexity to be routine.
Rachel Kidwell, applying Atul Gawande’s Checklist Manifesto
In summary, this is the impact we are focussing on creating within the industry. Implementing a super power of planning, process and empathy to create one point of truth for your projects.
A full recording of the startBUILD presentation can be found here.
If you would like a demo of TC Pinpoint to ascertain how it can aid in your project delivery, contact us here.