Onward and upward into 2022 for the AEC industry

Table of Contents

How the AEC industry continues to adapt to the ever-changing project landscape

Pushed to the limits!

Every team has had to change and adapt over the last two years. Video calls are now the norm, discussions are made via a screen and problems are solved from home. Out of this “new normal”, new and successful ways of working have emerged.

Success in these situations is led by the team’s flexibility and adaptability to effectively and efficiently collaborate. These past two years have shown us that collaboration is the most critical point of a team’s success in times of uncertainty. Out of uncomfortable situations and challenges are where the most innovative solutions come from – and we have seen it time and time again this past year. As we look back in a sense, it feels like the past two years have dragged on. Yet the truth is that the uncertainty was the most predictable part.

The truth is that our finest moments are most likely to occur when we are feeling deeply uncomfortable…or it is only in such moments, propelled by our discomfort, that we are likely to step out of our ruts and start searching for different ways or truer answers.

M Scott Peck

We all were uncomfortable with the uncertainty

About six months into the pandemic, some conversations began to change. The “we are going to be in this for a while” and the “this just might be the way it’s going to be” moments began to happen. People started to strap in for whatever ride this was going to be – and still is!

Since the pandemic, and the new way teams across the globe have collaborated together, we’ve witnessed the largest and most complex projects we have ever seen take their workflows, flip them over and create new systems that are adaptable to the fluctuating uncertainty of the current environment. And the best part, they did them under budget and ahead of schedule. Somehow, out of all of this, communication cycles got shorter. The time it took for issues to be flagged and actioned via all necessary stakeholders went from days to minutes!

The toughest part of implementing a new process or new workflow is the adoption. Why? Because it is uncomfortable. It takes time. People question change, the “this is how it has always been done” comments stand out, but we’ve gradually seen that change is welcomed. The pandemic has offered teams the option to stop “doing things as we’ve always done”.

We recently released our annual Collaborators of the Year Awards, which include AECO firms from around the world and a handful came directly from the UK including the Most Innovative Contractor and Collaborator of the Year.

Fine-tuning the machine

While we all know the construction industry is not historically known for being the most innovative as many firms have been pen and paper-heavy up until recently – and many still are. But this period has in a way supported the AEC industry in the effort to catch up to the rest. It was really a sink or swim option – time was of the essence. But it is beginning to look like the AEC industry is now swimming with other adaptive industries.

These past two years have shown us that collaboration is the most critical point of a team’s success in times of uncertainty.

The European Journal of Social Psychology says that it takes up to 254 days for a person to form a new habit. On average, it takes 66 days for a new behaviour to become automatic.

When just simply looking at the maths and now being about two years into the pandemic, those firms that were early identifiers in how the industry was going to be impacted are now over a year into their new processes. The ways of doing things are not new anymore but automatic. The majority of it is now routine and the main focus can be on fine-tuning and looking ahead. The question is, where is your team in their process of change.

There are five generally adopted common steps in the typical Change Management Process – they are as follows:

Prepare the organization for change.
Craft a vision and plan for change.
Implement the changes.
Embed changes within company culture and practices.
Review progress and analyse results.

Well, it is safe to say that with the onset of Covid, many did not even get to properly execute 1 or 2.

Those that read the warning signs better than others had a bit more time to create a vision and plan. Those that didn’t quickly followed suit due to needing to adopt processes and workflows to enable effective remote collaboration across teams. The success stories are endless, thanks to supportive tools like Revizto, the Integrated Collaboration Platform that enables real-time, cross-team collaboration – from anywhere.

Revizto as a company has actually been remote from day one – and has created a platform that 20 of the top global ENR firms are using for integrated collaboration. During the past two years, Revizto released Revizto 5 and Revizto+ featuring Clash Automation, an integrated solution for clash detection, grouping, workflow builder and issue tracking into a single environment.

Original article.